So I started responding to a post over at Sore Eyes regarding George Clooney as the Last Movie Star and then I realized it would be rude to leave a small essay as a comment, so here goes. Go read that first.

I agree that Mr. Smith has been in some eminently forgettable films. I AM LEGEND and I ROBOT spring to mind. And I think that among his action flicks, ID4 will probably be remembered as fondly as any other Irwin Allen film or perhaps as the 90s version of something like DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. But, in Smith's defense, while he knows that the cash comes from his stint as Action Guy, he does still strive for things like ALI and PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS. He did work for Redford in BAGGER VANCE and although Schepisi might have a warm spot in only my heart for ROXANNE, Smith was in his version of SIX DEGREES.

But Clooney's box office has come from mainly the OCEAN's series (which was driven by star power) and *cough* BATMAN. So yeah, my question would be what kind of deal does Clooney have so that he can be in a string of films that don't have huge box office gains and yet still basically pick and choose whatever he wants. Maybe he makes that much money off of ER reruns? I have no idea. I wanted to say it's because the small films he's in still turn a profit because they *are* small, and maybe that's the case. SOLARIS underperformed given its budget. But SYRIANA almost doubled its production budget in worldwide box office, THREE KINGS made a profit worldwide, PEACEMAKER doubled its budget worldwide, and the rest…well, Box Office Mojo doesn't have budgets listed for them and I'm too lazy to go hunt them up right now. And I'm sure Clooney is who sold the tickets to those.

Clooney does have star power. And I think he's an excellent actor. Even though I'm one of the five people on Earth who didn't enjoy O BROTHER, it's still the film in which (among his that I've seen anyway) he does the most acting and isn't playing his usual Clooney on-screen persona.

I'm not quite sure if I even made a point in here. And I don't feel like formatting this properly. Just had to put this somewhere. And oh, that's what this is for, isn't it?

16. The Climax (1944). Boris Karloff again as a doctor who wants to keep a woman's voice for his own. Hmm. That sentence didn't come out just right. Anyway, it's suprisingly good if formulaic.

17. The Cat O'Nine Tails (1971). Karl Malden as a blind crossword puzzle creator in an Argento-scripted giallo flick? Who knew? And it wasn't terrible either. I actually would have liked to have seen that character in something else.

18. "Treehouse of Horror V," The Simpsons (1994). My favorite Simpsons Halloween episode, because not only do you get the Shinning but the Time Toaster. Maggie's proclamation, in James Earl Jones' voice, "This is indeed a disturbing universe," is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

19. The Thing (1982). A classic sci-fi horror flick that we watch every year because it's just brilliant. We watch it all the time and we just caught, this year, some new stuff in seeing it.

20. Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995). Billy Zane in this is hilarious. "FUCK this cowboy SHIT! You human aren't worth the skin you're printed on!" For a goofy EC-based flick, it seems like a kindler, gentler version of Demons more than an actual Tales From the Crypt episode. But it works.

21. "The Galaxy Being," The Outer Limits (1963). Starring Cliff Robertson, this first episode from the series which involves an electromagnetic alien showing up and inadvertantly causing havoc, lacks any subtlety whatsoever. It positively bellows from the rooftops "TOLERANCE, YOU FUCKERS!" Which is a nice sentiment, but doesn't make for good television.

22. Pulse (2006). This was unmitigated crap. The worst flick I saw this year. I will have to post a full review. It begs to be beaten with a stick.

23. The Wolf Man (1941). Again, as I mentioned previously, I love Lon Chaney Jr. And I get Claude Rains. Rains sells "beating a werewolf to death with a cane" better than anyone else has or ever could.

24. Tower of London (1939). Not really horror, except that we have Boris Karloff as Mord. And Cosette considered the costume design a comedy. But how could I resist Karloff, Rathbone and Vincent Price in a single film?

25. Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (1978). While Pulse is definitely the worst film I watched this year, Zoltan made the least amount of sense.

26. House on Haunted Hill (1959). This is usually my token William Castle film just because it's so wonderfully goofy.

27. Dance of Death (1968). More Karloff, later in his career. And this ending makes little in the way of sense. The credits, when they start rolling, come as a complete surprise, especially since there's still footage playing under them. Very odd.

28. Dawn of the Dead (1978) and 29. Day of the Dead (1985). Obligatory stops on my film festival schedule.

30. Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987).

31. Devil Bat's Daughter (1946). I couldn't believe someone made a sequel to this. And it completely retconned the events of the first film anyway, because they probably realized no one would care. Hilarious.

32. Frankenstein (1931).

33. Shaun of the Dead (2004). Ending our festival with the horror comedy classic.

11. Graveyard Shift (1996). Okay, we see the thing's tail caught in the machine. We saw it the tenth or eleventh time you showed us. Would you quit fucking showing us so we can get on with the end of this shitty movie? Thank you!

12. King of the Zombies (1941). I pretty much already wrote about this here , but it was terribly amusing nonetheless. I need to go find more stuff with Moreland in it. He's freaking hilarious.

13. "The Ventriloquist's Dummy," Tales From the Crypt (1990). I just wanted to see Don Rickles and Bobcat Goldthwait in an EC Comics adaptation together. How can you go wrong with that? Answer: you cannot.

14. Dorm of the Dead (2007). Full review is coming on Needcoffee. Stand by.

15. The Mummy (1932). Have to watch this every year because of Karloff. He makes for a great Imhotep.

6. Jess Franco's Succubus, 1968.

They billed this as erotic horror. Trouble is, it's neither erotic nor horrifying. Perhaps the utter waste of time would be horrifying to some. And unless you find incomprehensible cinema stimulating, you won't find this erotic in the least. One bit with mannequins is creepy, but in a film that seems to be filled with random crap, it's one dull spark amongst the dung.

7. Black Christmas, 1974.

Supposedly the first slasher flick, it's amazing that there was ever a second. This is garbage. You do have a cast with Margot Kidder, Andrew Martin, John Saxon, Olivia Hussey and Keir Dullea (looking somehow wrong in his long hair), but they have precious little to do. When there are times when they emote, it's mostly to fill time because the WTF-ness can't possibly fill the entire running time. I'm not going to call this a spoiler, but I am going to give you an example of how goddamn stupid the film is. Girl dies in a sorority house. Her body's in the attic. Propped up in a chair. Right in front of a window. That's clearly visible from the street. So when she goes "missing," okay, fine, you would assume that civilians might not think to check the house. But even when the cops get involved, nobody decides to actually check the sorority house for the girl. Ever. During the whole film. Sweet Jebus, this is a dumb damn flick.

8. The Frighteners, 1996.

A truly goofball horror film from Peter Jackson and WETA, the introduction to the director's cut is interesting in that it explains how Lord of the Rings, in a sense, was just a way to use computers they had already bought for something besides Frighteners. The effects hold up surprisingly well, even over ten years later.

9. "Fog Closing In," Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 1956.

Probably the most interesting bit about this is that Hitch delivers a epilogue where he explains how the wicked person got their just desserts in the end. I think this is back when they had to do that shit lest somebody think that crime actually paid or something.

10. April Fool's Day, 1986.

Call me crazy, but I just have a soft spot in my heart for this flick. I appreciate how it took the slasher genre and gave it a nice light hearted boot to the buttocks.

1. "Where is Everybody?", The Twilight Zone, 1959.

Ah, the classic Twilight Zone. The Definitive Collection was a birthday gift to myself. We needed to start somewhere, so the first episode seemed like a good place. Although for some reason, I had always thought "Nothing in the Dark" with Robert Redford was the first episode. I don't know where I got that from. But that was actually from the third season. And Ken thought "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" was it, but that wasn't until Season 5. So we're all mixed up. They still hold up, though. The bit with the mirror is fantastic.

2. Dracula, 1931.

A perennial for the Film Fest, I still haven't figured out what's up with the opossum and the armadillos, although they do explain them (if I remember correctly) in the commentary for the most excellent Legacy Collection edition.

3. The Frozen Ghost, 1945

I just love Lon Chaney, Jr. I really do. He just seems like a big (well, no, he is big), likeable guy. The kind you'd want to buy a cup of coffee. It's funny–I thought just now that he would make the perfect Lennie–and he apparently was the perfect Lennie in 1939. I need to go find a copy of that. Anyway, these Inner Sanctum movies are just a great time. And as for Martin Kosleck, is it just me, or was he one of the prototypes for Campbell Scott in The Impostors? Also, how do we know Chaney is cool?

*SPOILER – swipe to see* Because not only does he save the day, but he gets his old girlfriend back and picks up another young lady for his troubles. As the three of them happily march out of the museum at the end, you can't tell me that's not what's up there. Lucky bastard.

What's going to be very funny is that in a few months when I change the theme of the site, the background probably won't be black, and so that will stick out like a sore thumb. Oh well.

4. "The Ripper," Kolchak: The Night Stalker, 1974.

Although he's probably best known to folks of my generation as the Old Man in A Christmas Story, McGavin as Kolchak just rocks. The character is the perfect cynical goofball. He goes after the Ripper in all seriousness, trying to dispatch the bastard–and you buy it. But he also gets arrested in a humorous situation trying to hide and setup watch for the Ripper–and you buy that too. In fact, he makes you believe that you could have somebody like the Ripper running around and getting perforated and still ticking–and that nobody could see it but for him. What a great show, and Moonstone's continuing adventures of Kolchak are actually pretty dead on.

