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As anyone in movie marketing can tell you, nothing beats a great title, and sometimes it only takes one word to sell you on something you just know it gonna hurt your brain but you have to see anyhow, like Sharktopus, Carnosaur, Manster or Sharknado (I kid you not, it exists! ). (RoboCop is the awesome exception to the rule, of course.) OK, technically those titles are actually two words smashed together to make one glorious B-movie mutant of a moniker. Regardless, when it comes to the double-your-pleasure-double-your-fun Frankentitle (see what I just did there…), I’m a sucker. So when a DVD with Snowmageddon emblazoned on the front landed on my desk, any and all forms of resistance were futile.

This low budget Canadian production, made for the Syfy channel in the U.S., has one of the weirdest premises ever. Christmas approaches in an idyllic small town mountain town of Normal, Alaska. Main street is decorated, trees are up and presents are arriving, including one that shows up on the doorstep of the sheriff. His young son, who has an affinity for a fantasy roleplaying game, opens the package to discover a mechanically complex snow globe that contains a detailed replica of the town and surrounding mountains inside of it. He sets the device in-motion and soon the town is under siege by… earthquakes that crack open main street, exploding ice comets that rain down deadly icicles, giant spikes that shoot out of the ground, and a volcano that erupts in the mountains. Hmmm… not a lot of snow in that mageddon, is there?

As the sheriff and his wife, a helicopter pilot who drops a couple of snowboarders off on one of the mountains when the chaos begins, try to save the town, while their son tries to convince them that the snow globe is at fault, which he eventually does with the help of a local merchant, played by Michael Hogan (best known as the salty Colonel Saul Tigh on Battlestar Galactica). And just to make the proceedings extra Canuck, Lorne Cardinal of Corner Gas fame co-stars as one of the locals. Trapped and rightfully confused, they townies eventually figure out that their only chance is to throw the globe into the new volcano above the town, which will most likely hurt tourism. The sheriff hops in his clunky, sometimes computer animated, Snow Cat and attempts to make like a Hobbit on Mount Doom.

Because this is a Syfy movie, the effects are expectedly terrible, the carnage PG-rated and the performances uneven. That said, if you don’t mind the lack of a snowmaggedon, and watch Snowmageddon as an incredibly twisted Christmas flick, you’ve got the best Hallmark movie ever made. (And not the Roland Emmerich-type apocalypse epic promised by that severly overreaching DVD cover.) The Twilight Zone-style plot is weird enough to keep you in the game, Hogan is fun to watch and the whole thing is under 80 minutes and keeps a brisk pace. It’s kind of movie you’d want to bring over to grandma’s house during the holidays, just to break her mind.

Director Sheldon Wilson does a respectable job with what he’s got, and deserves to be working on bigger projects. I’ve seen his second feature, the horror-mystery Shallow Ground, which is well worth seeking out.

It may not live up to the promise of its title, but Snowmaggedon is perfect for keeping it weird during the holidays. At least until someone makes Blizzarmageddon.

-Dave Alexander

It will be the zombie epic ten years in the making – the biggest budgeted undead film ever launched, shot in locations all over the world, starring a Hollywood A-lister and helmed by a director with a Bond film under his belt. When the trailer for next year’s World War Z was finally released this week, it signalled the pinnacle of the zombie movie resurgence of the past dozen years. A decade ago, if someone told you that Brad Pitt would be starring in a $200 million dollar zombie movie, you would’ve thought the news was as likely as an actual undead outbreak. Yet, not only is Pitt starring in it, his company, Plan B Entertainment, bought the rights to the source material (for what’s been quoted as “a high six figures”) after winning a bidding war with Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company.

Now that the movie is a reality, let’s get up to speed on World War Z and take a closer look at the trailer...

The man behind it all it all is Max Brooks, son of legendary actor/filmmaker Mel Brooks, a exceptionally smart, observant and witty guy, who I got to know a little bit when I hosted a panel with him on it a few years ago at the Rue Morgue Festival of Fear. In 2003, Max’s book The Zombie Survival Guide was released, which is part practical manual on how to survive a rotterocalypse, and part series of accounts of “real” historical instances of zombie uprisings, going as far back as ancient Egypt. The book was a hit and led him to pen World War Z: The Oral History of the Zombie War in 2006, a novel (inspired by the Studs Terkel novel The Good War) in which a U.N. inspector gathers accounts of the outbreak, from its beginning in rural China, beneath the water in a lake created by dam; through its rapid global spread, resulting in billions dead from both the infection and "The Great Panic," nuclear devastation in the Middle East, millions starved or frozen to death after escaping into Northern Canada; to Cuba ironically becoming a safe haven for Americans; and climaxing with the remaining world governments formulating a plan to fight back. Brooks exhaustively researched the book for maximum realism, including details of military tactics, the effectiveness of specific weaponry, the path of the viral spread and the likely political responses of scores of nations. It’s absolutely riveting, with each chapter reading like a treatment for its own movie.

