The War on Zombie Terror

At last the zombie threat is being taken seriously at the highest levels. It’s always encouraging when our world leaders show insight and forethought in this way.

Thanks to Chris Stronach for bringing this explosive news to my attention.

Mind you, it hasn’t always been this way; in the past there have been those who believe zombies should be integrated into the American Way of Life. Here’s a propaganda film from more tolerant times:

While we’re on the subject, here’s the trailer for the third in the Resident Evil series: Resident Evil: Extinction, which takes its particular living dead premise well-and-truly into apocalypse territory:

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The perils of editing

Some people really can’t handle rejection, can they?

Check this out!

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Daikaiju! 2 Review

It’s taken a while, but at last a review of Daikaiju! 2: Revenge of the Giant Monsters has hit the blogsphere — and it’s a fairly positive one. You can read it on the ASif site. I always knew it was going to be a hard road for the sequels, because the first volume raised expectations so high. Still, “a solid anthology that could have done with just a little more whittling down” isn’t too bad.

I particularly liked this bit: “[Daikaiju! 2] refuses to settle down into simplistic monster stories. Instead it shows us haunting tales that sometimes lead us to question ourselves and our need for monsters.”

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Neon Genesis didn’t lie!

Here it is, proof that all those daikaiju attacks on Japan have resulted in their cities being built to retract underground prior to “an incident”. In this video, you can see the buildings rising again, once the kaiju was dealt with. It is unclear which monster was involved.

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Daikaiju! 3 cover is revealed!

Here it is, the wonderful cover art for Daikaiju! 3: Giant Monsters vs the World, especially painted by award-winning artist Nick Stathopoulos from his own story (which appears in the book).

Daikaiju! 3 cover

To see a larger version, go here.

Is that awesome or what?

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The Real American Godzilla Movie

Kaiju artist Todd Tennant has for some time been turning the original script that Jan DeBont was intending to use as the basis of his Godzilla film into a graphic novel. To date there are 38 pages, five new ones having been added today. It looks great and it reads like a real Godzilla movie, not the Godzilla-In-Name-Only that we ended up getting from Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich.

Poster for Todd Tennant’s Godzilla ‘94

Todd’s graphic novelisation comes with the blessing of conceptual artist Ricardo Delgado for Todd’s Godzilla ’94 design, and storyboard artist David Russell has also been supportive. So this is a unique opportunity to gain a sense of what might have been. The site includes information on the film that never was, original storyboard artwork and much else besides.

Contact Todd through the Backbrain and let him know what you think.

To start on page 1 of the graphic novel, click here.

A while ago, when Todd started this project, I wrote a brief background history of the US Godzilla movie on the Talking Squid site. It’s worth checking out if you don’t know the story.

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Self-portrait

The Undead

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Mecha-Godzilla Transformer?

This is brief and I have no idea what it comes from, but it’s rather cool:

And also cool is this French ad that might represent a Euro sneer directed at the 1998 US Godzilla and its depiction of the French:

Thanks to Todd Tennant for drawing them to my attention.

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What a Week!

And it hasn’t ended yet!

Sorry, I haven’t been able to do much here or on my website over the past week, but things have been hectic, thwart and generally appalling. Work is keeping me totally pre-occupied — with suddenly imposed deadlines and an impossible amount of material to find and coordinate for the RQF. If you know what that is, you’ll understand; if you don’t, believe me, you don’t want to know.

But on top of that I’ve been working on the edit of Daikaiju! 3: Giant Monsters vs the World, the CRC of which has to be at the printers next week to make sure we have copies for Conflux. Parts of it are running very late and I’m being forced to ask for a lot of goodwill from contributors — goodwill which they’ve been willing to give… so far.

At the same time, I’m coordinating a mini-film festival for Conflux, and for various bureaucratic reasons, I suddenly need to do a whole lot of paperwork for the Australian Film and TV Classification Board so that we’ll be allowed to show the films, as non-controversial as they may be. I’ll post about the program later. There’s some excellent work, including a couple of zombie films, a new Australian ghost flick and much else besides!

To make matters worse, there’s been some bad news, health-wise, regarding a friend.

Anyway, bear with me and I’ll soon have good news (hopefully) about Daikaiju! 3 and lots of great info about the Conflux film festival — including reviews and interviews with assorted filmmakers. Meanwhile, if you haven’t seen it already, here’s an interview I did a few weeks ago with the producer/writer of a new SF film, First World, which will be screened at the convention.

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The Winners!

Drumroll!

And the winners of the Giant Monstrous Limerick Contest are:

Jess Nevins and Sean Williams.

Congratulations, guys.

Here is the Judge’s Report by Cat Sparks:

“I despise limericks and all forms of rhythmic word association, but even I have to admit there are some crackers in this bunch. Jess Nevins wins for being so downright original. Sean Williams comes a close second for his creative abuse of the English language. Runners up: Both pieces from Martin Livings were clever, but the Biolante one made me laugh (I have always had a bit of a thing for Biolante so maybe a bit of daikaiju bias crept in there). Mark Rainey’s smushed added a hint of hillbilly vibe to the proceedings, and as for Lee Battersby’s tale of bulknitudinous excretia… ew gross!

All the shortlisted entries were good though, so congratulations champs!”

I have decided to award two Special Prizes as well. The winners don’t get a copy of Daikaiju! 3, but I do have a selection of other goodies they can choose from.

Special Prizes:

Nigel Stones, for his multi-versed limerick sequence featuring the rarely recognised Talos;

and

Jason Fischer, for contributing more daikaiju limericks than anyone else except Nigel.

Can all winners please email me at [robert_hood@uow.edu.au] so I can get your preferences, addresses, etc.?

And thanks everyone else for your wonderful participation. As soon as I get time, I will be putting the limericks up on my website as a special feature!

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