Despite some stiff competition, when it comes to revered horror movies Jaws inevitably makes the top. When studios announce their goal of remaking a classic horror movie they’re usually greeted with exhausted, barely noticeable scorn. When Bryan Singer announced that he had absolutely no intention of remaking Jaws, fans went into a frenzy, based for no other reason than on the proximity of the words “Jaws” and “remake” to one another. Such is the power of Jaws.

With that in mind, it surely comes as no surprise that a group of fans have taken it upon themselves to create the ultimate Jaws documentary, entitled “Shark Is Still Working,” that clocks in at an amazing 3 hours and 14 minutes, over an hour longer than the movie itself.

The film features new interviews with Steven Spielberg, cast members Roy Scheider (who also provides the film’s narration), Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, cinematographer Bill Butler, production designer Joe Alves, composer John Williams, and nearly every surviving member of the “Jaws” production that you could wish for. The film also includes the last on-camera interview with “Jaws” novelist Peter Benchley, which should mean a lot to appreciative fans of Benchley’s creation.

The film also takes time out with people who weren’t involved in Jaws in a professional capacity, but have respect for the Great White as fans, including fillmmakers such as Bryan Singer, Robert Rodriquez, and Eli Roth. I’m not anything remotely close to an obsessive Jaws fan, but I would still love to delve into something this obsessive.

Do you think you have what it takes to whip out an exploitation masterpiece? If so, The Groovy Age of Horror wants to see what you’ve got. In conjunction with his recent foray into Naziploitation, Curt is asking his readers to write their own sleazy Nazi epics, in 100 words or less. And all manner of fiction is eligible.

Although it must be fictional, it needn’t necessarily be prose. If you can write an awesome Nazisploitation haiku, more power to you!

In the time it took you to read this you could have already won. So sharpen your pencils, crack out the thesaurus and get writing, schwinehund!

Not every superhero character hits the big time, and more than a few don’t even get the chance. The Golem is a perfect example of this. X-Y-Z Cosmonaut once again delves into the quarter bin and digs out a batch of comics that you probably didn’t even realize you needed to read. As a bonus, he lays out a decent publication history for the Thing The Walks Like A Man, all the way up to and including his appearance in Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos. Oh, Golem. We hardly knew you.

Rue Morgue’s The Abbatoir managed to sneak in a small conversation with Rob Zombie during the shooting of his Halloween remake. I’m not entirely sure, but this may be the only interview Zombie has given since he began production. During their talk Zombie discusses the virture of remakes, dream casting, and internet rumours.

“For a few minutes, when I first started, someone would always email me and go, “Is it true so-and-so is Laurie Strode?” “No, it’s not true, I don’t even know who that person is you’re mentioning.” But then it would get posted anyway and y’know, I’m done, I can’t address nonsense all day long, I’ve got actual work to do. Clearly, they would sit at home, think of something and just put it out there because there was no basis in anything ever. Life’s too short to address bullshit all day long.”

I do have to take issue with one comment Dave makes about The Devil’s Rejects. The main reason I enjoyed that film was because I felt it went nowhere near romanticizing The Fireflys. In fact, I thought the entire thing was the exact opposite, with the clan coming off as a group of worthless schlubs who couldn’t keep their shit together for more than a handful of days when left to their own devices.

The Academy Awards weren’t the only ones in Hollywood passing out statuettes this weekend. The 27th Annual Golden Raspberry Awards were handed out for rather dubious distinctions in modern cinema. Surprisingly, horror was almost completely shut out of every category it was eligible for. The big loser of the night was Basic Instinct 2, which beat out Bloodrayne, The Wicker Man remake and Lady In the Water for Worst Picture. In fact, of the nominated horror-related films only two received any recognition. Carmen Electra took home Worst Supporting Actress for Scary Movie 4, and Lady in the Water nabbed two wins for both Worst Director and Worst Supporting Actor for Lady in the Water. I’m just glad that, though Texas Chainsaw Massacre - The Beginning deserved some recognition, Little Man was the recipient of the award for Worst Remake or Rip-Off. Shameless.

The New York Comic-Con wasn’t the only shindig going down this month. George A. Romero appeared at Haunt X over a week ago, and SyFyPortal caught his Q + A.

Someone else asks, “Why do the dead come back?”

“Why does it matter?”

The whole thing is a pretty decent read, with Romero dishing on YouTube, Masters of Horror and Mr. Rogers. And as a bonus, check out this gossip page from The National Post. Only in Canada would George A. Romero merit a mention on the society page.

If you’re aware of an event I can place here, or are planning one yourself, please send me an email at steven@thehorrorblog.com.