And that’s the challenge. The scope of the book is so large and contains stories from so many different voices that containing it could be difficult as containing the fictional plague itself. The first person charged with the task of wrangling it into script form was J. Michael Straczynski, whose extensive writing credits include everything from The Amazing Spider-Man comic book, to creating the sci-fi show Babylon 5, to working on screenplays for movies such as Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling and Thor. Despite favourable reviews of the script, after it was leaked online, it was rewritten by Matthew Michael Carnahan and then underwent additional rewrites by Drew Goddard, who most recently directed the fantastic Joss Whedon-penned horror movie The Cabin in the Woods and also has writing credits on Cloverfield and the TV show Lost.

Helming the project in the director's seat is Marc Forster, whose feature credits include Monster’s Ball, Stranger than Fiction and the Kite Runner, but is best known for directing the 2008 Bond entry Quantum of Solace. Back in 2008, Straczynski compared World War Z to the Bourne movies and you can see that in the trailer in terms of the global scope, military/conspiracy content and manic action, making Forster a good choice, as those are also elements one finds in a Bond movie, minus the apocalypse and monsters, of course.

I watched the WWZ trailer half a dozen times to see what I could glean from it. Obviously it couldn’t follow the episodic style of the book, so instead we’re firmly embedded with Pitt’s character, Gerry Lane, beginning with him and his family in the streets of New York. We get flashes of the conflict around the globe, including a sense of realism and urgency via video news clips that recall the opening of the Dawn of the Dead remake. And like Zack Snyder’s 2004 film, World War Z has abandoned the traditional George A. Romero-style of slow zombies in favour of running rotters. The trailer for WWZ gives us a look at something we’re never seen in the subgenre before: a zombie tsunami. We see hundreds and hundreds of the undead pile on top of each other and flow through the streets en masse like a tidal wave of bitey death.

This goes against how Brooks envisioned them, which is in the classic Romero style. He’s even spoken out against fast zombies, saying that it makes them “silly and campy” so clearly there’s a major departure here.

There are two ways to look at this. A lot of zombie fans will lament the change as heresy – THOU SHALT NOT RUN! – or you can see it as the filmmaker bringing something new to the genre by equating the undead as a virus that grows and ravages everything in its path. Personally, I find this idea a breath of fresh fetid air: a new way to the view a zombie outbreak as a faceless, biological mass. Some of the scenes of the zom-balls moving through the streets are terrifying in the trailer. Of course, they may work  in snippets but look ridiculous in long takes, which might render them silly CGI blobs. Time will tell...

Another key change to the story that seems apparent in the trailer – and isn’t unexpected given the blockbuster nature of it – is that the film version of WWZ will have a much more pro-American military viewpoint than the book. Brooks, writing in the tradition of Romero, fills his zombie tale with cutting political and social commentary, including examining the damage done by bureaucratic red tape, govermental failure to adapt to a new threat, and the effect of foreign policy that favours an isolationist stance towards the rest of the world. At the core of any Romero-style zombie story is that the harm done by humans to each other is as bad or worse than that inflicted by the undead. The trailer is slanted more to the might of the American military as it takes charge, however. Judging by the footage, the film may be more Tom Clancy than George A. Romero.

Regardless, the sheer scope of the movie, and the fact that it takes itself seriously, is more than enough to ressurect my waning interest in zombie movies. Most undead films are contained to a group of people in a handful of locations – a concept that works better with a small budget. World War Z on the other hand, which is already being touted as the first part of a trilogy, could just be The Lord of the Rings for zombie lovers. Trigger fingers crossed.

-Dave Alexander

Remember how amazing robots were during the ‘80s?  On TV there was Vicky the robot on Small Wonder, K.I.T.T. the talking car from Knight Rider and Conky from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Toy stores were full of Go-Bots, Transformers, Voltron, Omnibots and Nintendo’s R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy). And they invaded theatres: in the Short Circuit films, the Robocop series and two Terminator movies. It seemed like we were on the verge of either living a Jetsons lifestyle, or getting caught up in a robocalypse.

Well, neither happened, but at least we got Runaway, the 1984 film in which Tom Selleck plays a cop in the near-future who's assigned to policing out-of-control robots. The heavily mustachioed actor was wildly popular at the time due to his starring role in TV’s Magnum P.I. and shot the film in between seasons. What was intended to be a blockbuster, however, was overshadowed by James Cameron’s The Terminator. So instead of tearing up the box office, it played often on Super Channel free movie weekends, which was where I discovered it.

I hadn’t realized it until recently, but the movie was directed by acclaimed sci-fi author Michael Crichton, who, aside from writing Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, Congo, Sphere, and creating the TV show E.R., stepped behind the camera for several features, also including Westworld and Coma. It was the fourth anniversary of Crichton’s death this past Sunday, and I stumbled across the movie on Netflix the same day, so I decided that was just reason enough to see if Runaway held up since the days when Selleck wore a ‘stache that large, in charge and dye-free.

In the film he plays Ramsay, a cop in a future where robots are so much a part of humans' daily lives that we need a special squad on the police force to deal with them when they go haywire. Like most movie cops, he gets a new partner and – wouldn’t ya know it – she’s a beautiful woman (played by Cynthia Rhodes). When his ornery Captain has them fly over to a farmer’s field to disarm and haywire planting machine, she discovers his fear of heights, something that maybe... just maybe... will come into play later in the film. Then, when a household helper robot goes bonkers, Ramsay must act to save a baby from a gun-totin’ automaton, and in the process he uncovers a plot involving dangerous microchips that can turn good ‘bots bad and the ruthless man intent on selling them to terrorists and the mafia. KISS’ Gene Simmons plays the murderous genius Luther with such over-the-top malevolent relish you’d swear he was really was a dickish, greedy egomaniac in real life…

So, Ramsay pursues him, Luther strikes back, wounding his partner and kidnapping his son, leading to an inevitable confrontation on a really tall building. Oh, and Kirstie Alley shows up as a sort of gangster’s moll who has the microchip templates that both cop and criminal are after. And some pretty big hair.

Runaways wears its cop flick clichés like a pair of lead mukluks, which gives it a bit of a cheesy charm, like something The Simpsons would make fun of. But the real reason to watch – doubly so if you're a pre-teen boy – is all the cool robotics and gadgetry. The big selling point of the film is the gaggle of Luther’s mechanical spiders, which crawl and leap on their victims, injecting them with a needle full of acid (because this is the most efficient way to kill someone outside of a James bond movie, right?). That, and he’s got those bad-ass, scary bullets that chase their targets, allowing Crichton to do a neat bullet-cam thing that sees the shot snake through alleys and make 90-degree turns.

In hindsight, ‘80s robo-sci-fi movies like Runaway were just big techno teases. They showed us amazing technology that we wanted (I, for one, craved my own army of mechanical acid-spiders to do my bidding), while simultaneously scaring the hell out of us that the same technology would try to kill us. At the end of day, we failed to achieve a society with robot butlers, but at least we can easily watch the movies that promised us such things. And it's probably a good thing we passed on the whole giant moustache thing, too.

-Dave Alexander

Horror movies and storms have a serious peanut butter and chocolate relationship, and with the Halloween “Frankenstorm” upon us, there’s no better time like the rain-soaked present to take a look at how the genre has used weather to scare us. As someone who loved to sit on a lawn chair with his father and watch lightning storms from the garage with the door open, I’ve long found it thrilling to see nature unload on us.

Flash forward to when I saw John Carpenter’s Halloween for the first time. It was a late night, and I was all alone, with a storm raging outside – rain drops hammering the bay window in the living room and the howling wind knocking a tree branch against the glass. It heightened the tension and chilled the atmosphere to an incredible degree. Storytellers have understood this since the birth of the horror story, with the gothic tales of the 1700s, which are full of castles on stormy nights.

This Gothic tradition was carried over to the horror film in a big way. After all, what would the original Frankenstein (1931) be without lightening cracking across the sky over a castle roof? Narratively, nothing, as the storm itself is the catalyst that gives birth to the monster via a jolt of electricity from the sky, channeled into lightning rods and down into the electrodes of the soon-to-be-reanimated corpse. (FYI, this is the more literal version of a Frankenstorm.) But even when storms weren’t making monsters, they were making them scarier, as you can see through dozens of the Universal monster movies and their imitators, which feature stormy evenings to immediately establish an atmosphere of dread.

Similarly, storms are a staple of the Old Dark House subgenre (which notably/obviously includes the 1932 film with Boris Karloff called The Old Dark House), which often have visitors sequestered in a creaky , mouldering home to find themselves caught up in a murder or some sort of seemingly supernatural shenanigans. Just as reliant on sinister storms to set the tone, of course, are the straight up haunted house films (e.g. The Innocents, Poltergeist, The Woman in Black), to the point of being cliché/appearing in numerous Scooby Doo episodes.

Sometimes, however, the storm itself can be just as dangerous, or even more dangerous, than the chief threat. In Misery (1990), our protagonist is not only bedridden by the injuries suffered in a car accident and at the hands of his tormentor, even if he could escape, he’d most likely die in the snow. Some of the most famous horror movies have not only trapped their characters in deadly weather, storms have played a pivotal role in the climax, The Shining (1980) and The Thing (1982), being prime examples. More recent examples include Identity (2003), in which a massive storm that washes out roads traps a group of people at a motel with a murderer, and Burning Bright (2010), in which a boarded up house getting hammered during a hurricane becomes a death trap for a girl and her autistic brother when a tiger is let loose inside.

But sometimes, a storm is just a catalyst that ushers in something worse (worse than even Frankenstein’s Monster), and I’m not talking about floods. In Jurassic Park (1993), a tropical storm frees the dinosaurs from their pens; in the nature-strikes-back movie Squirm (1976), a massive storm and downed power line drives a legion of carnivorous worms to the surface to feed on local townsfolk; and in The Return of the Living Dead (1985), crematorium smoke from burned zombie bodies gets into the atmosphere, mixes with a rainstorm and resurrects an entire cemetery of flesh-starved ghouls.

And, on a few occasions, a storm is actually the result of something awful already happening, such as the hurricane weather in The Mist (2007), which ushers in the titular fog filled with inter-dimensional monsters; or the swirling skies in War of the Worlds (2005) that prefigure a Martian invasion.

Yes, storms can trap us, cause all kinds of havoc and kill us by their very nature, but at least the weather itself isn’t malevolent. Right?

