Anne Hathaway Catwoman

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I think the most important lesson we take away from this is to not suck on the fingers of the man that just killed your boyfriend and is about to cook you up in a hot tub. Useful knowledge that you can apply to many circumstances of life! 

Halloween II (1981)

I wasn't planning on doing a Way Not To Die today, I hadn't thought one up and the effort just seemed beyond me. Like, way beyond me. But then I watched the news this morning and they were talking about this ridiculous heatwave hitting us for the next couple of days and I immediately thought of this scene, because this is what it is going to feel like, and that is what I am going to look like.

I think this scene was scratching at the surface of my brain anyway because Stacie mentioned it in her write-up of Cold Prey yesterday for her latest Final Girl Film Club. Now Cold Prey, that's a movie we should be talking about! It's set in the middle of the mountains and everything's covered with snow!

Meanwhile I feel like if I laid down in snow right now it would melt around me the way that the cabin deck melted when the alien's acid-blood dripped onto it in Alien. I fucking hate Summer.

I probably should say more about this actual scene, right? I refer you to that first paragraph here - the effort is like way beyond me today. I'd love to hear your thoughts though! What do you think of Halloween II? I've had to give my boyfriend an eye-roll several times over when he says this one's as good as John Carpenter's first one, but I do think it's a solid sequel. And it's really laid the template for a lot of sequel's in it's wake - they're always starting right when the first one ended with characters in the hospital now. Left and right, willy nilly!

Oh and since we went ahead and showed some boobs it's only fair we acknowledge there is some male nudity a little earlier in this scene when her boyfriend played by long-time character actor Leo Rossi gets out of the tub to turn down the water temperature and is summarily dispatched with quickly in the background.

