Still, the novel – with all its shortcomings – was really only the beginning.  It would take the genius of then little-known director Stephen Spielberg, a spine-tingling underwater POV, and a terrifying two-note score by John Williams for Jaws to fulfill its potential and terrify people in a way that Benchley’s book never could.

At its core, Jaws is a visual story with a simple message: don’t go in the water.   It taps into that innate human fear that something is lurking out there, waiting to gobble us up, and it’s because of this basic recipe that it succeeds as a movie where other big-screen adaptations of critically acclaimed stories have failed.  If anything, Spielberg’s decision to skimp on the underlying small-town drama and nonessential character development that characterized Benchley’s novel works to the film’s benefit.

The performances from Richard Dreyfus, Roy Schneider, and Robert Shaw are solid and, while Schneider’s “We’re going to need a bigger boat” is one of the most memorable lines in horror movie history, it’s the haunting presence of the shark that steals the show.

As Spielberg demonstrates, the scares are scariest when they’re suggested, and his decision to give the audience a shark’s-eye view of what’s going on beneath the waves packs more of a punch than anything the animatronic figure – affectionately nicknamed “Bruce” – can manage for all its onscreen teeth-gnashing.  Even when the shark isn’t seen, or when the audience isn’t looking through its “eyes,” its presence is felt by the slow buildup of John William’s brilliant two-note score.  What begins slowly quickly turns frantic, and the tension becomes as palpable as the unfortunate swimmer on the receiving end of big, bad Bruce’s teeth.

All in all, Jaws is a phenomenal film, the likes of which have not been seen since suggestion gave way to CGI.

Unfortunately for fans of The Wolfman, Universal Pictures misinterpreted the “less is more” concept to mean less substance, less story, less continuity, less suspense, less… well, less everything… except gore.  What director Joe Johnston’s remake of the 1941 Universal classic lacks in coherent plot, character development, and rudimentary editing it makes up for with breakneck pacing and miles of small intestines.

That’s not a winning combination.

Unlike the original – wherein scenes actually played out and audiences were able to acquaint themselves with the characters – Johnston’s version is less a movie and more a manic succession of inter-spliced images overlaid with snippets of cringe-worthy dialogue.   According to Johnston, seventeen minutes of additional footage (largely comprised of finishing touches to existing scenes) “had been removed during the third editing pass to push the story along so that audiences would get to the first Wolfman transformation sooner.”  (Said transformation, disappointingly, is completely rendered in pulse-deadening CGI.)

As a result, the film never has a chance to breath.   Key plot-points fall flat and sequences meant to build tension collapse in on themselves as if the meat of the film’s performances were left on the cutting room floor.  Speaking of meat, a horror film completely devoid of suspense is just not scary and, when it seems that characters are introduced solely to be ground up into puppy chow seconds later, it’s almost impossible for the viewer to care.  Thus, the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies that litter the ground following the endlessly repetitive Wolfman attacks barely elicit a shrug from the audience.

When all is said and done, it’s Universal’s drive to update not only the plot but also the presentation that causes The Wolfman inevitably to disappoint:  the choreographed wire-works finale is so cheesy it would make Ang Lee wince.  Older fans who fondly remember the original are likely to be turned off by the remake’s excessive gore, while younger audiences watching this film won’t have any inkling why the 1941 classic was so beloved.

Sadly, what could have been a truly great horror movie has, instead, become just another indication that contemporary attention-spans cannot process the luxury of characterization, while modern sensibilities are ill-formed to deal with subtlety.  Perhaps we’ll have to wait for Hammer to set things aright.

If only I had had been twisted enough to think of locking someone in a room with a bear-trap rigged to their head, I could be a part of the most lucrative horror franchise in history and be well on my way to penning the much anticipated “Jig Saw’s Uncle Ginsu’s Killer Cutlery, part 7 of 9, volume 4, episode 6: The Revenge.”  If only.    Maybe then I could kiss my office corner goodbye (note: I didn’t say “corner office” because I do, in fact, sit in an actual corner – sans cubicle – in a hallway, no less) and have legions of fans lining up for the latest installment of gruesome doo-hickery.

Love it or hate it, you’ve got to admit that Leigh Whannell – the Melbourne-born writer who is responsible for spawning the Saw phenomenon – has got it made. This guy has cranked out the same exact movie six times running and movie-goers are still begging for more.  Maybe the resounding success of the Saw franchise is a testament to the notoriously short American attention span. Or it might be attributable to our society’s thinly veiled appetite for gratuitous violence. Or maybe people just like saws.  Whatever the reason is, I don’t get it.

