SWH07: Week 4 (fifth)

Six Weeks of Halloween 2007
Week 4 (fifth)

Masters of Horror: "The Screwfly Solution" (2006)
I'm a sucker for a post-apocalyptic movie and, wow, Jason Priestley lives in town? (7/10)

d. Joe Dante


An even more barebones Halloween this weekend. Real life is pushing my normal non-stop horror movie fest to the side this year. Ah well, that'll happen. Others are picking up the slack for me, and I appreciate it.

I did manage to read a pair of horror-themed graphic novels over the weekend. My advice is that you stay as far away as possible from Papercutz's Tales from the Crypt #1: Ghouls Gone Wild. I haven't read such a pathetic horror anthology comic since the disappointing days of Flinch. This book does not contain reprints from the classic '50s series. It's all new material with modern-style art in a digest-sized book. None of this is the problem. The problem is that the writing is awful. The stories all follow the same pattern: asshole does something evil, something supernatural punishes him. Granted, the original series was the creator of this pattern, but, 50 years later, it's tiring to see it resurrected. Why can't anyone do horror anthology comics right these days?

I had exactly the opposite reaction to The Walking Dead, Vol 7: The Calm Before. This series never fails to blow me away. What would real people -- not people trapped in a 90-minute movie -- do if the dead came back to life? How would they interact with other survivors? What problems, both internal and external, would they face? Which problems would they conquer and which would best them? The Walking Dead lays it all out in a stark, realistic, humanistic terms. Vol 7 was no exception. It's telling of the series that the "calm" of the subtitle of this volume involves a doctor-free birth, an amputation, an exploding building and a suicide. For a Walking Dead book, this was all practically relaxing. I'm actually afraid of what terrors volume 8 will visit upon the characters within.

As for what occupied me all weekend, I'll say that if all goes well, next year I'll be Six-Weekin' from here: