The Halloween List for 2018

Happy October, everyone! This is my favorite month of the year. The leaves are turning, the air is fresh, and pop culture is overrun by spooky things. Today I'm hanging a ghost named Gus on my front door, and revealing this year's Halloween List.

The Halloween List is my annual blogathon reviewing scary movies. The rule is that every movie has to be a first-time viewing for me. I spend most of the year saving these films up. Each year is packed with interesting scary movies between Hollywood, domestic indies, and international film, but I'll also try to cover some things from Horror's past, like Kwaidan and the original Haunting. It all kicks off on Wednesday with some titles you probably recognize.

Wednesday, October 3: A Quiet Place & Emelie & Hereditary

Friday, October 5: Mandy & Slice & Summer of '84

Monday, October 8: The Meg & Pyewacket & Hold the Dark

Wednesday the 10th: Thelma & Annihilation & The Endless

Friday the 12th: A break from movies for two special miniseries: Ghoul & Erased

Monday the 15th: Unfriended: Dark Web & Office & Calibre

Wednesday the 17th: The Lobster & The Killing of the Sacred Deer

Friday the 19th: The Evil Eye & What Have You Done to Solange? & Tragedy Girls

Monday the 22nd: Upgrade & Suicide Club & Short Night of Glass Dolls

Tuesday the 23d: Blumhouse's brand new Halloween (2018)

Wednesday the 24th: Prom Night

Thursday the 25th: My Friend Dahmer & Suicide Club

Friday the 26th:  Kwaidan & The Haunting

Monday the 29th: Veronica & Veronica, the strange case of two movies from the same year with the same title and nothing in common.

October 31st, Halloween itself: The Mummy (1932), The Mummy (1959), The Mummy (1999), and The Mummy (2017). A special four-part feature on all four iterations of the classic Mummy franchise.

What looks good to you? What are you watching this October?

Click here for Day One, with A Quiet Place, Emelie, and Hereditary!

The Halloween List: Shin Godzilla is a Return to the Soul of Kaiju Film

It’s a two-second shot that defines the movie. The camera points up a cramped street as wreckage overflows into it, literal tons of boats and cottages rolling up the pavement like waves in a hellish river. A single young man runs from the camera and the tide of destruction so fast that his limbs are losing coordination. We don’t see him escape this street, and we never see him again. We can only hope he made it out of here. Shin Godzilla is an angry movie, angry that government has failed to save us, and insistent that it do better.

Shin Godzilla is the most political entry in the series since the original in 1954, which was an allegory for the horrors of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eventually kaiju film became more about giant monsters and robots fighting each other, and while fun, Shin Godzilla is from an older school. Godzilla has always been a hybrid of metaphors, and this movie shares influences from the 3/11 earthquake, Fukushima reactor incident, and recent tsunamis. It’s unnerving from its haunting score, to the camera so frequently switching to the point of view of his victims seconds before they die, to the pure nightmare fuel of Godzilla’s new appearance.

The Halloween List: Tremors and Bone Tomahawk

Today is another one of those weird coincidences. Both of my movies were set out in the west - Bone Tomahawk attempting to blend Westerns and Horror, while Tremors is wonderfully cheesy Horror simply set out in the lesser-populated parts of Nevada. These are two movies that definitely wouldn't talk to each other at a party.

Tremors (streaming on Amazon Prime)

From the distant past of 1990 comes Tremors! A favorite of mine that I hadn’t watched in over a decade, and it ages very well.

Tremors is a classic 90’s B-Movie, cheesy and earnest, with an absolutely wild monster design. The “Graboid” is a prehistoric monster that tunnels under the ground, with an elephantine body, a mouth guarded by carapace mandibles, and inside lurk multiple obedient snakes that serve as biting tongues to drag prey down inside the beast.

The Halloween List: Pontypool and Southbound

Welcome back to The Halloween List! I'm already overjoyed with this project, as it's giving me fascinating movies to watch during otherwise grueling exercise sessions. I'm gradually rebuilding my lung capacity on the elliptical, which is great to do, but flares up my neuromuscular syndrome. A good show or movie takes my mind off things, and today's features definitely did that. I'm still thinking over the strangeness of Pontypool.