Previous Ways Not To Die: Beyond the Veil -- Sunken Prayers -- Super Crack -- Brains Blown -- Fur For The Boogens -- White Hot Bunny Rabbit Rage -- Dragged To Hell -- The TV Van That Dripped Blood -- Don't Mess With Mama -- Heads Ahoy -- Martyred For Sheep -- Heads Nor Tails -- He Loves Me Knot -- The Great Bouncing Brad -- Miss Kitty's 8 Mishaps -- Boat Smoosh -- Meeting the French-Tipped Menace -- A Magic Trick -- Slick Suck -- We Who Walk Here Walk Alone -- Raptor Bait -- Kneegasm'd -- Dare to Dream in Fincher -- Reach Out and Throttle Someone -- De-Faced -- Voluntary Drowning -- Cross Borne -- Pulled Up Hell's Sphincter -- An Arrow Up The Ass - The Numerous Violent Unbecomings of Olive Oyl -- Ack! Ack! Zap! -- Baby's First Acid Splash -- Chop, Drop and Sashimi Roll -- Forever Rafter -- Can't You Hear Me Now? -- Daisies Ways #5 - Harpoony Side Up -- Acid Dip -- On a Wing and a Prey -- For Standing in the Way of Sappho -- Busting Rule Number Three (For The Purpose of Number Two) -- Daisies #4 - Window Dressed To Killed -- Hands Off the Haas Orb -- Bullet Ballet -- A Single Vacancy at the Roach Motel -- A School Bus Slipped Thru The Ice -- Trache-AAHHHH!!!-tomy'd - For Mel Gibson's Sins -- A Wide Stanced Slashing --- Daisies Ways #3 - Scratch n' Snuffed -- The Victim of a Viscous Hit & Run -- Curled -- Kabobbed -- Daisies Ways #2 - Aggravated Cementia -- Boo! Nun! -- 2009's Ways Not To Die -- Bug Scratch Fever -- Daisies Ways #1 - Deep Fat Fried in My Own Unique Blend of 500 Herbs & Spices -- By the Yard End of the Stick -- Screwed From A Very Great Distance -- A Righteous Bear-Jew Beatdown -- Fisted By Hugo Sitglitz -- Xeno Morphed -- Fuck-Stuck -- A Vengeful Elevator God: Part 4 -- Lava Bombed -- The Cradle Will Rock... Your Face Off!!! -- The Food of the Nilbog Goblins -- The Slugs Is Gonna Gitcha -- Phone Shark -- Hide The Carrot -- Sarlacc Snacked -- Avada Kedavra!!! -- Hooked, Lined and Sinkered -- "The Libyans!" -- Axe Me No Questions -- Pin the Chainsaw on the Prostitute -- The Wrath of the Crystal Unicorn -- The Ultimate Extreme Make-Over -- Drown In A Sink Before The Opening Credits Even Roll -- The Dog Who Knew Too Much -- Don't Die Over Spilled Milk -- Inviting the Wrath of Aguirre -- An Inconceivable Outwitting -- The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique -- Nipple Injected Blue Junk -- Your Pick Of The Deadly Six -- Thing Hungry -- Don't Fuck With The Serial Killer's Daughter -- DO Forget To Add The Fabric Softener -- Any Of The Ways Depicted In This Masterpiece Of Lost Cinema -- Rode Down In The Friscalating Dusklight -- Good Morning, Sunshine! -- Mornin' Cuppa Drano -- The Cylon-Engineered Apocalypse -- Tender-Eye-zed -- Martian Atmospheric Asphyxiation -- Maimed By A Mystical Person-Cat -- The Sheets Are Not To Be Trusted -- Handicapable Face-Hacked -- I Did It For You, Faramir -- Summertime In The Park... Of A Pedophile's Mind -- A Vengeful Elevator God: Part 3 -- Strung Up With Festive Holiday Bulbs By Santa Claus Himself -- A Vengeful Elevator God: Part 2 -- A Vengeful Elevator God: Part 1 -- Decapitated Plucked Broiled & Sliced -- Head On A Stick! -- A Trip To The Ol' Wood-Chipper -- Pointed By The T-1000 -- Sucking Face With Freddy Krueger -- A Pen-Full Of Home-Brewed Speed to The Eye -- Motivational Speech, Interrupted -- A Freak Ephemera Storm -- When Ya Gotta Go... Ya Gotta Go -- Hoisted By Your Own Hand Grenade -- Having The Years Suction-Cupped Away -- Criss-Cross -- Turned Into A Person-Cocoon By The Touch Of A Little Girl's Mirror Doppleganger -- Satisfying Society's "Pop Princess" Blood-Lust -- Done In By The Doggie Door -- Tuned Out -- Taking the 107th Step -- Rescuing Gretchen -- Incinerated By Lousy Dialogue -- Starred & Striped Forever -- Vivisection Via Vaginally-Minded Barbed-Wire -- Chompers (Down There) -- Run Down By M. Night Shyamalan -- Everything Up To And Including The Kitchen Toaster -- Sacrificed To Kali -- Via The Gargantuan Venom Of The Black Mamba Snake -- Turned Into An Evil Robot -- The Out-Of-Nowhere Careening Vehicle Splat -- "Oh My God... It's Dip!!!" -- Critter Balled -- Stuff'd -- A Hot-Air Balloon Ride... Straight To Hell!!! -- Puppy Betrayal -- High-Heeled By A Girlfriend Impersonator -- Flip-Top Beheaded -- Because I'm Too Goddamned Beautiful To Live -- By Choosing... Poorly... -- Fried Alive Due To Baby Ingenuity -- A Good Old-Fashioned Tentacle Smothering -- Eepa! Eepa! -- Gremlins Ate My Stairlift -- An Icicle Thru The Eye -- Face Carved Off By Ghost Doctor After Lesbian Tryst With Zombie Women -- Electrocuted By Fallen Power-Lines -- A Mouthful Of Flare -- Taken By The TV Lady -- Bitten By A Zombie -- Eaten By Your Mattress -- Stuffed To Splitting -- Face Stuck In Liquid Nitrogen -- Crushed By Crumbling Church Debris -- Bitten By The Jaws Of Life -- A Machete To The Crotch -- Showering With A Chain-Saw -- In A Room Filled With Razor Wire -- Pod People'd With Your Dog -- Force-Fed Art -- Skinned By A Witch -- Beaten With An Oar -- Curbed -- Cape Malfunction -- In The Corner -- Cooked In A Tanning Bed -- Diced -- Punched Through The Head -- Bugs Sucking On Your Head

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Good goddamn this is a banner day for fresh hotness. The John Carter trailer this morning, that shot of Andrew Garfield's ass in his Spider-Man costume that has guaranteed my entry into the world of cos-play, and now a trailer for The Thing remake with Ramona Flowers and Joel Edgerton.

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--- Queen T - When the aliens come and ask us to take them to our leader, we've obviously got to make a beeline straight for Tilda Swinton's house.

