Godzilla

Oof, the first retail day of November certainly is a post-Halloween hangover as far as horror is concerned. This may be the weakest lineup I've seen all year.

Best of the New Releases: Dark Mirror
Earlier this year IFC picked up Dark Mirror as part of it's Midnight Slate roster, so if you missed it during its run On-Demand, now is your chance to catch up on this thriller about a woman (Lisa Vidal) who discovers that the mirrors in her house reflect a different reality than what she sees around her. It's not an outstanding movie, but it's interesting, and, perhaps most importantly, it is leaps and bounds better than all of the other straight-to-video movies out this week.

James Turner over at Forbes.com has an interesting piece up examining the relationship between countries and their favorite brand of movie monsters. Godzilla, he posits, was born directly of Japan's post World War II paranoia that, in dropping nuclear bombs on their nation, scientists had irresponsibly forged a new kind of monster out of man's meddling with technologies beyond their control. Though the giant, irradiated mutant is still iconic today, Godzilla's relevancy has taken a bit of a dive in recent years, but for decades the monster reigned as Japan's reminder that man's carelessness with awe-inspiring technology has consequences that are literally too large to ignore.

However, America never developed the allegorical infatuation with Godzilla that Japan did. Half-way around the world, Godzilla was little more than an entertaining man in a suit stomping around meticulously designed sets and wrestling with other men in rubber suits. But that's not to say that the US of A lacks its own personification of science gone wrong. Ours, Turner counters, is merely a fear of endless hordes of friends, families and neighbors transformed into mindless cannibals.

Ever since Romero gifted the world with Night of the Living Dead, America has had a fascination with scientific fumbles that bring about the undead apocalypse. Crashing satellites, bungled lab work, mutated viruses, escaped experiments -- these are all our Godzilla. That said, though, Turner does point out a crucial distinction between America's brain-eaters and Japan's city-destroyer:

Over at SciFi Squad, my pal Erik Davis does something called "Captain's Log," which is his catch-all section for opinions, musings, rants, links, and all sorts of friendly geek stuff. So I racked my brain for about seven minutes and came up with "Chop Talk." It sounds a lot like "Shop Talk," which is what geeks do a lot of, only this is "Chop," because a horror site is supposed to be jam-packed with groaning puns like that one. I hope to do this rambling several times a week, so please do let me know what subjects you'd like to see covered.

But today we start off with the very first rumblings from ... a new Godzilla movie. Our friends at Bloody-D have indicated that the big-spending* production company Legendary Films is interested in pulling ol' Gojira back across the pond. One can only assume that Roland Emmerich and Matthew Broderick won't be on any short lists for this project. That's all the information we have so far, but really ... don't even act surprised.

Since 1954, Godzilla has appeared in over twenty films, and there's certainly no reason to think that the last one (Godzilla: Final Wars) was actually the final one ... even though it says "final" right there in the title. I say another big-budget American Godzilla flick was pretty much inevitable, and at least it's happening while I'm still young enough to enjoy it. But who would we, the crazy geeky monster maniac movie fans, hire to direct such a film? The obvious choice would be a "tentpole" guy like Stephen Sommers or Rob Cohen, but I'm hoping they go the classy route (like WB did on Batman) and enlist someone like Paul Greengrass. And I'm just dreaming here, but "David Fincher's Godzilla" has a pretty cool ring to it.