"What's Pontypool?" you ask. Well...

Nuke ‘Em: Pacific Rim's Problem with Kaiju Heritage

There’s a lot I love about Pacific Rim, but its ending has bothered me since opening weekend. Spoilers, naturally, if you haven’t seen it. In the last year, I haven’t heard a single person mention the oddity of a film rooted in Kaiju lore that resolves its problems by nuking the enemy army.

To start: Pacific Rim owes its existence to Godzilla. It has copious allusions to the 1954 film, and that franchise popularized the Kaiju battles that Pacific Rim is built around. Godzilla was punching giant robots a full decade before Guillermo Del Toro started making movies. It’s easy to envision the Jaeger program building Mechagodzilla in the eventual crossover – and Del Toro publicly said he wanted a crossover even before Pacific Rim screened. The appropriation is deliberate and largely affectionate.

In the fun and camp of giant battles, it’s easy to forget that the 1954 Godzilla is rooted in the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that film, the beast is both an allegory for nuclear war, and is literally woken up by the usage of nuclear weapons. These themes ebb and flow in the ensuing franchise, but the beloved character was emblematic of a real national terror.

Pacific Rim solves its conflict by dropping a nuclear bomb into the rift. The characters are explicit that the Jaeger’s core is a nuclear reactor – that’s why it works when others can't, and it goes off like a nuclear bomb, not like a reactor in meltdown. The war isn’t resolved when the two Jaegers defeat the final Kaiju. It isn’t solved by Pentecost’s sacrifice. Humanity is only safe once we’ve A-bombed the bad guys.

I reveled in most of the movie. Kikuchi, Perlman, Day and Elba are delights, the soundtrack is pitch-perfect, and the overall film is greatly executed. Is the movie dumb? Yes, but it’s great at its dumbness. Even the bombing, with GLaDOS counting down and the heroes racing to safety, is exciting.

But even in IMAX, it was also troubling. We clearly hit a military installation, with no idea of how many civilians live on site. It’s like the lovably dumb movie suddenly committed another Hiroshima.

It’s one thing to not make the anti-nuclear message your core point, and it’s another to explicitly go against it. Was it intentional? I like to think not. No press I’ve read around the film suggests an enthusiasm for nuclear holocaust. And mistakes happen in art because when you’re juggling a dozen things in your mind, a thirteenth can always hit the floor. What hit the floor here is an incredibly sensitive item, from the genesis of kaiju films and one of the worst evils human beings have ever committed.

And the bombing isn’t indispensible to the plot. The rift could have been blown up rather than the people on the other side. In Newton Geiszler’s mind melds with Kaiju, a solution to closing all rifts could have been revealed. The Category 5 Kaiju could have been the lord and mother of them all, and its defeat the guarantee that no more could be created, or that the remainder would have no motive to continue attacking. Rewriting a few scenes, you could craft several different endings that wouldn’t require nuking the enemy.

It's still a surprisingly haunting moment.

Re-watching the 1954 Godzilla on Friday night brought this all to mind again. If it wasn’t the first, Kaiju film began there, and that film begins with a makeshift hospital laden with bodies, dead parents, irradiated children, and a narrator dazedly waking up in the wreckage. This is the fallout of a radioactive dinosaur, an impossibility that harkened to another impossibility – a mushroom of smoke changing the world.

That’s what any alien survivors of the end of Pacific Rim will wake up to. It feels spiritually wrong.

Godzilla Review: Spoiler-free, except for one

Let me spoil one moment of Godzilla to let you know what the movie is actually like.

About an hour in, Godzilla finally gets out of the water and roars for the camera. He faces down a winged kaiju at an airport, what's suggested to be an ancient predator of his kind. The military is down; the humans are helpless. Flames swell and it's clear only Godzilla can stop this.

The movie immediately cuts to the hero's living room, where his son watches a news channel showing Godzilla and the winged kaiju throwing each other around for a few seconds. The kid yells, "Mommy, Mommy, dinosaurs!"

The guy sitting behind me snorted. I laughed. The rest of the room was awkwardly quiet, especially as the movie then depicted the monsters going separate ways. We missed the fight, we missed what made them split up, and we immediately go back to humans talking.