Notable Theatrical Releases

March 2nd - Zodiac
March 9th - The Host (limited)
March 16th - Dead Silence
March 16th - Premonition
March 16th - Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (limited)
March 23rd - The Hill Have Eyes 2

Notable DVD Releases

Feb. 27th - 42nd Street Forever: XXX-Treme Special Edition
Feb. 27th - Jess Franco’s Count Dracula
Feb. 27th - One Missed Call Collection
Feb. 27th - Perversion Story
Feb. 27th - The Return
Feb. 27th - Shock
Feb. 27th - The Ultimate Hitchcock Collection (Sabotage, Jamaica Inn, The Lady Vanishes, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Farmer’s Wife and 15 more)
Feb. 27th - Chainsaw Sally
Feb. 27th - City of the Living Dead (reissue)
Feb. 27th - Don’t Torture A Duckling (reissue)
Feb. 27th - Inferno (reissue)
Feb. 27th - Deep Red (reissue)
Feb. 27th - Aftermath/Genesis (reissue)

Notable Comic Book Releases

Feb. 21st, 2007

Emily The Strange #4
Return of the Gremlins #1
Escape of the Living Dead Annual #1
Night of the Living Dead - Just A Girl
Black Gas 2 #2
EC Archives Two Fisted Tales Vol. 1
Gloomcookie #29
Haunted Mansion #6

Events

Feb. 23rd - March 3rd (Porto, Portugal) - Oporto International Film Festival.

Mar. 2nd (Montreal, Quebec) - Freaky Fridays lecture series. Shrunkenhead Fever, followed by a screening of The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake.
Mar. 3rd (everywhere)- International Read A Comic Book Naked Day.
Mar. 3rd (Burbank, CA) - Dark Delicacies hosts an afternoon with 30 Days of Night scribe Steve Niles and master illustrator Bernie Wrightson.
March 5th (New York, NY) - The Host and Falling To Pieces screenings at Pioneer Theater. Presented by Fangoria.
March 10th (Austin, Texas) - SXSW, The Alamo Drafthouse and Robert Rodriguez present a grindhouse double bill of Torso and Zombie.
March 15th (Toronto, Ontario) - Rue Morgue’s Cinemacabre presents Fido.
March 24th (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) - Exhumed hosts a very special night with Roy Frumkes and his classic grindhouse film Street Trash. In addition, Frumkes will be screening his documentary on George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, entitled Dream of the Dead, as well as other surprises.
Mar. 29th - April 1st (Toronto, Ontario) - The World Horror Convention descends upon the unsuspecting populace of Toronto, the first time the event has been held outside of the United States.
Mar. 30th - April 1st (Strongsville, Ohio) - Cinema Wasteland movie and memorbilia expo has some truly bizarre and wonderful guests lined up, including the ladies of Faster Pussycat Kill… Kill!

April 2nd (New York, NY) - Severence screening at the Pionner Theater. Presented by Fangoria.
April 6th (London, Ontario) - Vagrancy Films double bill, with Grindhouse followed by Cannibal Ferox.

After directing the cult films Hardware and Dust Devil, Richard Stanley seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth popping up occassionally with a few shorts and documentaries. Now it looks like he’s ready to make the leap back into feature-length horror, with a short called The Sea of Perdition that serves as a calling card for his re-entry into the game. The short concerns a cosmonaut lost on the surface of Mars who stumbles across a horrific discovery. Be warned, it’s NSFW and it’s also a little… odd. In an interview with Suicide Girls, Stanley reveals that Warren comics were an inspiration for the piece. Hopefully that will put you in the right mindset. Link courtesy of Fangoria.

I was doing housework last night, so I decided to have the Academy Awards playing in the background as I tidied. This was the first time in years that I had watched or listened to it. One thing that I had forgotten was how moved I usually get when some of the less-known recipients receive their awards. I’m a big softy.

In horror, Pan’s Labryinth picked up half of the awards it was nominated for, including Best Achievement in Make-up, Best Achievement in Art Direction and Best Achievement in Cinematography. The major category it was up for, Best Foreign Language Film of the Year, was won by The Lives of Others. I’ve heard great things about that movie, and hope to catch it sometime soon. The only other notably creepy nominee was Monster House, which slipped into the Best Animated Feature Film of the Year category and lost out to Happy Feet.

Ennio Morricone received his honorary Academy Aawrd, and I got chills when they played the theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Oooeeeoooeeeooo wa wa wa. Clint Eastwood presented the award, and as he rattled off a list of some of Morricone’s more memorable films I swear he slipped Red Sonja in there. Probably the best part of the show. I can just imagine Clint kicking back with some brewskies and relaxing with sword and sorcery b-movies. Morricone’s contributions to horror received no love in the montage, but they did mention The Thing and Exorcist II - The Heretic in the title scrawl. Congratulations, maestro!

Other small horror-related moments included mentions of Darren McGavin, Richard Fleischer and others in the montage of the recently deceased, as well as Forest Whitaker giving a shout-out to drive-ins during his acceptance speech for Best Actor. I bet Joe Bob Briggs was happy.