Wrong…

Sometimes the weather decides to come after us. Cast in point: Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004), in which deadly frost chases our heroes into the fireplace room of the New York Public Library (after a hurricane, tsunami and insta-Ice Age already bugger things up on an epic scale). Pair that up with the Emmerich End Times film 2012 (2009), in which all kinds of deadly atmospheric whatnots cause endless last-second escapes for John Cusack’s character, like the weather is OUT TO GET HIM…

More calculating, though, is the Satan-sponsored wind/ bolt of lightning combo that impales a priest with a lightning rod in The Omen (1976). Or there are the numerous weather-caused fatalities throughout the Final Destination series (2000 to 2011) that are the product of Death’s design. But none of these are so calculating, convoluted or downright confusing as the malevolent wind in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), which chases Mark Wahlberg’s character through a field, and subsequently credibility from the movie. (Note to filmmakers: the wind does not make a very credible bad guy.)

If you’re weathering the Frankenstorm by watching some Halloween movies, the horror genre has ya covered. Consider these films a forecast of 100 percent chance of Stay the Hell Inside.

-Dave Alexander

As we head into Halloween, I like to make the most of my day job at a horror magazine and pick some choice, under-the-radar genre films for your seasonal viewing (dis)pleasure. Below are five movies released in 2012 that probably flew under your radar, if they even entered your airspace at all…

The Cabin in the Woods

Most of you know about this one, as it opened wide, and, yes, it did take in $42 million domestically, but for what is probably the best horror movie of the year, it should’ve been a big hit. It’s co-written (with Cloverfield scribe Drew Goddard) and produced by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and the director of the mega-huge Avengers movie, so you know it’s gonna be pop-culture clever and fun. The problem was that it sat on the shelf for a few years after MGM went bankrupt, and then proved very difficult to market. The movie seems to be yet another teen slasher flick, but that’s the beauty of it – The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie about horror movies (that's not a new concept, but the execution is entirely fresh). So, after it sets up the familiar premise of a bunch of teens (including one played by a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth) going to the wood for a weekend of sex, drugs and ignoring warnings from a raving local, it pulls the rug out from under the audience and becomes something very different indeed. It’s got a great conspiracy plot, more monsters, ghosts and other creepy-crawlies than you’ve ever seen before, plenty of gore, even more laughs and a perfect celebrity cameo. But to give the details away, would ruin the film, so Alliance puzzled over how to market this puzzle of a movie. Nevertheless, if you jive to the world of Whedon, chances are you’ll love this one.

The Hole

For something light that the entire family can gather ‘round, Joe Dante’s just-released on DVD/Blu-ray kid-centred 3-D creep-out is worth tracking down. Done in the spirit of ‘80s movies such as The Goonies, The Monster Squad and The Gate, it features two brothers, who, along with their mom, move from New York City to a small town, where they must not only adapt to a new pace of life, but fight the evil they discover in a hole in their basement. Along with the girl next door, the kids seek help from an eccentric local (Bruce Dern) to vanquish the demonic forces they unleashed, which are now terrorizing them (one particularly Poltergeist-esque scene when a clown doll comes to life and attacks is particularly scary). Not surprisingly, the only solution is to venture into the portal to confront the thing that brings their worst fears to life. The movie is available in 3-D if you have an equipped TV, but even without it, The Hole has thrills for the kids and plenty of nostalgia for parents weaned on those’80s movies where kids had incredible adventures in their own backyards.

Kill List

British director Ben Wheatley also likes to play with genre, and his masterful Kill List is unlike anything you’ve seen before, or could likely prepare yourself for. After a contract killer with a wife, kid and financial problems agrees to a lucrative series of hits with his partner, strange things begin to happen, including traces of the occult, the discovery of a kiddie porn operation and a secret sect with ties to the government. What begins as sort-of gangster movie mixed with a darkly domestic comedy, takes viewers down a mysterious path full of extreme violence and mind games that ends somewhere in the territory of The Wicker Man. The finale may leave you scratching your head (fans are still trying to get their collective heads around the subtext and metaphors), but the journey is thrilling. Catch Kill List on DVD from IFC Films or on Netflix.

The Loved Ones

If John Hughes had made Aussie torture porn after seeing Carrie, it might turn out something like Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones. After getting buried in the post-festival rubble, this tale of teenage angst gone very awry was quietly dropped on DVD by Paramount this year, despite being a diamond in the Outback. Australian heartthrob Xavier Samuel (he was in a Twilight movie, so one assumes he’s a heartthrob, anyhow) stars as Brent a depressed teen trying to come to terms with his father’s death in a car accident that he caused. His mom is overprotective but at least he has his girlfriend, so when he’s asked to the prom by the weird girl at school, Lola (a very excellent Robin McLeavy), he turns her down. Big mistake. With the help of her equally demented father and some chloroform, she stages her own prom back at the family homestead, complete with formal attire, glitter, balloons, paper crowns and… uh, trepanation. Poor Lola just wants the boy of her dreams but it never seems to work out, most likely because her and her bug-eyed, leering old man are better with knives, power tools and bleach than taking no for an answer. The Loved ones is a delirious mix of pop music, candy colours, bloody torture and teen angst. Not for weak stomachs or highly impressionable rejected prom dates.