I don't feel this is much of a spoiler because it's a trick the movie pulls at least five more times. It's as though they didn't have the budget to make a giant monster movie and so went to every length to avoid it, giving you glimpses of struggle from the corner of the screen, or multiple times, shrunken visions on TV sets. During its climactic battle, the movie cannot wait to cut away from the giants in favor of Navy men trying to get into the city, steal a nuclear warhead, and then escape the city.

Godzilla gets tackled? Cut to the humans.

Godzilla slams a kaiju through a skyscraper? Cut to the humans.

I was rooting for them to die so that we could stop checking in on them.

And we cut to the wrong humans. Prominently featured in trailers and commercials, Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe are shouldered out of the way for Aaron Taylor-Johnson, an ordnance expert and Cranston's character's son. He is not just a cipher, but an uncharismatic one who constantly requires excuses to keep around. He's at one set-piece because of his dad, then another on his way to the airport, and so-on. While the humans tend to suck in Godzilla movies, it's not often you get two great actors who are already in it and then shunted.

So the movie becomes more frustrating than anything. Its new kaiju are interesting, and up to something crazy, and pose different threats to Godzilla. One is winged and nimble, where the other is more of a hulk. There's an excitement to seeing a throwdown, and so the movie did the build-up well enough, if it took far too long to get there. It's no Jurassic Park in its build, but it's adequate. The problem becomes that it's nowhere near Jurassic Park's league when it finally lets us see the creatures. The T-Rex is supposed to show up and dominate the scene, not be interspersed with talking head sequences with mission command, reporters and nurses, all of whom exist to tell you the thing you're not seeing is scary and important. That's when the movie starts getting goofy.

For a movie that was billed as intense, it wobbles between drab and cheesy. At one point Watanabe gives a nuke-happy admiral his father's watch – it stopped the day he died in Hiroshima. Get it? But shortly thereafter, Godzilla saves a school bus. I'm still not sure if he did it on purpose; it was goofy enough that I laughed. The movie is occasionally dumb, but not campy like the Godzilla franchise you expect.

We get multiple shots of casualties lying around like human set design, and also multiple sight-gags. This movie absolutely loves people being unaware something enormous is right next to them, including the hero's wife not hearing an airplane crashing until it explodes behind her, and a specialist team checking a waste dump and missing that a 500-foot monster was eating there. It never reconciles its tone, right to the end, when it flashes a headline that literally dropped my jaw.

I could complain about its ill-fitted soundtrack and the number of Asians it enjoys killing, but why bother? After more than twenty films, and one failed American film to study, it managed to be the Godzilla movie that didn't know it was supposed to be about Godzilla. The great hope is that we get that rumored Pacific Rim/Godzilla crossover, and thus get this beast into Guillermo Del Toro's hands. Somebody else, please take a shot.

Waiting for God(zilla)

We're days away from the worldwide release of Godzilla. If you've read this blog for long then you know I cherish giant monsters. They're splendid metaphors for natural disasters and even more splendid excuses for giant fight scenes. I've been watching kaiju movies since elementary school and even today, at least once a year, will watch Cinemassacre's entire series retrospective on Godzilla. It's probably my favorite thing on Youtube for how unabashedly the narrator, who seemingly hates everything else, loves that series.

How do you hide this guy for an hour of film?

The hype cycle started early for this adaptation, and so we're getting different attempts for media attention now. Director Gareth Edwards explained to early journalist audiences that Godzilla wouldn't show up too much to build anticipation. He likened it to the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, who isn't on screen for that long.  

This worried me for a few reasons. Firstly, there are over twenty Godzilla movies. Even if you've missed all the shots of this Godzilla, we all pretty much know what he looks like. You can't surprise us the way Steven Spielberg did with Stan Winston's revolutionary puppets and CGI. 

And furthermore, as a teen I didn't run out of the cinema babbling about how cool it was that the movie hid the T-Rex for the first hour. The impression was that once the creature showed up, the movie had amazing payoffs for using it. You want your director to pitch how cool his ideas are for Godzilla when he throws off the cloak of shadow, not an emphasis on the cloak. As my friend Randall Nichols put it, Jurassic Park wasn't called "T-Rex." It was a feature of that movie, sure, but it wasn't what was promised on every poster, so they had more leeway. The second and third Jurassic Parks couldn't afford to be as coy.

