My 20 Most Anticipated Movies of 2018

It's fun to think about what's coming out and which movies I'm most interested in, then compare that at the end of the year to what I actually enjoyed.  Of my 20 Most Anticipated last year, 12 of them turned out to be Top 20 movies for me, so that's pretty cool. One of them (Hostiles) was pushed back to this year and another (Jumanji 2) I just haven't been able to schedule yet, so that leaves 6 that were disappointing in some way.

Of those, I've seen and was underwhelmed by three (The Beguiled, The Mummy, and Justice League) and thanks to trailers and reviews, completely lost interest in three others (Dark Tower, Ferdinand, and Pitch Perfect 3) before they hit theaters.

So here's what I'm most eager to see this year. As always, these aren't the movies that I'm predicting will be the best; just the ones that I most want to see. Tell me what you're looking forward to in the comments!

20. Tomb Raider



I'm a mark for treasure-hunter movies and have enjoyed even the Angelina Jolie movies on some level. The trailer for this one is visually impressive and Vikander is a talented actor, so I'm just hoping that the story is up to snuff.

19. Mary Magdalene



One of the most fascinating characters in the New Testament, even without the Dan Brown nonsense. It's about time someone made a movie about her.

18. Mary Poppins Returns



I enjoy the classic adaptation, but it's not holy ground and I'm glad to see that the rest of the book series will get some attention, too. Not that I've read the books. And these movies will see that I don't have to.

17. Mowgli



I don't really need a new Jungle Book adaptation, but I'm interested in almost anything Andy Serkis does. And it'll be interesting to see what he does to avoid comparisons with the Jon Favreau Disney remake.

16. Incredibles 2



I've cooled off on Brad Bird after Tomorrowland, but I've still loved 80% of his movies and am interested in what he's able to do with this. I'm especially curious how a new Incredibles movie compares to the modern landscape of superhero movies. The first one was released the same year as Spider-Man 2, when we were just starting to figure out that great superhero movies were possible. The bar has been raised a lot higher since then and I'm not 100% confident that Incredibles 2 can clear it.

The X from Outer Space (1967)

Who's In It: Eiji Okada (The Ugly American), Shun'ya Wazaki (Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades), Itoko Harada (Let's Go! Kôkô Lemon Musume), and Peggy Neal (The Terror Beneath the Sea)

What It's About: An Earth spaceship to Mars encounters a UFO that lays an egg-spore-thingy on the earth ship's hull. Back on Earth, the egg-spore-thingy grows into a giant space chicken that terrorizes Tokyo.

How It Is: Dumb Godzilla ripoff with an equally dumb love triangle that resolves as poorly as the monster threat itself.

On the other hand, it's got a fantastic score of groovy '60s music and I kind of love the spaceship and moonbase models and sets.

Rating: 2 out of 5 giant space chickens.

'Casting Off | King Kong (1933)

David and I discuss the original, Merian C Cooper classic and how it holds up today. There are comparisons to Peter Jackson's 2005 version and big questions about Carl Denham's fascination with Beauty and the Beast.

7 Days in May | Wonder Woman vs Gappa

Wonder Woman (2017)



It's awesome. The first movie in the DCEU that's about an actual super hero. I love that Wonder Woman goes on a character journey that is never about whether or not she's going act heroically. It's about her world view changing from simple and naive to complicated and mature. It shakes her to her core, and there was a Zac Snyder moment that made me worried about what she'd do, but she recovered quickly and got back to the work of fighting evil. Just beautiful.

And I love that the movie is able to introduce her to the world as a fish-out-of-water without sacrificing her confidence. She's learning a new culture and there are funny moments that result, but she's never the object of the joke.

I do want to point out one thing though that bugs me a little. Not about Wonder Woman, but what it reveals about the wider DCEU. In Batman v Superman, Wonder Woman has clearly been gone a long time. No one knows about her or remembers her. It's a major plot point that Batman figures out that she's not a brand new hero, but someone who was around a long time ago. And BvS implies that something happened when she was first here that sent her into hiding. Maybe back to Themyscira, but certainly out of the public eye. And that made me concerned - especially in light of Man of Steel and BvS - that Wonder Woman was going to be another dark movie about how heroism is punished.