--- Soul Swallow - There is apparently actual forward momentum of the long-gestating Evil Dead remake. Via Slash we hear that Uruguayan director Federico Alvarez has been hired and there are production people heading to Detroit to work on it. Alvarez apparently got a lot of attention for a short film called Panick Attack! that he released online a couple of years ago, and you can watch it at the link. I haven't seen it. I just pity the poor fool that tries to fill Bruce Campbell's shoes.

--- Batception - DH collected up the three big posters of the day - ones for The Dark Knight Rises, The Thing remake (which has been sitting around gathering dust forever now), and Martin Scorsese's Hugo (sans Chabret).

--- Weinstein Buttholes - Dimension Films is still owned by those Weinstein buttholes, isn't it? Ugh. They've snatched up the rights to Livid, the new film from the French director behind the awesomely disturbing fetus-snatcher movie Inside (reuniting him with Inside star Beatrice Dalle), which BD rightly deciphers to mean they'll mess the release all up, because they always do with horror movies.

--- Parrish The Panties - I don't watch Weeds, but I do watch videos of Hunter Parrish standing around in his underpants, even if he is trapped in a hamster ball.

--- 8 Times Ice - I am up to page 60 in A Dance With Dragons! I am a slow reader, this book is a thousand pages long, it's gonna be awhile. But I actually lugged the giant thing on the subway with me today, and I normally can't read on the subway, it makes me dizzy. Point: I am willing to risk barf for GRRM. Speaking of him making me queasy, io9's got a couple choice quotes from a new interview (no spoilers, don't worry) where he admits the possibility that the Ice and Fire series could stretch into an 8th book instead of 7 at this point. SIGH. This series will be the death of us all.

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--- Swimming With Fassy - Michael Fassbender has joined every other Irishman actor in existence in the cast of Brendan Gleeson's adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s 1939 novel At-Swim-Two-Birds. I am not familiar with this novel, but here's the world's briefest description:

Has anyone read the book? I should read it probably, shouldn't I? The way all the articles speak of it I feel ashamed not being familiar with it actually. Me = flop. 

--- Speaking o' Fassy, have you ever wondered what it'd be like to have sex with him? HA what a question. Well over at FF Simone points us in the direction of a burlesque performer's NSFW blog entry about her day spent shooting a (simulated, duh)  threesome sex scene with him for the film Shame, his reunion with Hunger director Steve McQueen. Point of lurid interest:

I mean, anybody who's seen Hunger knows this already (link NSFW), but it's always a welcome reminder.

--- Ze Plane - Apparently there was word via Twitter (a tweet which has since been deleted, so who knows) over the weekend that Dominic Cooper had joined the cast of a Hervé Villechaize bio-pic, which is starring Peter Dinklage (who looks nothing like Hervé, height aside). It's called My Dinner With Hervé and Cooper's apparently playing a journalist who interviews the Fantasy Island star about his life, which probably had more to it than shouting, "Ze plane, ze plane!" for a couple of years, right?

--- Crazy Girl - I'd pretty much given up on bothering with seeing John Carpenter's The Ward, the reviews were so foul and Im so tired of watching the great horror directors losing this grip, but now that Pax has admitted to some appreciation for the film (save the ending, which apparently everyone agrees is most foul of all) I'm feeling more inclined than I had been.

--- Planet of the Rapes - James Franco would like you to know that he's not a gay rapist, thank you very much.

--- Eyes Wide Shout - Glenn tells us all the movies he's seeing over the course of the Melbourne International Film Festival over the next couple of weeks. 59 movies! Egads. Bets of luck, man. That sounds painful. I mean, he's seeing all sorts of awesomeness - most jealous over Lars Von Trier's Meloncholia and Ti West's The Innkeepers, probably - so that'll help presumably. But that's a lot of stimuli for that amount of time.

--- Hour of the Wolf - Arbogast looks back at Brotherhood of the Wolf which is apparently ten years old - god that makes me feel old, that movies I saw here in NYC are having 10 year anniversaries now - and which I need to revisit myself having not seen it since.

--- Solar Flair - It's nothing new really if you're familiar with the books but in an interview at AICN with James Purefoy (mmm James Purefoy) they got him to talk a little bit about his character in John Carter (have they renamed it just JC yet?) and what the filming was like. A little bit.

There is more than that if you click over; I just liked that random comment - obviously this will play into the story at some point given in lieu of much more about his character. Oh he's a dude whose ship goes too slow sometimes. Acting!