Somehow, even with the questionable press and negative reviews showing up, I've calmed. Early reviews are trickling in, with critics going back and forth on there being too much of the humans (nooo), the humans being too uninteresting (a Godzilla fan has to swallow that), and the movie being too preoccupied with its titans (that's the God-damned point).

I've had the healthy realization that I don't need this movie to be great. Sure, I want it to be – I'm going to pay to see it. But I've watched the trailers so often that the collected runtime is greater than that of the average movie, and I've enjoyed them outside of a pure hype cycle. I've actually gotten a movie's worth of enjoyment already, which is a strange thing to realize, and if I were more Marxist, this consumerist positive-drip would scare me. Now in my thirties, I'm just grateful for entertainment where I can find it. This takes some of the edge off of fears of another American Godzilla screw-up.

Maybe they'll still enrage me by having the non-Watanabe, non-Cranston humans talk too much.

That lithe classic Godzilla.

By the way: for a laugh, read about Japanese fans fat-shaming our new thicker Godzilla.

By the way 2*: negative reviews and bad reviews are not the same thing.

Time Magazine has an example of a negative review here, taking a pick-axe to the film with some thought. 

Forbes has a bad review I won't bother linking; it has little to say and spends several paragraphs repeating itself. It even has some choice errors, like when some buggy algorithm links a stock quote to an actor's name: 

 

Which is what you get when you ask stock merchants for reviews of giant monster movies. The conflation of "negative" and "bad" reviews has occurred more as authors become more public about their consumption of reviews. It can be excruciating to read an angry review of your work, and I've been lucky that the few anthologies I've been in have had enthusiastic responses. That'll be fixed, though, when I start publishing these novels I'm working on. If I'm lucky enough to catch on, somebody will hate everything I like. That's the life of an author who makes it.

I'm already a little adjusted to having someone hate everything I like. I mean, I'm a Gigan fan.

 *or, By The Way Raids Again

The Nigh-Infinite Serpent - #fridayflash

It’s hard to believe we ever wanted to kill the Nigh-Infinite Serpent. I mean, I don’t know how you do that, and neither did the Ancients, since every bomb they invented never even sloughed its old skins. But I’ve got fat books full of stories of great knights and cyclopes who braved the mountains of the world trying to kill the Nigh-Infinite Serpent. Their bravery made for great tragedies, even if these days they only get adapted as comedies.

You have to be very brave to fight something that can and frequently does encircle the continent. Every Winter the nights get longer, not because we’re tilting from the sun, but because it’s shifting in the sky trying to warm up. You might as well try to arm wrestle an earthquake. Also, fighting it caused a lot of earthquakes, which is why the Moderns outlawed fighting it.

There was this one whole crusade that climbed up to the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s mouth, using a combination of apatosauruses and gryphons for travel, just to die bravely and go to Ten Heavens. This was in the second dynasty of the Moderns, who dispatched one thousand runners to chase them and hand of the writs of cease-and-desist. It was bound to be an epic, and an epic against the serpent would probably wreck the entire continent for us.

So the crusade had to turn around, because if they broke the law then their dead souls would never get into Ten Heavens. Except they were so high up that they had to march down the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s spine – there was no easier way. And marching around up there, the crusaders found there really was no more convenient way to get anywhere on the continent than by walking on the serpent. It was lying about so much of the world that some of them even visited islands cartographers had deemed lost and mythical by hopping off its tail.

You can tell which regions were the first to bribe the Nigh-Infinite Serpent into playing highway because they’re still rich as cake today. Ornithologists were conscribed to trick flocks of rocs and gryphons into straying past the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s mouth, giving it ample sustenance, and for every load it would contort its amazing body, a length becoming a new bridge or tunnel, sometimes running two or three highways on top of each other if the bribe was plentiful enough. When the Moderns factored in the reduction in wars with nature and no longer needing to construct or pave highways, they considered bribing the beast to be an exceptional savings.

