"The Mist", Cloverfield, and More Monster Stuff

I'm glad I haven't seen "The Mist". The air is so foggy outside right now that I'd be too scared to walk my dog. Even button "E" (for "special illumination") on Speed Racer's steering wheel would have trouble with this "pea soup". The air is so damp that my lungs reacted to it, creating the sensation that I needed to cough.

I hear there's a giant monster in "The Mist", kinda like the Cloverfield monster. Cool. I'll have to check it out.

I still haven't seen Cloverfield, so I'm really looking forward to the DVD and it's bonus features. There has been much speculation in various Cloverfield forums that New York is too populated to have had only one idiot filming the devastation. Also, such hints have been dropped in interviews with production staff, and in the wording of ads for the DVD that there is more to come, either in the form of alternate footage of the same event or with follow-up stories. Only time will tell, and there's certainly no rule saying they couldn't make an actual movie based on Cloverfield, in the fashion of classic giant monster movies, instead of in shaky-cam style. We'll see.

BTW, or the record, it seems silly, even to me, that I should be so interested in something I didn't get to experience in theaters, but I've always been a giant monster fan, and I guess I always will be. Tyranosaurus Rex was always my favorite dinosaur, Fin Fang Foom is my favorite Marvel Comics monster, (Japanese) Godzilla IS the King of the Monsters... it's just my way. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, and the many incarnations of the Frankenstein monster all have their place in the world, but you know, even when they've been giant-sized, Godzilla still kicked their asses.

I'm big fan of Hellboy, Cthulhu, and the modern Mummy movies, even Underworld was big fun, and zombies are always good. I guess the classic Universal Monsters are just too cheesy for my tastes. But I love cheesy entertainment! Which begs the question, "Why do I scorn the classic monsters so?" Perhaps I'd like them if I gave them another chance. I haven't seen them since I was a kid when I only watched them because there was nothing else to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and back then I was genuinely afraid of monster movies. As for what scared me most... It's a toss up between the original Blob and Phyllis Diller. I was cool with The Munsters, but they had that sweet dragster...

Perhaps the idea that something has a (pseudo-)plausible connection to the world as I know it makes the ultimate difference in whether I like it or not.

What I'm trying to do here is whittle down my tastes into a unified theory of personal fandom. Next up, Speed Racer!