In related news, I bought a bag of PC “Ballpark Hot Dog” potato chips in the discount bin at the grocery store and do not recommend them, because the name sort of lets you know what to expect, and they did not at all taste like anything except old all-dressed chips left over from like five years ago.

In Mexico once, I bought lime and pepper Pringles, and that was almost as weird.

I now challenge Republican presidential candidates to come up with something even better to classify as a vegetable, like cows or gasoline.

• Plot: A model rents a new apartment in Brooklyn. Upstairs, there’s a blind priest who sits in the window all day and all night. The other neighbours are very, very strange, including the little old man with the cat, who is not what he seems at all. The priest is there for a reason: he’s guarding the gateway.

I love this movie, mostly because the book it’s based on is one of my favourite horror novels. Jeffrey Konvitz must have been more than pleased to see his story adapted so faithfully; I just wish The Guardian, his equally fantastic sequel novel (No, not the stupid Kevin Costner/Ashton Kutcher swimming movie), never made it to film. This stuff is as good as, or better than, The Exorcist and most other ’70s Satanica.

• Warning, though: The Sentinel uses people with actual physical deformities in one sequence, and this caused a stir of accusations of exploitation. If you’re sensitive that that kind of thing, you should probably watch some Twilight. Also, the poster is a spoiler.

I did once. I paid money to see Van Helsing in the cinema. With a few of my kids, I recall, because it was marketed as a Universal-style fun horror action flick.

The machine-gun crossbow was cool. Everything else made me wish iPhones had been invented so I could annoy the people behind me by browsing Reddit during the movie.

Between Hugh Jackman’s stupid accent and Kate Beckinsale’s stupider accent and the weird attempt to create a medieval Q, this effort at launching a new action franchise failed harder than your BlackBerry yesterday when you wanted to tell your boss you were running late, and don’t start the meeting until you arrive.

Of course, you all know how stupid I am. I bought this on DVD the other day for two bucks, hoping it would improve with age, then got home and discovered it’s on Netflix Canada. And then I watched it again, and I am as think as you stupid I am.

This is the movie that makes Hugh Jackman say “How about watching Kate and Leopold instead?” when friends come over.

There’s a reason we never went back to the moon.

It begins with a secret Department of Defence mission to the  moon, an undocumented effort to install spy cameras to guard against Soviet incursions. Three NASA astronauts take off in secret as part of Apollo 18, which officially never existed, and two of them descend to the lunar surface to carry out their mission while the third orbits, waiting. Their families don’t know they’re there. The public thinks the Apollo program is finished. Only a select few military and NASA specialists on the ground know three Americans are in space.

• On Day 1, they set up their cameras and collect samples.
• On Day 2, they find a footprint that isn’t one of their own. And then they find something else.
• On Day 3, they wake up to find their flag missing. And they know they aren’t alone.

I was hoping to love this but expecting to be disappointed. The result was right in the middle. It’s a found footage flick, like Paranormal Activity or Cannibal Holocaust, but it works fine, because that format functions best in enclosed environments. And it makes sense that old footage of the mission would be revealed decades later, so you can buy into the premise. It even looks like ’70s stock. The actors, all familiar-looking macho guys whose names don’t matter, are convincing as trapped, scared heroes used to being able to deal with whatever’s out there … until whatever’s out there wakes them up by shaking their lander as they sleep.

You probably have to be a genre fan to like this. It has very little mainstream appeal and could be a challenging watch for popcorners. And I suspect I’ll have to watch it again in a year or two to remind myself of it. But it succeeded on the most important front: for a while, especially in the first half hour, I forgot it came from someone’s imagination.

The only flaw, to me, is the threat itself, but that’s a minor quibble. This is a decent little space thriller with some real chills and plenty of the kind of space conspiracy crap I like reading about, even if I can’t even begin to buy into it. A secret lost lunar mission? Come on. Everyone knows Steve Austin was the last man to walk on the moon.

I can’t even talk to you right now. I’m a mess. I just watched what is either one of the best, or one of the worst, movies of all time.

• PLOT: Rubber is a movie about a guy named Robert who roams the American desert, using his telekinetic powers to explode the heads of rabbits, cops and motel maids. Sometimes he just watches TV; he likes workout shows and NASCAR, which makes sense, because he’s a tire. A tire. He seems to notice this halfway through the movie, after he has a shower and a swim and sees himself in the mirror, and realizes he’s a tire. A tire.

So I just watched a flick about a tire rolling through the desert, killing people. It’s also about how aware the people within it are that they are in a movie, with a unique opener and an ongoing meta-subplot involving the audience, a group of people randomly gathered in the desert to watch Robert’s travels through binoculars, or maybe they’re staring at a distant drive-in. It’s tough to tell. And then they have their turkey dinner.

It’s severely flawed, but at the same time works on a smarter level then most people would notice, so as I sit here now, an hour after watching it, I have to say it has carved itself a nifty niche and, sorry, rolled onto new road, and so I have to go ahead and recommend it.

• Spoiler: He’s a tire.