Nowadays it actually gets angry if people aren’t traveling on its hide, which is why it attacks so many aircrafts. The best we can tell is it’s used to all the traffic as a sort of back massage. I work in automobile manufacturing, so I don’t mind the anti-aircraft strikes, but the delays on the highway are miserable whenever the beast sheds.

Hydra-Electric Plant

It’s a different way to power a frontier city. There’s zero pollution, minimal clean-up, and statistically fewer people die from the hydra-electric plant than from hydroelectric plants. Only one bulky guy every so often, whenever the west head phones us for feed.

It began with a two-headed hydra, the west head of which happily sold out and murdered the east head. It murdered its two children, and their four children, and so forth, until it had thousands of cranial neighbors. While it retained the intellect of a full half a hydra-brain, its cranial neighbors had to split their brain matter, over and over, until they were too dumb to understand why they lived with socks over their heads.

Now the thousands of hydra heads rub against the world’s most frictive carpet, built from the skin of a particularly tough lion, generating more static electricity than a lesser city would be able to deal with. We deal with it just fine, though. All the west head of the hydra asks is to eat a body builder every once in a while. We’re not sure what that’s about.

Bathroom Monologue: Rescuing Pacific Rim

Dear Stacker Pentecost,

I notice that you are devoting your life to fighting the giant enemies of civilization. As a mechanical being that has not only spent its entire existence in this service, but was actually built for it, I am deeply sympathetic to your cause and wish your organization the best of luck.

I actually wish you more than luck for, as someone built to help in this struggle, it's often been an issue that I was not built larger. Like my creators, you seem to have constructed robot armors at approximately the same height and mass as the monsters you face. Unlike my creators, though, you seem to have at least four times the resources, given that you have four machines, where there is only one of me. I know, also, that you have several outdated machines of similar dimensions, and all of these are also similar to the titanic crabs, pterodactyls and whatever the glowing squidy thing was.

Have you ever considered taking all the material for several machines and making one that was much bigger than the giant monsters you face? Given that your plan of attack is always fisticuffs (my favorite professional approach, as well), punching the things to death would be considerably easier if they were much smaller than you. Many have been the days on which I wished I hadn't been built to the specifications, down to the meter, of the monster I had to pursue. If only I was as much bigger than him as he was than my creators, then the fight would have been over very quickly, perhaps leaving you time to get that nice Asian lady some psychotherapy.

Best,

Mechagodzilla

Bathroom Monologue: The Godzilla Moment at Niagara Falls

Earlier this year I visited Niagara Falls for the first time. My phone was busted and ate the photos I took, but I kept a monologue from my visit to the base of the falls. I'm still not sure why I like exposing these thoughts. It'd probably be better if I didn't.

This is what I came for. From above it looked like any waterfall, just bigger, more gallons-of-water per square-national-treasure. Up there it seemed the factual mass existed, but not the spiritual.

Below, the grandeur sets in. It sets in so deep that I realize “grandeur” is Shakespearian for “bigness.” From below, Niagara Falls possesses considerable bigness.

Peering up through its perpetual mist, at how its spill dwarfs all neighboring staircases and hills, and yet all remains in motion. A fall from its lip possessed mortality. This, I thought, was how those peasants must have felt when Godzilla first loomed over the mountain. Yes, the spirit of kaiju filled my heart at Niagara.

Perhaps my experience was even better than Godzilla’s witnesses.

After all, I was real.

I also wasn’t eaten.

Bathroom Monologue: Year of the Inkanyamba

Inkanyamba linocut by Kate Rowland

Foreword: T.S. Bazelli introduced me to this beast. The Inkanyamba is a South African folk monster, reported to be a giant eel, possibly with the head of a horse or dog. Its anger is said to conjure storms. It’s only ever seen at Hosick Falls in the summer – which led me to ask what it does for the rest of the year.

Also, anyone who knows how the equator works will recognize that these dates are all wrong. I've "translated" them to reflect how the northern audience experiences the seasons, though this is about the exact opposite of the South Africa seasons.
This story is dedicated to T.S., and to homesick giant eels everywhere.