Watching Wonder Woman, I can still see that movie in there. Diana does go through the ringer. And I can imagine a Snyder-influenced ending where she gives up her mission and just goes home for 100 years. I am so glad that the folks in charge decided not to do that and instead had Diana stick around to keep working, but it does create a large continuity hole with BvS. Making a movie about a hero is a great course correction for the series, but it is a course correction and not a flawless one.

So far, anyway. I suppose that Justice League could explain why no one's ever heard of her even if she's continued to work in our world. That would be great.

Daikyojû Gappa (1967)



Not every kaiju movie is fun or charming. This one's a mix of Godzilla and King Kong in which a magazine publisher hires some people to round up animals for his new theme park. When they bring back a giant baby bird-lizard, they're flabbergasted about why two adult bird-lizards would follow and start tearing the city apart. Eventually, they figure it out and return the baby to its parents just in time to roll credits. Lame.

El Dorado (1967)



I'm almost as much a Howard Hawks fan as I am a Robert Mitchum fan. And I don't mind John Wayne or James Caan, either. That makes El Dorado one of my favorite Westerns.

It has a couple of problems though. One is an unnecessary, extremely racist gag in the middle. The other is some shaky storytelling that skips over the events that turn Mitchum's character from an affable, highly competent sheriff into an embarrassing drunk. It's explained in dialogue, but it's such an important change that I should've been able to see it.

His journey back is much better, though, featuring the efforts of several friends, including Wayne and his new sidekick Caan, as well as Arthur Hunnicutt as a cantankerous, but extremely cool, old coot. Michele Carey is also awesome as a young woman whose family is being persecuted by evil Ed Asner, and she's not going to just sit back and wait for the men to get their act together.

Jam of the Week: "Lost the Feeling" by The Saint Johns

I dig the light, easy groove, the harmony, and the way they pant the word "I" all through this thing. Very cool.

What happens when a podcaster violates the code?

This month on Mystery Movie Night we're joined by special guest Paxton Holley (Nerd Lunch, Cult Film Club, Hellbent for Letterbox) to discuss some older films: The Uninvited (1944) starring Ray Milland, Konga (1961) with Michael Gough, and Michael Caine in Get Carter (1971). Hear what we thought and see if you can guess the secret connection between the three films!

Apologies for some background noise we picked up from somewhere (including a siren).

The Univited review starts at 3:17
Konga review starts at 20:42
Get Carter review starts at 37:00

Borderland: A B-Movie in the Making [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

"Borderland" by Arthur J Burks is a typical pulp adventure and yet somehow more interesting than many of his other tales in Gangster Stories or Weird Tales. The plot is familiar to anyone who watches old 1950s B-movies. A mad scientist creates giant lizards (though not by nuclear radiation, but with a glandular concoction), intent on extorting millions from the governments of the world. Dr. Frankenstein meets Captain Nemo. Scenes of gigantic iguanas devouring helpless villagers is not far from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms or It Came From Beneath the Sea. And yet, Burks published this story in Thrilling Adventures, December 1934. Not Thrilling Wonder Stories, but Thrilling Adventures.

Let's back up a bit. The hero of the story is Cleve, a man who captures specimens for Dr. Keller, the Curator of Herpetology at the Museum of Natural History. Cleve plans to dynamite large crocodiles for the Doctor's collection when three enormous iguanas come out of the lake and attack the Haitian villagers nearby. Cleve finds an old dugout canoe and goes to Cabritos Island where he thinks the lizards came from. There he finds his employer, who shows him a secret hideout where the villains are injecting the iguanas with the super glandular mixture. Dr. Keller also reveals he is, in fact, the owner of the secret lab, as well as a giant stockpile of dynamite, enough to destroy the island if the authorities should discover the truth. Cleve must join the doctor or die. Cleve lies and says he will help him in his great plan. Cleve begins capturing more iguanas for Keller. He eventually makes a pretext of going to the other side of the island to get some bigger specimens, but retrieves his dynamite gear from the dugout and strings wires from the dynamite stockpile to the shore. In true non-science fiction adventure style, he wakes from a dream and the ending feels lame. Only after he pushes the plunger, expecting to capture his crocodiles does Capritos Island explode, actually destroying the giant iguanas and Dr. Keller.