I just know I’m jealous that I didn’t come up with it first.

Set in the remote town of Barrow, Alaska, this adaptation of Steven Niles’s eponymous graphic novel strikes a bleak tone from the moment the opening credits begin to roll, blood-red, across the windswept tundra.  Even before Ben Foster’s wild-eyed Stranger begins sabotaging any and all connections between the town and the outside world – gone are cell-phones, dog teams and the town’s lone helicopter – one immediately grasps the enormity of Barrow’s seclusion.  There are no capes or crosses here, either, but neither are there any of the familiar intimations of young love to offset the growing sense of dread as the Alaskan sun slips beneath the horizon and snowy little Barrow descends into thirty days of night.  While characterization is not Slade’s forte, the man can paint a picture – his visual palette is as deep as the dramatic tension is palpable – and the viewer is enthralled no matter whether he watches the film in a theater or the DVD in the comfort of his own home.

Story-wise, we’ve seen it all before – hell, there are only seven basic plots – but the devil, so to speak, is in the arrangement of the details.  Most of Barrrow’s citizenry make for Fairbanks or some other hot spot during this month-long solar hiatus, so our victims are as neatly isolated as every one of those mini-busloads of randy young adults forced by weather, mechanical breakdowns, ineptitude or just plain old script-driven stupidity to hunker down at that abandoned farmhouse in the middle of Nowhere, Texas, or some other scary Southern state in the innumerable, interchangeable, Crazed-Gimmicked-Up-Killer-On-The-Loose movies of the last 40 years. The Stranger – the hemi-demi-semi ghoul who precedes the thirsty hordes in order to remove any obstacles to stress-free feeding – is a clone of Salem’s Lot’s Richard Straker, who himself is merely Renfield on steroids.  The noble self-sacrifice of the town’s sheriff can be traced (most notably) to the New Testament, while instances of the mano-a-mano resolution between the forces of Good and Evil are to found thousands of years earlier, in Homer.

The newer stuff – perhaps interesting; perhaps not – centers on the reinvention of vampires as mindless, blood-driven predators bereft of human emotion; unstoppable, soulless juggernauts that are no more capable of wit or strategy than teabaggers are of the mature and rational exchange of ideas.  In such a milieu, heightened characterization need not trump action sequences and the film’s big scene – wherein wholesale quantities of near-invulnerable predators savage their prey – is also most memorable.  Unlike the “vegetarian vampires” in Twilight – whose skin sparkles in the sun and who content themselves with animal blood – these ravenous creatures of the night have come to slake their thirst via Alaskan arteries.  They attack without mercy and slaughter the townspeople indiscriminately, with no thought given to the Bella Swans of the area.  (Twi-Hards be warned: there are more than just feelings flying around this scene.  The violence is gratuitous and it doesn’t let up.)  There’s an unholy National Geographic feeling to the sequence, as the camera pans through the carnage from above, forcing the audience to witness the unbridled fury of a vampire feeding-frenzy, without any hope of rescue or respite.  Heck, given the locale, we might just as well be watching packs of polar bears working their way through ice floes crammed with walruses and seals.

Characterization-wise, though, we might just as well be dealing with walruses and seals.  The mass of “action” vampires seems completely disassociated with the human race.  Gone are the suave, sexually ambiguous immortals born of Anne Rice and Stephen King.  Niles’ creatures – with their lifeless black eyes, oh-so-slightly distended facial features, and mouths filled with serrated teeth – are more shark than man.  When they speak – if what they do can be considered speaking – they do so with grunts and snarls and terrible shrieks that will linger in the viewer’s subconscious long after the movie has ended.  As for the leads, Josh Hartnett as local Sheriff Eben Oleson is as wooden as a stake, but Ben Foster’s Stranger strikes the right mix of normalcy and creepiness, and his best moment may be when he says – in that spine-tingly, creepy Cajun accent of his – “That cold ain’t the weather.  That’s death approachin’.” The audience – if not the unsuspecting citizens of Barrow – quickly realizes that this is not just another case of the scene-stealing Ben Foster overcompensating for Josh Hartnett’s doe-eyed stare.