September 4th:

Went to sea today. Will miss Howick Falls, but it's good to stretch again. Inland waters grow cramped. And while the Falls are pleasant, I never have a better meal in the year than snagging flying great whites off the coast.

September 12th:

A megalodon invited me to a party on one of the four corners of the world. It's that part of the map where all the dragons and sea serpents live. Those sea serpents are total attention whores; it makes no sense that they're still cryptids. Two of them were pretending to be lesbians just to catch the Kraken's attention. The seven seas' social circles can be depressing.

October 5th:

Wearied at last of that undersea kegger, tripping the currents north to Atlantis. Only place you can hear yourself think, because no other monsters live in those ruins. They call it "quaint" and "played" and "touristy." The tides of popularity recognize not real culture.

October 11th:

I wish I could take in a play at Atlantis's amphitheater. No mermaids left to perform. Damned Japanese poachers are industrious. Looking forward to visiting their home surf.

October 26th:

Got drunk and paddled around Atlantis like it was Venice. Italian drinking songs carry well underwater.

October 30th:

Got drunker than I anticipated and wound up in the real Venice. Scared the shit out of some janitors. No one will believe them, but there's an off-chance their story will be optioned as a SyFy Original Movie of the Week. For the record, I didn't eat any of them.

November 20th:

Just barely made it to Greenland on time. Made a nocturnal appearance on a whale watch; the guide had no idea. I think she called me a beluga, so I conjured a freak squall and soaked her. Almost time for sleep.

November 23rd:

Icing up well. Taking longer than it used to. Am I getting fatter, or is this global warming?

November 25th:

Can feel the chill in my blood now. Will hibernate a long time. Wonder how many skeptics will debunk my presence at Howick Falls while I'm dreaming under a glacier.

March 1st:

What day is it?

March 15th:

It's too damned early.

April 9th:

You know that point at which you've fallen back asleep as many times as you can, and you toss and turn in your bed, and hog the covers, and keep closing your eyes telling yourself you just want five more minutes, when your pulse is clearly telling you it's time to get up? Well I don't know anything about that because I'm not human.

April 10th:

I ate a human today. He'd already drowned, but I needed to reacquire the taste.

April 28th:

Thought about taking the African/Indian route. Never liked Marco Polo. Going north of Russia instead. Making good time for Asia.

May 8th:

This day feels important. Can't tell why. Been swimming too long.

May 11th:

I think I passed Japan a few days ago. I get a little absentminded when I travel south. Caught the currents, though, and found a whaler route. Let one ship spot me, guy lost his shit. Have not interfered yet. They don’t know what’s coming. It’s spring time for Inkanyamba!

May 12th:

The first catch of the season is always the best. Whaling ship was pursuing the sperm whale for two hours. Their harpoons kept failing to take, and she kept diving. On her third dive, I entangled her and she never came up. Those humans were so confused. Radar kept showing she was down there - they didn't realize that blip was actually me. I love sperm whale almost as much as I love confused poachers.

May 20th:

Think a conservationist photographed me. Asshole was protesting the whalers. Had to eat his whole boat, now I have a steel rudder lodged in my colon. Think I'm subconsciously making it hail out of impotence. Thanks, ecology

June 13th:

It's not that I'm tiring of sperm whale; it's that they're almost extinct. It's not that I'm tiring of confused whalers; it's that they all taste like beer and secondhand coats. Every year I get this way. What am I doing with my life? This isn't existentialism, of course. It's...

June 14th:

It's homesickness. I miss its waters, pregnant with heat specific to South Africa. All humans are skeptical, but home-humans are my skeptics. All locales have pollution and wildlife, but if I'm going to tread water, I want it to be waters I've helped pollute. Even giant eels get homesick near summer.

June 26th:

Passed the Indian Ocean in almost record time. Am in awesome shape; passed some sea serpents who absolutely whistled as I went past. Sounds like bawdy whale songs. Will be home and terrifying drunk locals in no time.

The Recyclable Villain

Mechagodzilla

the recyclable villain

Breathes rays, not exhaust

Bathroom Monologue: Theseus the Cheater

“Tell me a good one, Grandpa!”