What strikes me about this tale was, of course, that it appeared in Thrilling Adventures and not an SF pulp. (Leo Marguiles, the editor, might have felt it wasn't quite strong enough for Thrilling Wonder, requiring instead the silly, "it was a dream" business at the end for adventure readers.) But there are a few other things I wonder about and make more sense after a little research on Arthur J Burks. First off, I was impressed by his locale color at the beginning of the story. If it had been written by Hugh B Cave I would have naturally expected details about Haiti since Cave made a second career out of writing about this island nation in Colliers Weekly in the 1950s. It turns out that Burks had been a marine in World War I (and would return to active duty in WWII later) and had first hand knowledge of the jungle island which he used in several books.

Secondly, the use of the name "Dr. Keller" makes me wonder if the character was named after Dr. David H Keller, a pulp writer of SF. The two knew each other through Hugo Gernsback's early pulps, plus they also worked on the serial novel Cosmos in 1933-35. Their by-lines are often found together in the same magazines such as Weird Tales. I have no proof of any homage but it is possible Burks was having fun with an in-joke.

And finally, the title "Borderland" refers to the opening of the tale in which the narrator talks about the thin line between the real and the fantastic. "Where is the thin dividing line between waking and sleeping, knowing and dreaming?" This theme would become part of Burks' life after the pulps (during which he wrote over eight hundred stories, being one of the Fiction Factory's Million-Words-a Year men). Ryerson Johnson told Will Murray in an interview that he saw Burks later working as a psychic medium. His final phase as a writer was in occult studies with titles like En-Don: The Ageless Wisdom (1973).

So "Borderland" was not just your average pulp story. It predated the B-movie monsters, featured solid local color and detail, possibly included a tip of the hat to David H Keller, and lastly, showed Burks' growing interest in the occult. It's a fun ride even if it relies too heavily on mad scientist logic and huge piles of dynamite. It remains one of those odd little pulp gems that can still surprise us eighty years later.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Bigfoot (2012)

Who's In It: Danny Bonaduce (The Partridge Family), Barry Williams (The Brady Bunch), Bruce Davison (X-Men, the Harry and the Hendersons TV show), Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks), Howard Hesseman (WKRP in Cincinnati, Head of the Class), and ever-so-briefly Alice Cooper (Wayne's World, Scream, Dark Shadows).

What It's About: The rivalry between former members of a New Wave band comes to a head when one of them (Bonaduce) wants to tear down forest land to throw an '80s music festival and the other (Williams) tries to stop him. Then Bigfoot shows up.

How It Is: As I told a friend on Facebook, Bigfoot really unmixes my mixed feelings about The Asylum, and not in a good way. There's everything to love about the idea of Danny Bonaduce and Barry Williams hunting Bigfoot, but The Asylum managed to screw it up.

It's not just about crap effects, though there's also plenty of that. Bigfoot is a horrid, cheap looking CGI creature with maybe five or six different moves that get repeated over and over again throughout the movie. I've come to expect that of Asylum movies and usually cut them a lot of slack, but maybe that's a mistake. More on that in a minute.

What makes Bigfoot  an especially miserable experience is the story and the characters. Bonaduce plays Harley Anderson, a stereotypically crass right-winger who doesn't care about the environment, while Williams' Simon Quint is a just-as-cliché tree-hugging liberal. There's no depth or subtlety to either character and though the movie seems to have an environmental theme, it has absolutely nothing to say about it. Bigfoot is supposed to represent the dangers of messing with nature, but he slaughters people so indiscriminately that it's impossible to root for him. And when Simon tries to, it just makes him look as clueless and pathetic as Harley has been saying he is. Since Harley is just as despicable, there's really no one to pull for in the film.



Sherilyn Fenn is supposed to be the audience's connection to the movie as the town's new sheriff who's just taken over the job from her dad. But she and her deputy (Davison) spend the entire movie running around helplessly and making a lot of plans that don't go anywhere. The movie could lose both of them and not be affected except for its running time.

Bigfoot isn't all bad though. The actors seem to be enjoying themselves, especially Bonaduce and Howard Hesseman (who plays the town's delightfully crooked mayor). Alice Cooper shows up for a few minutes at the music festival and is a lot of fun to watch. And my favorite character in the whole movie was a nameless guy who dressed as Bigfoot to attend the concert. Well, him and the blonde woman with novelty glasses who kept making devil signs to Alice Cooper during the show. I also dig the guts it took to go ahead and make Bigfoot a giant, rampaging monster instead of a shadowy, skulking figure.



