Dawn of the Dead Remake used a nifty mechanical pully system attached to scalp prostheses to achieve massive, gory headshots without relying on squibs or CGI.

Also in the movie's favor: Carpenter's screenplay and cast make Stephen King's dialogue sound like actual human speech. It's a rare accomplishment.

The last line of Christine, though, might be the best in King's whole bibliography precisely because it undercuts the idea that Christine is gone forever.

Inspired by the song "Cars That Go Boom," I assume?

It reads very fast, and honestly the plot is simple enough that if you kind of skim the chapters that don't immediately grab your interest you should still be able to catch up.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning thinking "What melody could the song 'Baby Can You Dig Your Man' have possibly had? The lyrics have basically no rhythm." I'm still not sure, and I'd prefer if King didn't strum out his own version for me.

There's also a problem where not much happens in the 80s narrative - the characters get phone calls, travel to Derry, meet for lunch, walk around town, meet at the library, go back to the hotel, and then head into the sewer for the final showdown. (There's plenty of incident in between, but not much plot.) Without…

The 1980s hate-crime murder is thematically pretty important, so hopefully they'll keep it (with adjustments for taste). One of the most striking themes in the novel is the sense of anti-nostalgia, where certain things about the characters' childhoods (like Screaming Jay Hawkins and horror movies) were totally rad,…

I reread It recently and had really forgotten how inane and slapped-together the last third of the novel is. The fact that he managed to wrap up 1,000 pages of frothing madness at all is a testament to his skill as a writer, and there are some legitimately haunting moments scattered through the ending, but all that…

But in the US you can just walk into an emergency room and get your knee replaced right away, for free!

My 14-month-old and I take regular trips to a used record/DVD/video game store in the neighborhood because I like looking at physical media and he likes getting out of the house. Anyway, I let him toddle near the $1 CD bins, and he grabbed a copy of the Titanic soundtrack out of the bin and started playing with it. …

When my wife and I were living in Oakland there was a comic shop down the street from us, and when my sister-in-law visiting with my teenage nephew they went to buy a comic. My nephew came back super pissed because he tried to buy a Walking Dead comic, and the comic guy suggested my sister-in-law at least flip…

I've only had one bad comic shop experience, and it was trying to buy Johnny the Homicidal Maniac back in high school. The living caricature behind the counter rolled his eyes and said, "They don't even publish that anymore…" with an unmistakable "Fuck you, kid" tone. Then after a long pause (I assume to make sure I…

2012 is hilarious nonsense. 1408 is too meandering and incomprehensible to be all that scary (really they could've just made the scene where a corpse chases him through a vent shaft the whole movie).

I had never heard of that Soul Reaver glitch. Guess I have a reason to go back and play that game again.

Everybody knows there are teeth down there. Roy Liechtenstein's son made a documentary about it.

I don't think of playing hockey in a "park," though.

Because those places don't count.

My wife and I live down the street from St Maria Goretti church; when my mother in law visited she was reminiscing that she remember Maria Goretti's canonization back in the early 60s.

When I was about 6 my older brother came down to dinner with a black eye. He had been punched in the face by our oldest brother for tearing down the Monkees poster that had been hanging in their shared bedroom for the better part of a decade. The occasion for him tearing down the poster was that our oldest brother…