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--- Make It A Full Moon For Luna - Diego Luna, who I love and probably even prefer to his Y Tu Mama co-star Gael Garcia Bernal if we're being honest, is in talks to join Neil Blomkamp's sci-fi follow-up to District 9, called Elysium and starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster and District star Sharlto Copley, and which... well hasn't that thing been filming for ages already? They're so damn secretive about it. Anyway yay Diego! Love him.

--- World's End - AICN got a little bit from Simon Pegg on where his and Nick Frost's third film with Edgar Wright stands right now. They are working on the story, and they want it to be interesting, basically!

--- Breathless Mahoney - Has anybody seen Dick Tracy lately? I was the perfect age of 12 when it came out in 1990 and I remember obsessing over it for that Summer but I don't think I've seen it since. I've been meaning to rewatch it for ages now but have no idea what that'll feel like. Anyway Warren Beatty's mentioned making a sequel. Timely, Warren!

--- Always Ari - PopWrap's got the trailer for a new movie with Ari "Balls Deep" Graynor called Lucky, in which she stars opposite Colin "Why does he keep getting jobs oh right, his father" Hanks. Let's make it the year of Ari! This movie's out next month.

--- The Thin Blue Broad - A friend of mine saw a screening of Errol Morris' new film Tabloid last year and apparently the woman who's the film's subject was there - she's that crazy woman who abducted a Mormon guy and cloned her dog, all sorts of bonkers shit - and she had a freak out, and it was awesome. The trailer for it's out now; the film's out in July.

--- Fairey Glare - Y'all have surely already seen this but there's artist Shepard Fairey's poster for John Carpenter's film They Live that he created for a special screening of the film down in Austin, where they vanquish movie-texters with glee. (via)

--- Space Stage - A couple of pictures of the sets and sound-stages for Ridley Scott's Prometheus have made their way online which you can look at over at io9. Green screen and a cave. Thrilling. Just get me pictures of Michael Fassbender's underwear drawer already!

--- And finally, here's video of Dario Argento talking about his intentions for his now-filming Dracula 3D with Thomas Kretschmann and his daughter Asia. After just suffering through the ineptitude of his most recent film Giallo I'm even more skeptical than ever. (via)

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A note: Remember how Blogger went down last week, and all the posts I wrote on Thursday disappeared? Well Blogger's finally returned several (though not all of them, yet) of them to my saved pile, but not republished them at the appropriate in-the-past place. I'm too distracted today to figure out when they were originally scheduled, and also all the comments y'all made on them are gone now anyway, so I'm just gonna republish each one right now. So yes, you've seen these stories before, and yes they are nearly a week old. Let's do the time warp, et cetera...

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--- Swamp Sweat - The first clip with actual footage from the fourth season of True Blood is online and you can watch it at PopWrap. And yes, as you can see there to the ?, they are highlighting their finer points.

--- And speaking of the finer things on True Blood, Alexander Skarsgard has joined the cast of a movie where he will be married to Julianne Moore. I want to watch them make out.

--- No Escape - John Carpenter's The Ward is getting dumped released on VOD on June 8th. It'll then get chucked into a couple of theaters on July 8th. It is supposedly awful. Dammit, John. I'll watch it at some point no doubt, but just dammit.

--- We Need To Talk About We Need To Talk About Kevin - I mention all this in the comments of the post I'm about to link to, but I started reading Lionel Shriver's book We Need To Talk About Kevin last night and the ol' cliche came true - I couldn't put it down! I lay there til my exhausted eyes ached, completely and immediately sucked right in. Shriver's writing is wonderful. Anyway over at The Film Experience Nat's talking about the reviews coming out of Cannes today for the film adaptation with Tilda Swinton, and how he's staying away from those clips that came out earlier this week. Me too!

--- Block Busted - I'll be in Italy when these happen so I'm gonna miss it - and I'm not that unhappy about missing it since I will be in motherfucking Italy - but that "British kids fighting aliens" movie Attack the Block that's got every blogger from here to thither foaming at the mouth over it is screening in 25 cities on May 25th. Find out more at that link. Word is that it won't be out in the US for real until Fall.

--- Hard For Hammer - You can hear a few thoughts from screenwriter Dustin Lance Black on the subject of his latest politically minded movie, J. Edgar, over here. This bit was up my alley:

--- And finally, it's a fairly lengthy piece but it's really all sorts of wonderful - here's Alexander Chee talking about what the X-Men meant to him thirty-five years ago growing up bi-racial, and what they mean now in the world we live in.