As much as I love those elements though, they frustrate me. They're meant to prove that the film isn't taking itself seriously, with the implication being that the audience shouldn't either. That's pretty much The Asylum's trademark, right? They're known for bad movies, so it's pretty dumb to be critical of them when their movies meet that expectation.

But I don't know if lowering the bar all the way to the ground should be an excuse. As much as I like certain moments in Bigfoot, watching it wasn't a joyful experience. I genuinely like some pretty bad movies, but this isn't one of them. The bad movies I enjoy are usually earnest attempts that just fail for whatever reason: not enough money, not enough talent, whatever. Most of Bigfoot just feels lazy and uncaring and no amount of winking at the camera can make that better.

Rating: Two out of five super-sized sasquatch

Monster Island (2004)

Who’s In It: Carmen Electra (Aerobic Striptease), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Thing), and Adam West (Batman)

What It’s About: A high school senior wins an MTV party for his class with Carmen Electra on a tropical island, but discovers the hard way that the island is crawling with giant insects and piranha people.

How It Is: Awful. And yet amazing.

Look, it’s a Carmen Electra vehicle and on the DVD cover she gets top billing with Nick Carter, who’s barely in the movie, so you know who the target audience is. Also, there are MTV VJs playing themselves. This movie shouldn’t work at all and for the first third, it really doesn’t. The main character (Daniel Letterle) is a sulky dude named Josh who’s just lost his girlfriend Maddy (Winstead) because she wants to be with someone who's interested in the world and has some purpose to his life. Letterie’s performance is as uninspired as his character, but maybe that’s what he’s going for. Either way, I didn’t care about Josh and quickly found myself hoping he’d connect with Carmen Electra so that he’d leave poor Maddy alone.

That wish is granted when Josh meets Carmen and bonds with her over Radiohead and the Ramones, but Maddy may not actually want Josh to leave her alone. Even though she’s already got a new, superboyfriend (who of course turns out to be a prick, but we only know that at this point because we’ve seen a high school movie before), she shows signs of jealousy over Josh’s new interest in Carmen. I was not willing to sit through an hour and a half of this, especially if it was going to stop every once in a while for Carmen to sing songs like the soul-crushingly insipid “Jungle Fever.”

The only thing that kept me going was knowing that Adam West was going to show up at some point as a character named Dr. Harryhausen. The set up might be all wrong, but I had a feeling that the movie’s heart was in the right place. And I was right.

When Carmen is abducted onstage by a giant, winged ant, Josh puts together some friends and MTV employees to go rescue her. That leads into the last two-thirds of the movie, in which Carmen’s presence is replaced by lots of great creatures: mostly giant insects and arachnids, but also a piranha man and a weird fungus-creature invented by the kindly, but probably nuts Dr. Harryhausen. None of the creatures are CGI; they’re all practical effects whether life-size models or stop-motion animation. So while the movie has the cheesy look of the Land of the Lost TV series, it also has the look that someone poured a lot of love into it.

Making it even more awesome is Maddy’s finding a mystic necklace that turns her into some kind of butt-kicking deity. The romantic plot between her and Josh never rises above the usual tropes, but the longer the movie runs, the less time it spends on that anyway. It’s a goofy film, but a lot of fun and way better than it sets out to be.

Rating: Four out of five teenage warrior goddesses.

Top 5 Spider Movies

Amazing Spider-Man 2 starts this weekend and sadly, I couldn't be less excited. I'm planning to see it, but mostly for the kissing parts. The villain-focused mythology this new series is building doesn't interest me at all, largely because that was the weakest part of the previous Amazing Spider-Man movie.

With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to remember and talk about some other spider-based movies that I expect I'll still like better than this new one once I've seen it. I picked my five favorites and some honorable mentions that didn't quite make the cut. Naturally, I want to hear about yours in the comments.

5. Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)



When I wrote about Beast from Haunted Cave a couple of years ago, I mentioned that it's primarily a crime drama disguised as a creature feature. The monster takes backseat to the conflict in a group of bank robbers and the guide they trick into helping them, which is what makes me love the film all the more. What crime thriller wouldn't be enhanced by a mysterious, cave-dwelling, web-spinning beast? The fact that it's not really a giant spider, but a spider-like humanoid only makes it more appropriate as a replacement for Spider-Man.