Texas Killing Fields

This one slipped onto DVD earlier this year in Canada after a brief theatrical run in the U.S. last year, so we’ll count it. Directed by Ami Canaan Mann, daughter of Hollywood director Michael Mann, this one’s for lovers of true crime. Loosely based on a long string of unsolved killings that took place on a stretch of highway between Houston and Galveston, it stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan as a transplanted New York cop and Sam Worthington as a local detective trying to solve a series of brutal killings in the Texas bayous/oil fields. Jessica Chastain plays the estranged wife of Worthington’s character, and Chloë Grace Moretz is a local girl who finds herself in the sights of the killer. It’s an absolutely riveting, very dark serial killer film with fantastic performances and very assured direction from Mann, who creates a downright dangerous atmosphere in the humid, murky backwoods setting. The Texas Killing Fields disturb the hell out of ya, but you won’t be able to look away.

-Dave Alexander

The movies tend to imagine our future world as exceptionally hi-tech and gleaming, particularly dystopian and crumbling, or a mix of the two in which the shiny gadgets are very distinctly set against the dirty, overcrowded streets (think this year’s Total Recall remake). There’s a tendency to push these things to the extreme with robots, hover cars and holographic imagery, and on the flip-side, roving criminal gangs, burned out buildings, graffiti-marked concrete and other examples of excessive urban blight. Filmmakers want to use the medium to blow our minds with visions of a time and place far removed from the present, but the versions of a future that feel the most real are the ones that employ a few flashy changes with a lot of subtle touches. Rian Johnson’s Looper does this really well and shows us a world about 30 years from now that seems very authentic (with the exception of the addition of telekinesis, which seems added to make for some eye candy, and competes with the main hook of the movie, which is time travel).

Let’s explore the aesthetic of the film and how it works. For starters, one of the smartest things Johnson does is not try to explain how time travel works, but instead shows us a very industrial-looking machine hidden in an abandoned factory that moves people through time. No dazzling lights or beams, just a big metal thing you go in and reappear somewhere else. Trying to explain time travel in movies usually just brings up more questions than it can answer, and we’ve heard it all before, so less is more here. He treats this “big thing” in such a matter-of-fact way that we easily accept it.

The depiction of technology throughout the movie is key and other very hi-tech things, such as tiny, clear, plastic cell phones or the hover bikes, are just shown briefly. Most sci-fi films foreground these items (think of the holographic computer screen in Minority Report, for example) like a giant, flashing neon sign blinking FUTURE, FUTURE, FUTURE, but in Looper, they aren’t as prominent as older technology. Prominently displayed are a lot of vehicles from now that are aged three decades and modified slightly with solar panels mounted on them and/or a hose going from the gas tank to the exhaust system – something that’s never explained but we assume is some sort system for either better fuel efficiency or perhaps an alternative fuel conversion. Many of the newer vehicles in the movie are European-style trucks and vans, which are smaller and more fuel efficient. It’s a nice, logical touch given our current rates of fossil fuel consumption.

And that leads us to the climate of the future. Scientists have predicted that global warming will cause not only a shift in weather, but the resulting loss of crops and fresh water will wreak economic havoc. In Looper we see a city full of the impoverished, there's a vagrant problem and the sky is almost always hot and hazy during the day. And when our hero, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) hides out on a farm, it looks like any farm you’d see now, except that the crop is “’cane” (sugarcane), which in the future may be more widespread in North American as temperatures rise. We rarely see farms in sci-fi, and to set much of Looper on one gives it a unique feel, similar to the opening of Star Trek, when a young James T. Kirk is driving a stolen car on a dirt road past crops. After all, it’s not like we won’t need to eat in the future, so agriculture ain’t going anywhere. That said, one of the movie’s most subtle nods to the future of food is a diner poster advertising a special on soy steaks, suggesting that meat is a scarce commodity 30 years from now.

In terms of larger surface changes, though, Looper acknowledges the rise of Asia in world culture and economy. Not only does Joe’s gangster boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels), who’s from the future, adopt an Asian-influenced style of dress, he advises Joe to move to China, rather than Paris, as it’s the place to be in the upcoming decades. Films such as Blade Runner and Serenity have similarly shown us worlds where Asian culture has a much more dominant presence in everyday life.

Finally, Looper presents a world where people fetishize vintage items, much like we do know. Joe is mocked by Abe for the "fad" of 20^th century attire, notably wearing a tie; Joe carries with him an old pocket watch; and his weapon is a blunderbuss, which is the name for an old-style pre-shotgun weapon with major stopping power but very little accuracy. Within the film’s gangster caste, the thugs define themselves by their weapons, including vintage six-shooters and a variety of blunderbusses. Again, it’s a small touch that both adds a unique Old West feel to the movie (as do the gold and silver bars that the loopers are paid with) but also recognizes our love of vintage items. When something such as frightening and futuristic such as time travel exists, it seems likely that we’d want to hold on to our past even tighter.