The infamous gossips at Page Six of the New York Post reveal the story behind Eli Roth’s new poster for Hostel II, which shows actress Bijou Phillips nude and beheaded. Uh oh.

Even better, the photo shoot for it was at the El Royale apartment complex in Hollywood with all the windows open. “The neighbors got an eyeful,” said our spy. Not that Phillips cares - she’s an exhibitionist.

Sex mixed with violence and a dash of dehumanization? Roth is mixing up a heady brew of controversy over this one. Maybe the MPAA-approved meat poster didn’t get the reaction he was hoping for. You can see the poster here, but be warned, it is definitely NSFW.

Eli Roth has confirmed at the New York Comic-Con that his next project after Hostel II will in fact be an adaptation of Stephen King’s Cell, the script for which is currently being written by 1408 screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. In other Roth news, Cinematical chatted to the director at the convention as he tried to juggle press conferences with meeting King to discuss the feature, and they certainly let him cut loose.

“…you know, the ‘Saw’ guys, we check in with each other. They call me and they’re like ‘Oh, we just filmed this fuckin’ scene and we got this guy and he’s got all these piercings and we’re going to rip ‘em out and he blows up.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, Fuck! I had cut to interior torture room, Whitney gets her belly button ring ripped out.’ And I just crossed it out of the script. ‘Goddamn it! That was the perfect torture!’. We actually check in with each other, none of us want to repeat the same deaths they’re doing. I notice there’s the same plastic sheeting in ‘Saw III’ then we had in ‘Hostel: Part II’ but it’s okay. I guess Jigsaw and the factory, they all go to the same Torture Depot. We check in and talk about every kill and about what got in through the MPAA. There’s a real good ‘Splat Pack Line of Communication’.”

While he’s at it Roth expounds on The Signal, Thanksgiving, Tarantino and Woody Allen.

It’s obvious that the New York Comic-Con would be a hotbed of nerd activity, but I still find it shocking over just how much of that nerd energy is devoted to horror. From Eli Roth to Wes Craven to Stephen King, it appears that the convention was bursting with news from the world of horror. One unlikely name to add to that list would be Kevin Smith. As some of you may remember, Smith has been threatening to film a horror movie for a few months now. At the convention he solidified his stance somewhat by stating that he intends to shoot two films back-to-back within a year.

“The comedy we need some winter weather for us, so I imagine sometime post-January we’ll be shooting that. But the horror movie we don’t … need winter for, so I think we’ll be doing that kind of like soon. And then we’ll probably see which one is done first and put it out there.”

Smith has always been hit or miss for me, but I will be interested to see how someone does in a genre they’ve expressed a distaste for.

I had no idea what a big deal the New York Comic-Con would be. One of the major announcements to come out of the convention is the confimation that J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, is currently working up the script for Max Brooks’ World War Z. IGN relates some of what he had to say about the project.

“It’s very political, very smart, very cagey, but there’s no main character. So you have to create who the interviewer is and give him some background and bring him from place to place to place to place. And they said, ‘Feel free to get as political as you want, as incisive as you want, to play with it. You could look at this as a Katrina kind of catastrophe.’ But I’m being very faithful to the book, letter by letter when I can, and I’m on about page 70 right now and I’m really happy with it.”

Straczynski also mentions the possibility that since the film is being produced under Brad Pitt’s company that the actor may appear in the movie. I’m not that familiar with Straczynski’s work, but as I understand it he takes a very hard line on realism within genre, something a project like this could use. Here’s hoping he’s the right choice.

I used to read like a locust eats. Instead of picking my way through different titles by different authors I would pick one author and just devour practically everything he or she wrote then move onto the next victim. One advantage of this approach is that I’m fairly well-rounded in what I’ve read, but unfortunately I made my way through so many of them so quickly that most stories barely made a dent. One that did was Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train, which has been hovering over a cinematic production for some time now. Rope of Silicon reveals some interesting casting choices.

Vinnie Jones is set to star opposite Bradley Cooper in Clive Barker’s The Midnight Meat Train based on Barker’s short story published in his popular “Books of Blood” series. Jones will portray Mahogany, a serial killer who rides the midnight subways, looking for victims to butcher before the train reaches the last stop. Leslie Bibb and Brooke Shields have also taken roles in the film scheduled to begin production next month in Los Angeles.

I really like Vinne Jones, and I think a palpable sense of physical menace is almost mandatory for the role of Mahogany, so I certainly hope he’s capable of contributing to the subtler terrors in the story. If, that is, any are retained.

I remember reading about Vacancy a few months back and being taken by the premise. A young couple stranded overnight in the middle of nowhere come to the realization that their motel is a front for the production of snuff films. Simple yet effective. The first trailer for the movie, starring Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale, can be found over at Yahoo.