4. Charlotte's Web (1973)



I don't have a lot of time for the live-action remake from 2006, but the original cartoon adaptation of EB White's book still holds a special place in my heart. Paul Lynde's Templeton the rat was a huge attraction, but I'm amazed at how fond I grew of Charlotte the spider and how heart-broken and yet optimistic I was over that ending. That's a complicated blend of emotions to ask from children, but it's exactly why the story is so powerful and enduring.

3. Tarantula (1955)



If you're gonna turn ordinary animals into giant freaks - which people loved to do in the '50s - you can't do better than the hairiest, nastiest animal of them all. I don't know if I've mentioned, but as much as I complain about cephalopods around here, spiders - and tarantulas in particular - are 1000 times worse. This is almost my worst nightmare.

10 Greatest Giant Monsters of ALL TIME!

So, this started with Godzilla: Rulers of Earth. Siskoid and I got to talking on Twitter about the 1998 American Godzilla (aka Zilla) and I admitted that I like her design. It doesn't work that the filmmakers tried to put her over as the Godzilla, but as her own monster, she works for me. Siskoid replied that he wouldn't include Zilla on his personal Top 10 Kaiju list and our blogging genes immediately lit up. Personal Top 10 Kaiju lists are things that need documenting. (Spoiler: Zilla doesn't make mine either.)

To make this a full blown blog crossover EVENT, Siskoid also recruited BW Media Spotlight and Matt Burkett of the Monstrosities vlog. I think Matt's going to join in later, but if you visit Siskoid or BW Media today, you should see their Top 10 Kaiju lists too. [Update: Here's Siskoid's list. Here's BW Media's. And That F'ing Monkey, Laughing Ferret, and Let's Rap with Cap have gotten into the action too. Yay!]

My list is below, but first, a few explanations/disclaimers:

1) I'm not as well-versed in the Tohoverse as I'd like to be. David, Diane, and I are working our way through the Godzilla films chronologically and we've only made it through 1969's All Monsters Attack so far. Some of the old Godzilla movies are surprisingly hard to find in the U.S. and we've been stalled out waiting to find a way to watch Godzilla vs. Hedorah. We're finally going to skip ahead and move on, but as of right now I've never seen a Gigan or Megalon movie. While I expect them to be awesome, they can't be on my list until I've seen them in action.

2) I decided for the purposes of this list that giant robots are a separate category. I sometimes see Mechagodzilla and Iron Giant on lists of giant monsters, but as much as I like them, they're not on mine. I've spent too much time having giant robots try to kill giant monsters, so they can't co-exist in my head.

3) These are my favorite giant monsters, not my favorite stories about giant monsters. That would be a whole different list. For example, I love Them!, but giant ants themselves didn't crack my Top 10.

4) In spite of the tongue-in-cheek, hyperbolic superlative in the title of this post, standard list-making rules apply about how these are my personal favorites. Your list will be different and I'd love if you share how in the comments.

10. Brainblob (Kill All Monsters)



This is totally self-serving and I apologize, but I really do like a lot of the monsters we came up with for KAM. Especially this transparent, gelatinous blob with a brain floating in it.

9. Kraken (Clash of the Titans, 1981)



I love that Ray Harryhausen decided against a traditional, squid-like kraken in favor of this giant, mermanoid sea monster. The only reason it's not higher on my list is because it appears so briefly and is easily defeated. As awful as the 2010 remake was, I do like how it extended the kraken's appearance into an actual battle.

8. Tarantula



I'm pretty terrified of normal-sized tarantulas, which are plenty big enough. Blowing one up to this size makes it the most horrifying creature on this list.

7. Gamera



We finally watched Gamera the movie the other night and I wasn't too impressed with it. Or Gamera the monster, for that matter, at least at first. By the time the military knocked Gamera on its back and were congratulating themselves (because turtles are notorious for not being able to right themselves from that position), I was barely paying attention. But that's when Gamera pulled into its shell, shot jets out of its leg holes, and turned itself into a flying saucer. The movie may still suck, but the monster is crazy and awesome.

6. King Ghidorah



Godzilla had sort of an identity crisis in the '60s as he waffled between villain and hero. What I like about King Ghidorah - besides his three heads and batwings - is that he's consistently evil and powerful enough that the "good" monsters have to team up to bring him down. A great antagonist.

5. Ymir (20 Million Miles to Earth)



This Harryhausen creation bears a slight resemblance to the kraken, but I love that fishy look, so it doesn't bother me. And though the Ymir isn't as huge as the other monsters on this list, it gets bonus points for being a sympathetic creature. It doesn't ask for any of the things that happen to it and is dangerous only because it's a wild creature that humans have forced into our environment. That theme goes a long way with me (see No. 1).