Anjelica Huston’s half-brother, Danny, likewise impresses as Marlow, the undeniably monstrous yet seemingly self-loathing Vampire Master.   That at least the Master is capable of human thought is nowhere more evident than in the scene where a frightened girl whimpers, “Please, God…” and Marlow, who to that point had been sketched in fairly straight lines, turns his dead eyes to the heavens.  “God?” he echoes, before shaking his head and sadly – yet coldly – announcing, “No God.”   For what sort of God could allow such a creature to exist?  It is a subtle moment in a film that spends more time going for the proverbial jugular than it does developing the nuances of its story.

This lack of character development is not a hindrance, though; if anything, it works for 30 Days of Night’s rapid pacing.  Not a magnum opus by any stretch of the imagination, the picture does turn on a fairly novel premise and, as a result, may well be one of the most creative vampire movies to come out in the last few years.  Like 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn – the picture’s spiritual ancestor – 30 Days of Night is a gritty, unapologetic, in-your-face horror film that is heavy on the world of total darkness, but that skimps on the twilight.

Literally.

With that strangely memorable sound bite, screenwriter John A. Russo and director George A. Romero redefined a genre and permanently laid to rest the living, breathing, voodoo-empowered zombies depicted in the 1932 independent film, White Zombie.   Night of the Living Dead lurched into theaters on October 1^st, 1968.   Almost 40 years and five sequels later, the creatures born of Russo and Romero’s collaboration continue to be the most popular representation of Hollywood’s least expensive – and thus most bankable – movie monsters.  No matter whether they’re shambling through the latest celluloid nightmare, lurching from one comic book page to the next, or trying to devour Xbox 360 players in a spurt of pixilated blood, today’s zombies owe all that they are to Night of the Living Dead.  Still, it takes a lot more than chocolate syrup and 1960’s ingenuity to scare audiences these days.  This is doubtless due to the fact that today’s audiences are over-stimulated.   Blame this on the internet – that proverbial information superhighway where anything is just a click away – or on today’s popular culture that glorifies gratuitous violence and sexually explicit material.  Hell, blame it directly on Hollywood, where endless strings of “action sequences” are tied together with a few lines of lower-shelf dialogue and released as “movies.”   Scenes that would have terrified movie-goers a few decades ago barely elicit a shrug in 2010.  It’s not enough for a Millennium-Age zombie to come back to life and stagger off in search of human flesh.  Puh-leeze.  Nowadays, he’s got to come back and sprint after his victims, because staggering is not only soooo ‘70s, it also takes way too long (as, apparently do story arcs, character development, and plot devices).

And it’s with that thought in mind that, in 2004, the then-relatively-unknown Zach Snyder introduced his audiences to a more “modern” take on the second film in Romero’s Dead series, the 1978 classic, Dawn of the Dead.  While the original Dawn was a critique of American consumerism, the 2004 remake – dubbed a “re-imagining” of Romero’s initial concept – was no doubt influenced by the critical and commercial success of Danny Boyle’s 2002 film, 28 Days Later, with its high-octane approach to a cadaverous concept.  Loosely based off of Romero’s original script, the James Gunn rewrite ditches just about everything except for the shopping mall (the film’s primary location) and takes what has become the traditional zombie lore – unknown circumstances cause the recently dead to rise with a hankering for human flesh – and combines it with a love for the 100-yard dash.  These zombies – unlike Boyle’s monsters – may be dead, but don’t try to tell them that.  They fly across the screen like a team of Olympic runners, hurdling obstacles in death with a grisly ease that they never attained in life.  (Who knew that rigor mortis would shave ten seconds off your best time?)

Granted, zombies are make believe, just like elves, gnomes, and Eskimos (D’oh!), so it’s ludicrous to debate which cinematic interpretation is the most realistic.  Nevertheless, at the end of the day, it’s this silly business and not the caliber of the acting  – which, with the exception of leading-man-turned-unlikely-hero, Jake Weber, is exactly what one would expect in a movie headlined by Ving Rhames  and Mekhi Phifer– that is the downfall of Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead.  After all, movie monsters HAVE to have some sort of inherent weakness or there’s absolutely no hope for the good guys to survive, especially when their scripted actions show not even a shred of common sense.  Seriously, pit a bunch of characters like Ty Burrell’s idiotic Steve – who wanders away from the door he was instructed to guard during a pivotal scene in the film’s climax to go hang in the parking garage – or Lindy Booth’s moronic Nicole – who leaves the safety of the mall to rescue a dog that doesn’t need rescuing, because zombies don’t eat dogs – against a ravenous horde of undead who can truly haul ass, and then see if they survive past the opening credits.