5. The Creature From the Black Lagoon, 1954.

The thing that strikes me now, rewatching this, is how much of this film lacks dialogue. Anytime you're underwater, they're in the old school aqualung gear, so dialogue can't happen. Such a heavy reliance on the film score and the fact that the Creature still looking pretty good (especially when submerged). This is a Legacy Collection edition as well, and I haven't watched the bonus bits to see if they take you through the suit itself (which is pretty impressive for the time, I would think), but I need to do that.

Next…Succubus from 1968.

The Atlasphere points out that the Atlas Shrugged movie is listed as in turnaround on IMDB Pro.

Honestly, I can't think of something better to happen to that project.

When you read an article with the screenwriter and it's obvious the guy either did not, in fact, read the book like he said or did not, in fact, understand it, it's pretty clear that it all should simply stop.

And when I say "did not understand it," I don't mean that the philosophy of the book escaped him. I mean that he, trying to avoid spoilers although the speech is pretty famous in its own right, stated that the speech that happens towards the end of the book has the exact opposite effect on "The Bad Guys" than it actually does. That's right: he failed to grasp the actual ending of the book as it was flat out written, screw all the philosophy.

Which means the actual end of the book, which seems more Hollywoody than anything else before it, would get completely passed up.

There is no way you can make Atlas Shrugged, the way it should be made, into a single film. It needs to be a Deadwood-esque maxi-series with a definite end. Yes, there's a DreamCast in the works for that.

I have a problem with most horror stories, movies, novels, what have you. I'm wondering if I'm the only one. The problem is this: most movies that you might think of, at first glance, as a "horror"movie, simply aren't of that genre. Most are thrillers, or, if you're lucky, thrillers with horror elements.

Let me tell you where I'm coming from with this. When I first saw 28 Days Later, I found myself feeling horror for the first time in the cinema in a long while. Specifically, I'm thinking of the brief shot of the community message board that this structure had turned into, where people were leaving things like "Have you seen my daughter?" and "I'm infected, I'm so sorry…" and so forth. The entire thing was covered with these messages, and you only got the briefest of shots, but it was enough to let you know that the situation was truly horrific. That was a testament to the lives, in that film, that had been devastated by the outbreak. Horrifying.

When dude goes to seek out his parents and what he finds…that's horror.

That, and other moments within that film, reminded me what it was to get horrified at a horror movie. I realized that what I'd been mistaking for true horror was simply terror. Horror movies should horrify, thrillers thrill and terrify. There's a subtle difference.

Let's get down to brass tacks for a minute. I looked up "horrify" and got "To cause feelings of horror." Great, thanks. But for horror, I got this:

• An intense, painful feeling of repugnance and fear.
• Intense dislike; abhorrence.

Painful repugnance. Abhorrence. That works. Now, if I watch a Friday the 13th flick, I really don't feel that. Why? Because most slasher flicks are simply thrillers. There's seldom anything horrific–at least in a movie–about people being stalked and killed one at a time. But compare the feelings you get from watching a slasher flick to the feeling of watching John Hurt "hatch" in the middle of Alien. I can't imagine anybody who didn't twist and turn when they watched that scene unfold.

You can even make the comparison inside a movie–let's take the recent House of Wax remake as an example. The movie was better than it had any right to be, frankly. And it had a lunatic final sequence which deserved a better film to be stitched on. But there's three things here.

First, I don't count what are essentially torture sequences as horror. The heroine having to rip her lips open after they've been super glued together or losing part of a finger–to me, that's just the gross-out. Anybody can go for that. Sure, if you want to be technical, that's horrific. But there's nothing artful about that.

But second, there are some truly horrific moments in the film. When dude smacks at the wax "dummy" of his friend and knocks part of the skin away, only to reveal the jaw underneath–when you think about being paralyzed, encased in wax, and you're still alive–that's messed up. That's horror, folks.

However, most of the rest of the film is just "being chased by/avoiding the bad guys," which is just straight-up thriller stuff. The new spin on the serial killer is that they're brothers and one's disfigured. Whoopee.

And that's the problem: a cheap "boo" has taken the place of real horror. A cat jumping out at the right moment is not horror, nor is the "turn around and be shocked by somebody standing there" schtick.

We need more moments of horror in fiction and film. And it's hard to do. I was thinking Something Else #51 would be horrific in nature, though it wound up simply sad. Something Else #50 is probably the closest thing to what I'm talking about I was able to pull off–the idea that such a terrible ritual could be compared to the Christian ideal of communion I would think would be fairly horrific to any self-aware Christian.

I honestly haven't written too many pure horror stories. Dark fantasy is where most of them fall, which I think is a convenient bucket for anything that simply doesn't want to be taken that far. For that matter, I honestly don't go into writing aiming for a genre of any sort…the things just sort of happen like they want to.

Anybody else feel like this? Or should the shmoe shut up and sit down?