4. Godzilla



Speaking of themes, I'll always love Godzilla if based on nothing but the strength of that first movie in 1954. He was a perfect metaphor for the horrors of nuclear weapons and it's kind of a shame that he would eventually be known for hanging out with Minilla (aka Son of Godzilla) and dancing jigs. Still, he's the icon and it's impossible for me to put him lower than this.

3. Mothra



Mothra introduced actual personality to giant monsters in the Tohoverse. Until her, there was a vague sense of who Godzilla and his fellow kaiju were, but they was malleable to the needs of their plots. Mothra, thanks greatly to the innovation of letting her speak through the Tiny Beauties, has a consistent personality. What's more, it's a lovely one that's protective not only of her home island, but humanity in general. She's directly responsible for turning Godzilla into a legitimately heroic character, but whatever I think of that development, Mothra's asking Godzilla to make that change fits perfectly with her characterization and it's cool that she did it.

2. Belloc (Firebreather)



The main character in Phil Hester and Andy Kuhn's Firebreather is the son of a human woman and a giant monster named Belloc. Hester has talked about how Belloc was inspired by Marvel's Fin Fang Foom (who just barely missed my list), which explains not only his general look, but also his intelligence. What I love about Belloc is that he's actually a complex character with conflicting motivations that lead him to do interesting things. Of all the monsters on this list, he's the most fully realized.

1. King Kong



I won't be surprised if I get some grief for featuring Peter Jackson's version of Kong instead of Ray Harryhausen's, but though I love the original film from 1933, Kong was just a monster to me in it, and one with a goofy smile. The story was all great, but as cool as that stop-motion gorilla was, I never connected to it.

Jackson's version - thanks to Andy Serkis' performance and Naomi Watt's reactions to it - turned Kong into a character I felt something for. He's not as complicated as Belloc, but he's no less relatable and the end of Jackson's film breaks my heart (in a good way) every time. I truly don't get the hate for it.

Really though, almost any version of Kong could make the top spot on my list just for being a giant gorilla who fights dinosaurs on a jungle island shaped like a skull. Does not get any better than that.

Daily Panel | Agu the Giant

From Lorna, the Jungle Queen #1, by Don Rico and Werner Roth.

The Giant Gila Monster (1959)

Who's in it?: Don Sullivan (Teenage Zombies); Fred Graham (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon)

What's it about?: A giant lizard attacks people around a rural town.

How is it?: Groovy, Dad. It's way low budget, but director Ray Kellogg knew how to use his limited resources. He doesn't even try to put people and monster in the same shots together, but the editing is effective and creates the illusion that everyone's inhabiting the same space. The models that the monster appears with aren't half bad either.

Sullivan is really likable as teenager Chase Winstead. The character's perfection borders on ridiculous at times (he keeps his gang of friends under control while also holding down a job to support his widowed mother and buy leg braces for his crippled sister), but Sullivan is so affable that it's impossible to hate his character. And the more time the story spends with Chase, the more it reveals that he isn't actually perfect after all. He's a responsible kid, so he has the trust of Sheriff Jeff (Graham), but he doesn't always use that trust very well. He never outright betrays the lawman, but Chase is a kid and he makes mistakes like a kid. Just as the sheriff makes a mistake by relying so heavily on a teenager. It's a realistic depiction of a the relationship without letting either character devolve into stereotypes. It's refreshing and cool.

There's some drama about the wealthy businessman who controls the town and is upset enough when his son goes missing that he threatens the sheriff's job. That's not overdone though and otherwise, the little town looks as pleasant to live in as Mayberry. Except for the giant lizard, of course. (And props to the film for coming up with something besides "atomic accident" to explain the creature's mutation.)

Rating: Good.

Recasting The Cyclops

The Cyclops is a giant monster movie with the crappiest special effects you've ever seen. By 1957, backscreen projection was solid technology (King Kong used it in 1933, for crying out loud), but that's too fancy for The Cyclops. Instead, they simply superimposed images of creatures onto footage of the actors, making the monsters transparent.

Still, the story told in The Cyclops is sound. I love the characters and the group dynamics and it would make a great ensemble piece for a small cast of actors.

