monsters » Absurd Intellectual

Low-budget sci-fi turns into a character piece

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 16 September 2010 Modern Life

Sep 162010

I’m looking forward to the November premiere of Monsters, a sci-fi film that looks like it will be about the characters more than it is about the special effects.

That’s the way the director talks about it, though, in this piece from Wired:

“We couldn’t make the big-budget kind of film Hollywood can, so I figured, ‘Let’s make the kind that Hollywood can’t because they haven’t got the balls to do it,’” he says. “They wouldn’t have the balls to invest this much CGI into something and make it a character piece, whereas if you’ve got loads of things exploding and big fight scenes and monsters everywhere, you’ve got a guaranteed return. We felt kind of obliged to do something different.”

With a five-guys-in-a-van ethos, the picked up weird and unusual shots where they could, flipping through the script to see what scene might fit in with the backdrop they had found.

Makes me want to make a movie! But I guess I will have settle for watching this one.

Oh, another plus — it’s R-rated. Hooray for a movie that doesn’t feel like it has to whitewash things.

Just in time for Halloween — what’s the most dangerous monster?

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 29 October 2009 Everything Else

Oct 292009

I’m so glad that I stumbled across a list of the 13 most dangerous monsters ever. I won’t give it away, but the list presents from least dangerous to most dangerous, and Cthulhu, above, is only the second-most-dangerous.

Don’t miss the comments, in which the list’s author entertains a few additions to the list and muses about where he would put them (Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, for example). I particularly enjoyed the fact that he spends some time actually thinking and reasoning about the positioning on the list, and didn’t just slap it together. His words on vampires:

Now, here’s the thing about regular vampires: they’re fucking lame. They sneak around in the dark and drain blood from people. They talk a big game, sure, and everyone thinks they’re sexy. But is sexy going to protect you from the Wolf-Man? No. The Wolf-Man is going to tear your god-damn head off. Ordinary vampires are equally vulnerable to sorcerous power, which is why the Mummy, whose physical capabilities are on par with a vampire’s, anyway, would still kick the crap out of a vampire.

Do you understand this, Twilight fans? Regular vampires are shit. They can only beat Zombies, Witches, assorted Poltergeists, and Mr. Hyde. That is BARELY BETTER THAN A REGULAR PERSON. Shut the fuck up about vampires.

I have nothing to add.