“I’ve got a good one. So King Minos, fearing Theseus would take his throne, sent him into the Labyrinth. This was a giant underground maze, dark and so convoluted that no one had ever gotten out. Therein dwelled the Minotaur, the king’s deformed son, who was half-man and half-bull. It was giant and famous for devouring anyone who was trapped in the Labyrinth. No one was allowed to leave without slaying the monster.”

“Wow.”

“Theseus promised to slay the monster and return alive. Minos’s daughter, Ariadne, fell in love with his bravery and gave him a spool of thread so that he could follow it back after he fought the Minotaur.”

“That’s a little less awesome, but still, does he fight him?”

“He came prepared. Though all were to face the Minotaur unarmed, Theseus smuggled a sword in under his tunic.”

“That wasn’t cheating?”

“It was a very large monster.”

“Okay.”

“Theseus crept around the dark the hours, leaving his trail of thread behind. Eventually he heard the clopping of the Minotaur’s hooves. They shook the maze around him.”

“That must have been scary!”

“He stalked the monster for a time, not attacking it right away. Instead he allowed it to tire and go to sleep.”

“Go to sleep? It sleeps?”

“Not for much longer. Once the Minotaur began to snore, Theseus slit its throat with his sword and took off the head as proof that he had won the battle.”

“Won the what? He didn’t even fight it! He cheated it with an illegal weapon when it was bed time!”

“It was a very large monster.”

“Then don’t fight it!”

“He had to fight it. The princess was counting on him. So he took his spool—”

“He didn’t even find his way back out! He cheated again! Did Minos lock the door and punish him for breaking the rules?”

“No, Theseus returned triumphant and escaped with Ariadne, making back off to sea. He was heralded as one of the great men of the ancient world.”

“All for a girl?”

“Actually, next he abandoned her on an island.”

“He ditches the girl? What the hell, Grandpa?”

“Well Ariadne was a witch.”

“Yeah? A dumb witch that falls in love with cheaters.”

“She cast a spell on his ship.”

“What spell?”

“Well Theseus’s father had a deal with him. If he was successful with Minos, he should sail back with a white sail. But Ariadne used her magic to turn it black. So Theseus’s father jumped into the sea and killed himself in grief.”

“That’s kind of cool. Did she ever get revenge on Theseus, though? He was the jerk.”

“No, but I think we’re going to talk about Medea tomorrow night.”

Bathroom Monologue: Reasons why I should write the new Legendary Pictures Godzilla reboot.

Dear Legendary Pictures,

I am aware you are in the planning stages for a new American Godzilla franchise. As a writer and longstanding fan of giant monsters, I am concerned for the film. Nobody needs another TriStar Godzilla. I am a versatile steward, capable of writing a screenplay featuring series favorites like King Ghidorah, lesser Toho rogues like Gorosaurus, or recognizable creatures in the public domain, like one of those giant Buddha statues in China that is animated by science gone wrong. Yet I am not offering myself merely as a writer, but in every facet of my being to ensure a quality film.

You may wonder what services a professional writer can offer besides a dynamite screenplay featuring a minimum of five giant monster battles. Well for one thing, hiring me will make storyboards obsolete. I will slouch, pull my elbows to my chest and enact any Godzilla sequence for directors, actors and/or catering staff whenever necessary. This way you will know exactly how stage directions are supposed to go. I make a very believable radioactive breath sound, too.

Scientists suggest that between seven or eight hours of sleep are optimal for the human body. Thanks to a lumpy mattress I haven’t slept a full night in months, and believe these scientists to be sissies. I will gladly sleep only three hours a night, spending the remainder of the dark hours showing your actors how to portray realistic fear of titanic threats, patching up and airbrushing dinosaur costumes, and setting up tiny Lego towns.

Do not mistake these services as a smokescreen for lazy writing. Not only will I produce a screenplay immediately upon request, but I’ll stay on set to re-write any lines you dislike, and to play sounding board if the actors try to adlib. I will set up a tent near the fire escape, my pen living within the range of your beck and call. My screenwriting will only cease once the film is distributed to theatres, at which point I will happily deploy to any theatres where you would like audiences to have their reactions scripted.

I cannot stress my devotion to the project enough. If at any time you feel the extras are slacking and someone needs to literally be crushed to death to appropriately express Godzilla’s magnitude, I will sacrifice myself. I can’t think of a better way to die than beneath a mammoth foot.