Susan Winter (Keira Knightley)



Susan Winter is a woman searching for her fiancé, Bruce Barton. Barton's plane went down in Mexico a while ago. I forget how long, exactly. It was months, at least, and maybe a couple of years. Certainly long enough for everyone but Winter to have given up hope that he'd be found. Winter's been trying to organize a search ever since, but unfortunately, the Mexican government refuses to allow her access to the region where Barton disappeared. Unrelenting, Winter has funded her own expedition to the forbidden jungle, but the small team still has to get around Mexican authorities to fly into the area.

The original film is clunky in the way it handles the early exposition, but there's potential for some great drama and action right off the bat as Winter and her team force their plane through opposing forces.

I picked Knightley partly because I just like her; partly because she's a fantastic, tough actress who can give Winter the determination she needs.

Martin Melville (Woody Harrelson)



Winter finances the expedition by convincing wealthy speculator Melville that there's uranium in the area where Barton's plane went down. Melville puts up part of the money in exchange for claim rights to whatever uranium they find.

In the original, Melville's played by Lon Chaney, Jr. He's a greedy, selfish man who causes all kinds of problems once he learns that there really is uranium in the area. He wants to get back to file his claim as quickly as possible, Barton be damned. It's that conflict with Winter that drives a lot of the drama throughout the film. Woody Harrelson would make a powerful, slightly unhinged opponent for Knightley to overcome. Fortunately for her, she has an ally.

Russ Bradford (Benicio Del Toro)



Bradford is a scientist, but his reason for being on the mission is that he's a friend of Winter and Barton's. He's also obviously in love with Winter and wants to help her put to rest her hopes about finding Barton so that she can move on with her life.

I picked Del Toro because I'm tired of seeing him play creepy villains. He's a great actor and I'd love to see him in a complicated, but positive role like this one.

Lee Brand (Kate Beckinsale)



The pilot and owner of the plane. Brand is a guy in the original, but there's no reason the character has to be male; especially with a name like Lee. Melville knows that he only has to convince Brand to leave the mission early in order to make it happen. He tries to convince Brand by suggesting that the pilot could fly Melville home early and then come back for the other two.

Melville's rich enough to make that worth Brand's while, but Brand understands that that's completely outside the original arrangement with Winter. The question is whether or not Brand's the type of person to stick to the letter of the contract or take a lucrative deal when it's offered. Beckinsale plays heroes and villains with equal ease, so she could do awesome things with a conflicted entrepreneur like Brand.

With all the human drama in place, all that's left is to include some modern effects when the team discovers that the radioactive area is crawling with giant lizards, spiders, birds, and other animals. There's also the cyclops of course. His origin is all too easy to guess, but it's the human drama that keeps the movie going. The mystery of the giants is just icing for the cake.

Hulkasaurus: One more thing for SpringCon

My son David will be at SpringCon with me tomorrow with a very limited number of copies of his own comic, Hulkasaurus. It's a 12-page booklet containing a giant-monster story and a back-up feature introducing a creature he plans to use in future issues. Only a buck. Get 'em while they last.

Salvage Divers Hate Cephalopods

[From the Gorgo story at Go Go Godzilla]

The Marvel 52, Part Two: Midnight Sons

One of my earliest memories of Marvel's trying an imprint formula was when they put all of their supernatural books into a line called Midnight Sons. Before then, there were sort of unofficial lines (the Spider-Man titles, the X-Men books, etc.), but this was the first time I remember seeing a purposeful attempt to start a new brand. It didn't last long, but I loved it while it did. So for my Marvel 52, I'm bringing it back.

Not exactly as it appeared in the '90s though. The original Midnight Sons line-up was Blade, Blaze (featuring Johnny Blaze, who at that time wasn't the Ghost Rider, but a bike-riding carnie with a hellfire-spouting shotgun), Darkhold (about a secret group trying to limit the effects of Marvel's version of the Necronomicon), Doctor Strange, Ghost Rider, Morbius, Nightstalkers (a team of monster-hunting vampires), and Spirits of Vengeance (a Blaze/Ghost Rider team-up book). It was awesome, but here's my version:

42. Fin Fang Four by Scott Gray, Roger Langridge and Richard Moore



In 2005, Marvel published a Halloween event called Marvel Monsters. My version of Midnight Sons owes as much to that as to the original Midnight Sons line. One of the several Marvel Monsters one-shots was Fin Fang Four, co-written by Scott Gray and Roger Langridge and drawn by Langridge. It featured Marvel's most famous giant monster as he teamed up with other Altas-era giant monsters (a robot, a gorilla, and an alien) to fight a microscopic warlord who'd been enlarged to giant-size. In my version, they'll continue to fight giant menaces (sort of an update on Marvel's old Godzilla comic) while drawn by Richard Moore (Boneyard), who's got a knack for drawing light-hearted, but empathetic versions of classic creatures.