It’s also just one more example of how Johnson thought through the world of Looper and brought it life, not through, hi-tech special effects, but by thoughtfully extrapolating on the present, staying true to the way people think and paying close attention to detail. Now where did I leave my blunderbuss?

-Dave Alexander

If you’re familiar with their work, than immediately you can guess that a certain exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is dedicated to the Brothers Quay. Titled On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets (running August 12, 2012 – January 7, 2013), it fits perfectly alongside a body of films with titles such as Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes and Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life. The identical twins, Stephen and Timothy (but almost always referred to as The Brothers Quay), grew up in the Pennsylvania area, in a neighbourhood with a large European immigrant population, which stimulated an interest in Eastern European art. After moving to London in the ‘60s to attend the Royal College of Art, they started making stop-motion shorts, usually with puppets. They’ve created scores of shorts, plus several features (often mixing live-action with stop-motion) since the end of the ‘70s, along with illustrations, TV commercials, documentaries, music videos (Peter Gabriel’s “Sledge Hammer” may be the most famous) and even live theatre performances. They are hugely influenced by a wide variety of classical and contemporary artists, and have in turn influenced many themselves (just look at Tool’s video for “Sober” for an example).

The Brothers have been celebrated before but this MoMA exhibit is by far the biggest and most comprehensive look at their work to date. Having been a fan of their dark, surreal, but also sometimes whimsical, avante garde fairy tale works, I wasn’t gonna miss Deciphering… while in New York for a few days.

Just outside the exhibit is the introduction, a puppet and backdrop (pictured) from the Brothers’ most famous work, the 1986 short Street of Crocodiles, plus a sign forbidding photography. Once inside, you move through a multi-media maze of grey walls and sharp angles, which give the whole thing an air of German Expressionism, which was so integral to the Quay’s work. Going in a mostly chronological order, we see pics of the brothers as children, their early artworks and home movies (expectedly weird) and pieces of art and other ephemera by some of the many other artists, such as stop-motion legend Jan Svankmajer, whose worked help shaped the Quays.

There are also magazine and album covers that the brothers were commissioned to do and a screen playing a selection of their TV commercials. Made for the likes of Coke, Doritos, even Round-Up weed killer, in order to facilitate their non-commercial filmmaking, their work in advertising is still unmistakably Quay. Within the exhibit are also a couple of small theatres, as well as several other screens showing well-known and obscures footage from the past 40 years (You can sit and watch Street of Crocodile and other shorts in their entirety, plus some rarely seen deleted footage). The best of it, though, are the actual puppets, props and sets from their films, which are highly detailed – some display cases have magnifying glasses in which to study them – and utterly fascinating. Broken dolls, pieces of weathered mechanical materials, animal parts and toys are turned into characters, often by combining them in bizarre ways. Fastidiously creepy might be the most apt description, and the tactile nature of it makes it ideal for close up display.

After this, I ventured down a level to the second part of the exhibit, which consists chiefly of light box dioramas from their films. The details and invention in pieces such as the anthropomorphic piano-like instrument being played by broken doll hands, from Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, is mind-blowing. This section also includes a series of short documentaries that the brothers have done on the topics that intrigue them and inform their work, such as Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum of medical abnormalities, and a particularly illuminating one on hidden imagery and illusions in classical paintings.

The overall effect of Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets is like you’ve stepped into an entirely different world, where a huge number of artistic influences are twisted, shaped, smashed together and uneasily co-exist in elegant nightmares. There’s nothing like it anywhere, but that’s just what you’d expect from one of the world’s most famous galleries. It’s the ideal place to try to wrap your mind around the way of the Quay.

-Dave Alexander

If movie sharks are unstoppable killing machines, then shark movies are unstoppable moneymaking machines. Look up “killer shark films” on Wikipedia and you’ll get a long list of, mostly straight-to-DVD titles. Ever since Jaws tore through the box office in the ‘70s, rip-offs of the Steven Spielberg film have been a genre staple. But in recent years, with cheap computer animation technology bringing down the costs of making a shark movie, low-budget filmmakers have gone crazy with the concept. The mutant monster shark gimmick is alive and thrashing in titles such as Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus, Sharktopus, Dinoshark and Two-Headed Shark Attack.

There’s another shark movie gimmick that’s appeared recently, however: expanding the shark's territory. Sharks got bigger, badder and weirder, now filmmakers are putting them in places you’d never expect.

In 1983, Jaws 3D was released, which saw the killer Great White sneaking into a marine park to chow down on tourists. But that’s nothing at all compared to these five recent films.

Just when you thought it was safe to go in the... everywhere.

Bait 3D (2012)

Just released on DVD and Blu-ray, this Aussie flick sees a group of disparate people (including a former lifeguard, his ex-girlfriend, a cop and a would-be store robber) trapped in a supermarket after a tsunami hits, flooding the place. They’re safe on top of the shelves but must swim out if they hope to escape. Only problem is, there are now twelve-foot sharks swimming around inside the store – very aggressive sharks. The computer animation is bad, and the comic relief forced but otherwise it’s a fun concept with plenty of outrageous death scenes.

Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack (2012)

This anime feature is based on the 2001-2002 manga series but acclaimed writer/artist Junji Ito, and may be the most original, mindbending apocalypse tale ever told. The world comes under siege when rotting sea creatures walk out of the oceans on mechanical legs (some sort of military weapon gone wrong we learn) and start attacking humans. Anyone scratched or otherwise infected by them turns green and fills with gas, but the most terrifying image in the tale is easily images of huge sharks chasing people though the streets. This one is currently playing at festivals and should make its way to DVD in North American within the next few months. It’s a must-see for anyone who thinks they’ve seen every type of shark attack out there.

Sand Sharks (2012)

Hulk Hogan’s bouncy beach babe daughter Brooke stars in this one, which features the mind-blowing tagline “Just when you thought you were safe out of the water.” Now, there is an actual species of shark called a sand shark, but I’m gonna guess they don’t actually swim in sand. Well, here they do, so take that, science, biology and logic. Apparently the beast is some sort of “prehistoric sand tiger shark,” one which clearly didn’t make the most of its unique adaptation, apparently and is released when an earthquake opens a crater(?). The trailer promises plenty of armored-shark-popping-out-of-the-beach moments, and absolutely no evidence that Brooke is in this film because she can act…

Snow Shark: Ancient Snow Beast (2011)

Painfully low budget, this punchline stretched out to a feature is exactly what the title says: a movie where the shark swims through snow. There are the Jaws staples, of course, such as the troubled mayor, the circling monster (a fin cutting through the fresh powder, obviously!) and local yokels getting taken out by this “ancient predator.” The hilarious cover sees a Great White coming up through the snow (wait, shouldn’t that be the dirt?) beneath a family building a snowman.

Swamp Shark (2011)

If you any questions about the career of Kristy Swanson (a.k.a. the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer), here’s your answer: she’s playing bayou shark hunter. When animal smugglers accidentally dump a great white into the swamp, it sets to work feeding on the locals, who initially blame the deaths on ‘gators owned by the McDaniel Family. Swanson, as Rachel McDaniel, must rally her family to hunt down the real predator and clear their name. If you think this is a career low, just remember, Swanson played a character named “Christie Boner” in Dude, Where’s My Car?

So then, where can the shark movie subgenre go from here? Did anyone say… Space Shark?

-Dave Alexander

The line separating the world’s greatest people from the world most foolish is success, and Thor Heyerdahl could’ve gone either way. In 1947 the Norwegian researcher set out to prove his unpopular theory that Polynesia was settled by South Americans travelling west, rather than Asian peoples travelling from the East. Contrary to established belief, he felt that in pre-Columbian times it would’ve been possible for South Americans to land on the islands without sailboats, but rather with primitive rafts. And he knew that the only way he could prove it was to build his own primitive-style raft and test his theory.

It was rightfully viewed as a fool’s journey, as the balsawood raft (called the Kon-Tiki, after the sun god) couldn’t be steered, the voyage was very long and the craft itself never tested for such a job. Despite the obvious peril, Heyerdahl eventually assembled five others for his crew (Erik Hesselberg, Bengt Danielsson, Knut Haugland, Torstein Raaby and Herman Watzinger), built the raft, secured funding, got additional sponsorship from the American military, in the form of rations, and set sail. For 101 days they were adrift in the ocean, sending radio reports, recording data and filming footage for what would eventually become the 1950 Academy Award-winning documentary Kon-Tiki. The exceptional dangers they faced –  including sharks, storms, a raft that was falling apart and a deadly coral reef – were miraculously overcome and they succeeded. Had they all perished, Heyerdahl would’ve been known as more of a fool than a hero, if he was still known at all...

The story captured the world’s imagination, and the book Heyerdahl wrote about the expedition, called Kon-Tiki, has sold over 50 million copied and remained in print. I read the story a few years ago while visiting Sweden, and was immediately captivated. I visited the Kon-Tiki museum in Oslo, watched the documentary, and couldn’t have been more excited about the new film based on the tale, which debuted at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.

An international co-production, Kon-Tiki is the most expensive Norwegian film ever made, at over $16 million, and it’s been in development since the mid-‘90s. It looks much, much bigger than its budget, and has the sheen of a Hollywood epic to it. The cinematography is stunning, the computer-animated ocean creatures look fantastic and the score appropriately rousing, though at times overstated.

Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen stars as the sometimes dangerously charismatic Heyerdahl, and has been compared to a young Peter O’Toole. We’re given a taste of both his childhood and his years in Polynesia with his wife, both of which demonstrate how he let nothing stand in his way of adventure, not personal safety, not the preservation of his family. Both his strength and his weakness, that line between hero and fool is tested in the film.

We follow the motley crew on their journey, as they not only face dangers but witness nature at its most sublime in the form of a whale shark, iridescent jellyfish, sun sets, etc. Bonds between the men are formed and tested, yet not quite explored enough, as the movie shows them ticking away but not necessarily what makes them tick. That’s OK in the end, though, because the journey is still stunning. Some adventure stories are so astounding that it’s best to keep them simple. Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg do a sturdy job of shaping the fact into a narrative with artistic license, and they actually downplay some of the real-life scenarios, such as the regular trips beneath the raft in a basket to make repairs, and leave others out, such as the journey up through the mountains during rainy season to acquire the balsa wood needed for the Kon-Tiki.