And I will do all of this for one dollar. Being a professional writer I do not work for free. But realistically, even if you throw it away and keep two gag jokes, it’ll have been a worthwhile investment in your eight-digit-budgeted film. Not that you’d want to throw this screenplay away – it’s going to be awesome, especially when Godzilla and Jesus team up to take down the Idolatrous Ro-Beast, Mecca-Jesus. I am fully knowledgeable about series history, having seen every Godzilla film multiple times. Even Godzilla’s Revenge, one of the worst films to ever be screened on multiple continents, and I’ve seen that sucker eight times. Thanks, WPIX New York.

Sincerely,
John Wiswell

Godzilla Haiku at... Godzilla Haiku?

This Sunday's funny is a little different. My haiku, "It Feels," has been accepted and published over at Godzilla Haiku. They've spliced it with an image of the big guy.

You can see the entry by clicking here.

Bathroom Monologue: It Feels (A Godzilla Haiku)

Army sees my breath,
teeth, scales, spines. All that I am.
Except my feelings.

Bathroom Monologue: Letter from Gorosaurus

Dear Toho,

My name is Gorosaurus. I'm a giant dinosaur that once did battle with King Kong. I am most famous for destroying the Arc de Triumph in France in Destroy All Monsters. It was the highlight of my career, but also the epitome of it: Japanese and American audiences watched me trashing that French landmark simultaneously wondered who I was and what that building was.

I appreciate all the work you’ve thrown me over the years. Being that my only talent is a jumpkick, one would think I’d be done for after one movie, especially considering how badly Kong beat me up.

That’s why I’m writing. I can’t get anymore famous than I am write now with my current skill set. As it is, I’m a budget Godzilla. I look more like a t-rex than he does, leaving me more generic. I don’t have the neat spines on my back, I’m not as tall, and I can’t breathe fire. Over time I’ve noticed you granting Godzilla additional powers, like turning him into a giant magnet to mess with Mechagodzilla, or making him be able to heal from any wound with “Regenerator G.” These are insulting to science. Toho, please let me insult science too.

I don’t have to fly, though I’d like that. How about telekinesis? Maybe it’s the secret reason I can jumpkick despite having such fat legs. I haven’t seen a giant monster with telekinesis lately, and certainly a t-rex that can move things with his mind is interesting. Imagine Thai citizens fleeing in terror down the streets of Chiang Mai, only to suddenly float off the ground and fly into my mouth. You could base a whole movie around that kind of thing.

Also, I’d like to attack Thailand. Korea has a giant monster now with The Host, but us Japanese beasts are pretty isolated to islands and frozen wildernesses. Thailand could use the attention. I’m sure they’d sacrifice a few buildings to a giant monster battle in return for tourism.

Sincerely,
Gorosaurus

Bathroom Monologue: Construction

This story has been taken down for submission to zines. Here's hoping you'll see it published somewhere soon!

Bathroom Monologue: Dear Diary

Why did God let me happen? Man perfected robot dinosaurs when he invented Grimlock, so why did they make me? All I ever do is fight the creature I was designed after. Why? It’s not that compelling a spectacle. I can only have a new cannon shoot out of so many appendages before they all blend together and I feel like a giant derringer with a tail. They might as well have made me look like a gun instead of an anatomically retarded tyrannosaurus.

I’m what Mary Shelley would have created if she’d been afraid of lizards and toasters instead of ghosts. Crazy Romance-era bitch. I can’t get a purpose in this life. Every psychoanalyst sends me to an electrician, and every electrician runs in terror. I tried finding Jesus, but short-circuited at the baptism and leveled the county. All I want is peace and all I get is rust. Time to face it. I’m obsolete technology. And what do you do with ten million tons of obsolete space titanium?

But things are looking up. I’ve got an audition for the new Gundam series on Friday, and the U.S. military is building a robot version of whatever the Hell that thing in Cloverfield is, and he might need an acting coach.

Who am I kidding? If Godzilla doesn’t come out of retirement I might as well recycle myself.

Sincerely,
The Cosmic Monster