The newest trend in monster movies is where the video cam plays a larger role than the no-name stars or even the monsters.  Two recent movies in the past month illustrated this trend, Cloverfield and George A. Romero's Diary of The Dead.  Only one will be become an instant cult classic, and both will be imitated by home amateurs, college students at film schools, and professional filmmakers looking to ride the newest trend.  The horror comes not from the current movies, but from the new movies that will appear in the next several years.

Cloverfield is a retelling of the classic monster-trashing-the-big-city formula from the perspective of a single video cam that previously recorded a dating relationship getting hot from the month before that gets recorded over during a going away party where the dating relationship had gone cold.   If the sound system at the theater I went to was set to normal instead of extra loud, I might've slept through the soap opera that unfolded.  No one really cares about the poor smuck who got ditched and then decides to rescue the girl who ditched him.  When the monster and baby monsters are finally shown, we don't see them for long as the movie is about the horrors of lost love instead of the destruction of a city by a seemingly unstoppable monster.

The highlights includes the head of the Statue of Liberty rolling down the street like a bowling ball, and the harden citizens of New York City whipping out their cell phone to take pictures; a collapsed building that causes a 9/11-inspired wall of dust to funnel down the concrete canyons of the cityscape; and a subway station being shaken by the monster fighting the military on the streets above.  Since there was only one video cam that recorded everything, the ending lacks the context to tie the story into the real world and the viewers are left struggling to find meaning in what they saw.  If that wasn't bad enough, there's an excellent sound track played during the credits that should've been saved for another movie.

George A. Romero's Diary of The Dead will become a cult classic for flawlessly executing the making of an internet movie called The Death of Death that documents the zombie outbreak as recorded by a group of film making students with two video cams, and edited to include video from other video cams, wireless surveillance cameras, cell phone cameras, and stuff downloaded the from the internet to provide a larger context to tie the story into the real world (some of the video was stock footage taken during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans).

The highlights includes an actress questioning the conventional horror movie formula of a scream queen running in her high heels in the middle of nowhere to have the monster grab her nightgown to show off her breasts (which does happen to her later on with a zombie when the main cameraman forgets he's making a documentary instead of a horror movie); exploding eyeballs when a pair of defibrillator paddles are applied to a zombie's head in a hospital; and an old Amish man who commits suicide by ramming his scythe into his head and the head of the zombie behind him.  I think Romero expects this movie to be widely intimated since he's holding a contest for the best three-minute short video to win an appearance on the DVD release.

Speaking of zombies, I picked up the March 2008 issue of PC Gamer for the cover story on a flood of zombie games that are coming out in the next year. Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil 5 look like the best of the lot, and I might get both.  I'm also looking forward to Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Batman, and Soul Calibur 4 when they come out.  Since I'll be writing a novel based on my six years as a video game tester, I need all the research material I can get my hands on.

Website Update: Since the current versions of MyBlog and Jom Comment are now compatible with Joomla! 1.5, blogging and commenting are now enabled. I'm still tweaking things to get them the way I want them to be and figuring out the minor annoyances that pops up.   I may need to shut down the website for 15 or 30 minutes at a time to make some adjustments.  Comments will be available for recent articles and moderated for now to filter out the "wow ur fat" crowd from Slashdot.