I liked how Robert got a screen credit for playing the tire.

Many years later, Roach would complain about not even having a fire.

So after I watched The Woman, I went back and watched Offspring, its sort-of-predecessor, and realized how poorly produced it actually is. Not that it’s a bad movie. But with the same writer, the same lead actress and the same themes, Lucky McKee brought Jack Ketchum’s concepts to life in The Woman far better than has ever happened before.

That’s what a good director does. Whether Wes Craven is a good director is up to you, I suppose, but one of my favourites of his is The People Under The Stairs. I saw it again this weekend because my kid wanted to watch something scary and saw Human Centipede on Netflix and said “Whoah, can I watch that,” and I said “Go play Lego for a while.” In the end, I let the little horror junkie watch People Under The Stairs with me, and hey, we had a blast.

I forgot how much goofy fun this movie is. It has its violent moments, and there are some bad words thrown around, and there’s just a tiny hint of something sexual, but for the most part, it’s a strange and surreal flick about an old house and the various long-held-captive zombie-like creatures who live in its walls and cellar … the people under the stairs. And we have, of course, Mommy and Daddy, the landlords, who are so over the top they make Flowers in the Attic look like The Brady Bunch.

• PLOT: Fool, a ghetto kid whose family, like many others, is about to be evicted just as his mother is dying and needs an expensive operation, is convinced by Ving Rhames, who wears a dashiki, that they should steal a rare coin collection from their landlords. These folks live in a decaying old mansion in the middle of the ghetto, so Fool dresses up like a cub scout and tries to decoy the landlady so Ving and his partner can rob the house. But the landlords are onto them, and have a few traps set … traps that have been used for generations to bring people to the house and keep them there … sometimes for food. Meanwhile, a pretty girl named Alice lives upstairs and has never been outside, and a boy named Roach lives in the walls.

People who have never heard of Jack Ketchum will likely be slightly confused by this film, because the biggest question goes unanswered: Who is The Woman? Who is this Mowgli-like wild creature living feral in the American wild, this apparently never-civilized killing machine with sharpened teeth and a taste for human flesh?

We who know Ketchum know who she is. We saw Offspring, and we read Off Season, and we know why a movie was made to the sequel to his first novel, not the book itself, and it’s all very confusing. I used to have a handle on it.

The Woman is Ketchum’s first made-for-probably-straight-to-DVD screenwriting project. He worked with director Lucky McKee on creating a sequel to the Offspring movie, but explored a complete shift in the cannibal dynamic by making The Woman (Pollyana Macintosh) almost the hero and reworking the earlier concept of a long lineage of Sawney Beaney cannibals living in the forests of the eastern seaboard by showing us that savage, twisted families can wear suits and ties, not rags and skins.

Plot: A successful lawyer, who lives on an isolated property with his wife, son and daughter, finds a savage feral woman while hunting, captures her, locks her in the cellar and claims he plans to “educate” her on modern life. But he has a darker agenda, one his wife and children know all too well.

McKee directed this, and it works. It really works. I loved Offspring, but this is an entirely different feel for a Ketchum concept. It borrows from his novel (later filmed) The Girl Next Door, but throws a Fritzl spin on it with an interesting (but badly telegraphed) last-scene twist. McKee takes some weird chances here, but they work: when sleazy lawyer Chris Cleek spots The Woman in the forest for the first time, hard-driving sexy rock music swells up over the scene (and in the trailer), and there are many other interesting uses of music that come close to montage but add to the story in a smarter way, if that makes any sense. Probably not. I just watched The Woman, so I’m a little scrambled.

There is some gore here. It’s Ketchum material, so you knew that. But there’s also a solid story about quiet evil, about how death dealers can be hiding in the woods or working in the next office building. And it’s brought to us in a solidly acted, smartly written and snappy little horror flick. The ending may make you wonder, but if you know the earlier stories, you’ll love it. It works.

Remember that question from earlier? Who is The Woman? Watch this movie, and ask yourself again afterward.

Jack Ketchum hides here.

I know I saw this when it came out on DVD, but I didn’t think too hard about it, because I was concerned about the closure of DVD rental stores, and then it was over and I was a little stupider. However, I just found it in a $2 bin and gave it a look, and hey, you know what? Pretty terrible.

There are, however, some good points.

• 10. It reunites early-90s SNL superstars Adam Sandler, David Spade, Rob Schneider, Chris Rock and Chris Farley in an improv-fuelled exploration of what it means to get older, fatter, slower and Sandler-er.
• 9. By “Chris Farley” I meant “Let’s find some other fat guy.”
• 8. Kevin James isn’t all that fat, when you really think about it. Hollywood has become overrun by fatists.
• 7. “Midget Filipino Fonzie” is the best on-screen insult since “Sit on it.”
• 6. Salma Hayek.
• 5. Water parks don’t really put chemicals in the water to out you if you whiz. Trust me.
• 4.  Watching old friends work together and celebrate their youth, their life paths and their successes is a little weird when you know that Rob Schneider is one failed pilot away from Dancing with the Stars.
• 3. Salma Hayek.
• 2. I meant Dancing with the Stars Croatia, by the way.
• 1. Saying, out loud, “There’s no such place as Saskatchetoon, you morons,” while watching the movie alone and eating day-old Cheetos. When you leave the bag open, they get kind of soggy, but they still taste okay, even if you have to scrub yourself down after.

If you can find it for two bucks, it’s worth it. For Salma Hayek.

Federal investigators have arrested eight suspected international smugglers in rural Pennsylvania, saying the group was operating a high-level vehicle parts ring from a series of barns in an isolated valley. Levi, Zachariah, Abram, Simon, Johan, Isaac, Aaron and Jayden, all members of the Zook family, are currently in custody as investigators determine the extent of their criminal operation.

“At this point, it seems to be a fairly sophisticated network of trafficking in black-market ball bearings and buggy wheels,” said Lionel DeTyme, deputy director of the U.S. Bureau of Unusual Low Level Smuggling/Hijacking/International Trafficking.

The suspects will appear in court next week.

When asked whether such items command a level of interest on a par with weapons, drugs and alcohol, DeTyme said there’s still a market for horse-drawn carriages in many third world countries.

“Really, it’s the bearings,” he explained. “There are a lot of people in those loser countries who have an interest in getting their hands on quality American balls.”

I’m reading comics again, because stupid DC Comics went and rebooted, with 52 new titles featuring hip young versions of their classic characters, many of them clearly modelled on their movie incarnations and stupid Smallville. Green Arrow needs a beard, people.

Here are some short thoughts on what I’ve read so far:

Action Comics #1: Finally, after 40 years of loving comics, I own Action Comics #1. Although it will be renumbered next year when DC undoes all this crap (under the Only Bucky Stays Dead Until He Is Alive And Then Dead Again rule), I can say I own Action Comics #1. That being said, this is the best of the bunch. Superman is reinvented here, or remembered, as a street-level ass-kicker with a bad temper who’s out to fight for the common man — much as he was in the original Action Comics #1. In jeans, work boots, a t-shirt and cape — strangely, the same thing I wore to my Grade 8 graduation — he’s a menace, a wanted man and the first superhero. As he should be.

Justice League #1: This is mostly the Batman-and-Green Lantern show, and kind of works, but is odd as the launch for a whole new line. It would have worked better to open big, then flash back. Enjoyable, but hard to tell that we’re dealing with new takes on the characters — because Batsy and Halsy are hardly altered.

Animal Man #1: I finally like Animal Man. This is a great little comic.

Hawk and Dove #1: Why do people keep asking Rob Liefeld to draw? Why? Why does Hawk have an extra bicep all of a sudden? What the fuck is this thing about? Lame characters + Bad art = “Why do you only have Hawk and Dove #1 and not the rest of the series?”

Batwing #1: Loved it. The new African Batman is a cop from the Congo, trained and equipped by Batman to fight a machete-slashing madman. Gorgeous art. Taut story. It’s about time comics mined the wealth of stories coming out of Africa.

Detective Comics #1: Pretty dull stuff, same old same old, until the last page, which will make you squirm and smile at the same time. Batman has undergone the least reinvention, but that’s okay — he was fine the way he was.

Justice League International #1: This is an attempt to recapture what Giffen and DeMatteis did so well 20 years ago. It doesn’t work.

Batgirl #1: Babs is back in the cape, and in a neat way. I see a lot of potential here, and the art is gorgeous. This isn’t an origin; this seems to be the old Barbara, from the old continuity, back in action. The only change is her father’s newly Gary Oldman-style brown hair and ‘stache.

Stormwatch #1: Terrible. There was an opportunity there to leave the WildStorm characters in their own continuity, but for some reason DC decided to tack them out of the bleed and into the main, so we have a new assoholic Apollo and lame characters who explain their powers as they use them, a Claremont holdover I’ve never liked. “Fine! I’ll use the alien power crystal embedded in my head to translate the linear matrix!” Or something. Once again, DC has proven it is impossible to write a good story with the Martian Manhunter in it without having him eat Oreos.

I didn’t read Men of War, with a new Sgt. Rock, or OMAC, because they looked terrible. And I dread the new Green Arrow, which is taken right from that TV series. Flash? I’ll get into Flash. Always have.

• Lowlights: My biggest beef is that I can’t tell when these stories are occuring in relation to one another, something that was a problem after Crisis in the ’80s. But I’m not worried. I’ve weathered Crisis, Zero Hour, Hypertime, Infinite Crisis, Flashpoint, whatever. I’ll live.
• Highlights: Apparently JSA is relaunching with an Earth-2 premise. Right on, kids. Adult Robin, Huntress as the daughter of Batman and Catwoman and some Sylvester Pemberton action … that, at least, makes me happy.

Note: In case you thought I was joking about the movie tie-in crap, look at this photo of Henry Cavill as Superman in the next film (cape added for effect; it appears it will be CGI for much of the movie):

“Did you remember to bring the package?
It had my little red shorts in it. In the package. “