41. Elsa Bloodstone by Vera Brosgol and Paul Taylor

Marvel's answer to Buffy the Vampire Slayer is Elsa Bloodstone, daughter of monster-hunter Ulysses Bloodstone. She doesn't need a lot of introduction thanks to Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen's including her in Nextwave, but my version would be more of an adventurous romp through Marvel's monsterverse for the Young Adult crowd. Balancing fun with scares is tough, so I picked two YA comics creators who already know how to do that. Vera Brosgol's Anya's Ghost is part high-school comedy/part horror story, while Paul Taylor's Wapsi Square mixes relationship comedy with some spooky Aztec mythology in a very cool way.

40. Legion of Monsters by Paul Cornell and Richard Sala



Just an excuse to team up Marvel's versions of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster with other monster-inspired characters Werewolf by Night, The Living Mummy, Mr. Hyde, The Lizard, Quasimodo, and Zombie. Paul Cornell (Captain Britain and MI13, Action Comics) could have a lot of fun with that and I'd love to see Richard Sala's takes on all those characters. There'd have to be a cute girl though, so maybe this could be a companion to Elsa Bloodstone's solo title. Especially since Marvel's already doing one kind of like that.

39. Inhumans by Neil Gaiman and Mike Mignola

I wouldn't really want to offer any editorial input on this. Just: Gaiman. Mignola. Inhumans. Go!

38. Ghost Rider by Joshua Fialkov and Ben Templesmith



Though I'm perfectly okay giving Fialkov a jungle comic with The Savage Land, I'd be missing a huge opportunity if he wasn't also writing a horror comic. And I just love Templesmith's Ghost Rider.

37. Doom by Kurt Busiek and Fiona Staples

The first of a couple of villain books in my Marvel 52. Busiek's grounded enough in Marvel history to make a book work about one of its most classic villains, but he's also inventive and willing to shake things up. I'm not interested in seeing Doom fail at an endless succession of master schemes. I'd much rather read a series exploring his more personal ambitions and the clash between science and supernature. Staples would be perfect for that, especially the supernatural parts.

36. The Hulk by Steve Niles and Skottie Young



I've known Steve Niles for years and I know how much he loves this character. He'd be brilliant on a Hulk book. And just look at how Skottie Young draws him. I'm crying a little right now because this doesn't actually exist.

35. Doctor Strange by Alan Moore and Joann Sfar

Can you imagine Alan Moore on a Doctor Strange book? That might actually be dangerous to read. Doctor Strange should totally be a horror series. That folks keep trying to turn him into a superhero is a shame. Sfar would make it nice and creepy too.

34. Monsters on the Prowl by Steve Niles and Duncan Fegredo



Niles has already sort of worked on a Hulk comic. His and Fegredo's Monsters on the Prowl was another part of the Marvel Monsters event, but what was really interesting and cool about it was that it didn't feature characters inspired by classic monsters. Instead, it featured recognizable, big-name superheroes who also all have some monstrous qualities. '60s versions of Thing, Hulk, Beast,and Giant-Man fight a menagerie of Atlas-era giant monsters that have escaped from the Collector. I'd love an ongoing series with that team.

33. The Defenders by Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente, and Eric Powell

As you've seen in the art above, Eric Powell did the covers for the Marvel Monsters books and in my dream line he'd be drawing a book too. The Defenders isn't traditionally a supernatural book, but its founders are a sorcerer, a monster, and an unpredictable menace from beneath the waves, so I'm putting it here. I've always been much more interested in the fantasy aspects of horror than actual scares anyway, so my Midnight Sons line would reflect that. The Defenders ought to sit quite nicely in the catalog next to Monsters on the Prowl and The Hulk.

Pak and Van Lente are easy choices for a book like this. My dream lineup for characters would include Doctor Strange, Hulk, Sub-Mariner, Clea, Valkyrie, Nighthawk, and Hellcat

Tomorrow: The X-Titles!