Of course, films such as this one rekindle interest in the real story, and the thought of a whole new generation getting hooked on Thor Heyerdahl’s mad genius journey across the ocean is more important than ever in an era when moviegoers care so much more about comic book superheroes then real life heroes. So, if you’ve seen Thor in The Avengers, try Thor in Kon-Tiki, once it makes its own journey over here to North American theatres, of course.

-Dave Alexander

“Kubrick films tend to grow on you; you have to see them more than once.” – Steven Spielberg

“The best horror is the horror that you can take home with you.” – Ernest Dickerson

“Every shot has some special effort put into it.” – Sydney Pollack?

Those quotes are taken from The Shining extras in the Stanley Kubrick Blu-ray box set, and they illustrate why the director’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is not only a masterpiece but a magnet for film geeks, obsessives and conspiracy nuts. There are layers to the movie that invite analysis, over-analysis and downright mental illness, which is where Room 237 (named after the notorious hotel room in the movie where Jack Torrance emraces the rotting ghost woman) dares to tread. Rodney Ascher’s documentary played the Toronto International Film Festival, where Kubrick fans eagerly wondered just how far out there the theories on The Shining can travel. Answer: far.

To the moon, in fact… well, sort of… One interview subject offers up what he believes is proof that the movie is actually Kubrick secretly telling the world that he was the one who faked the moon landing footage(!). Another believes it’s a metaphor for colonialism and the genocide of Native Americans. And then there’s the theory that the movie is really about the Holocaust. As Ascher explained in the post-screening Q&A, he wanted his five subjects’ viewpoints to stand on their own, so he never really shows us their faces. Instead, he relies on their voiceover narration and a sprinkling of long shots of who we assume are the people speaking, among them an academic, a playwright and a journalist.

For imagery the filmmaker uses plenty of footage from The Shining, many of Kubrick’s other films and non-Kubrick films, such as Schindler’s List – often to comically compliment the audio, so, for example, Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut might appear to be reacting to a particularly wild claim. This gives Room 237 a lighthearted foil to the weighty theories brought forward, which become tiresome and downright irritating after a while. The interviewees, who were mainly sourced from various Shining (conspiracy) theory websites, are so fixated on seeing the movie in a particular way that every little continuity error, simple visual motif or even cross-fade is imbued with an unlikely depth of meaning.

One of the theorists even built her own practical and digital maps of the The Shining’s Overlook hotel and then charted out the physical space of the film to prove that it’s a movie about impossible spaces. Well, guess what, almost every narrative film is a film about impossible spaces – they’re called sets. As is described in the supplementary material, Kubrick simply visited a real hotel and instructed his set designers to mimic the rooms for the scenes he needed in the script. And while it’s fascinating to hear someone form a complex idea about how the Dopey sticker that goes missing on a door from shot to shot is an intentional symbol of lost innocence, it’s more likely that a grip added or removed it from one scene to the next, perhaps because it fell off. Will we ever know? Does it really matter?

The bigger question raised by Room 237 is why? Why do people read so much into The Shining? Why this particular Kubrick film?

There are a few reasons for this. For starters, Kubrick genuinely does fill his work with rich symbolism and metaphor. I studied Full Metal Jacket in a university course and had my mind blown when the professor illustrated all the images of birth and rebirth in the film, and, more importantly, how they intentionally fit into the themes of the movie. So, Kubrick is one of those filmmakers who really does invite further investigation into his work.

In addition, he was notorious for doing so many takes that his actors would snap. An interview in the aforementioned supplements talks about how he did over 80 takes for the scene in The Shining where Danny’s eating ice cream and talking to Dick Hallorann. You can’t shoot for that long without breaks, sometimes over multiple days, which inevitably leads to continuity errors. But, at the same time, it cements Kubrick’s reputation as an absolute perfectionist who makes movies where everything down to the placement of a chair is purely intentional.

Lastly – and this one is key – humans are wired to see patterns. It’s an evolutionary advantage to recognize patterns and use that knowledge to predict future outcomes, such as realizing that bears live in caves, so don't just go walking into any hole in the wall without your spear. (The cavemen who did were removed from the gene poll by said bears.) And none of Kubrick’s films have as many patterns as The Shining – just look at that famous orange and brown carpet. Kubrick uses deep focus in film, as well, and likes to keep his mise-en-scène busy with background actors, pictures, colours, etc., which provide so many different things to focus on, to obsess over…  We want to find patterns and there are so many potential ones in the film that for some it becomes a code that needs reading. So on go the blinders, and before you know it you’re doing things like watching The Shining simultaneous forwards and backwards at the same time and finding metaphor in the way the images overlap. Yes, that’s actually explored in Room 237, as well. Again, both fascinating and infuriating...

I watched The Shining again after seeing Room 237 and I can never watch the movie the same way again thanks to that documentary. I just can’t stop seeing every little detail onscreen now and wonder what meaning someone could derive from it. I think that the best metaphor in the film is actually that giant maze on the grounds of the Overlook that’s so easy to get lost in…

-Dave Alexander