So, a funny thing happened a couple of days ago. A major sci-fi website linked to my blog, and suddenly my hits jumped 400%. I had 3,417 hits on Monday. Tuesday it dropped to 1,804, which was still about 200% more than I typically get in a day. Today it’s at 919 as of 9:00 pm. I expect that by tomorrow it’ll be back to a normal level.

Now, I know perfectly well that the increased traffic was from people who wanted that screencap of the infamous whiteboard from The Cabin in the Woods. Even on a normal day, all but a handful of hits on my blog come from people doing Google image searches.

But, just in case any of you lot also read a post or two and decided to come back, I want to say “welcome.”

My name is David Thiel, and I’m a 47-year-old geek living in Champaign, Illinois. In my day job I’m the program director for WILL-TV, the local PBS station. However, this blog isn’t about that. As much as possible, I try to keep separate my work life and my life life.

I’ve been writing this particular blog for more than seven years. It started as a typically navel-gazing public diary, but in recent times has become a bit more focused on geek pop culture.

I’ve disabled comments because I don’t want the hassle of dealing with spam and trolls, but there’s a guestbook link at the top of the page, and you can always drop me a note at the address in the right menu bar.

I’m very fond of pre-’70s sci-fi, Japanese monsters and cult films. I’ve been a fan of Doctor Who since the early ’70s. (It’s no coincidence that WILL was one of the first US stations to air the Christopher Eccleston episodes.) I was twelve years old when the original Star Wars hit theaters; I saw it twelve times that year. I had a birthday cake depicting the “space slug” from The Empire Strikes Back. I love Bruce Campbell, H.P. Lovecraft and Superman. The highlight of my year in Los Angeles was the time I played a man-sized mutant insect. I’ve championed Starship Troopers, Speed Racer and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I once completely embarrassed myself while sharing an elevator with LeVar Burton. All in all, it’s been a strange life.

So, that’s me. Again, thanks for stopping by. Perhaps I’ll see you again around here sometime.

Dave General David Thiel Superstar

(Note to you first-time visitors: Welcome! I just learned that io9 posted a link to my blog thanks to the “whiteboard” image below. I went from 631 hits yesterday to 2,222-and-counting today. I just want to give credit where credit is due; I found that image on the Twitter feed of one @johnfalvey, and reposted it here just to help disseminate it. So, thanks for stopping by. Hope you enjoy what you find here.)

The first weekend gross is in for The Cabin in the Woods, and while the $14 million+ take isn’t bad, the “C” CinemaScore is terrible. It means that Cabin is very much a love-it or hate-it experience, with lots of “F” ratings balancing out the stellar reviews and fanboy raves. It’s ironic (or perhaps the opposite of ironic?) given that the film is all about what happens when “the audience” doesn’t get what it wants. And apparently the audience wanted what the title and non-spoiler description promised: five kids in a cabin being butchered, without all the meta-commentary and betting pools and system purges.

And now, some random observations…

(TOTAL SPOILERS AHEAD. STOP READING NOW IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE.)

First off, this is not my image, but I know that a lot of folks have been looking for a clear shot of the “whiteboard” and I’m here to help.

Not sure if all of these made it into the film. Both the “Deadites” and the “Angry Molesting Tree” are references to the Evil Dead films, and the “Hell Lord” may be the Hellraiser-inspired creature listed in the credits as “Fornicus, Lord of Bondage and Pain.” Anyone want to guess what “Kevin” is?

I like that there’s a distinction between “Witches” and “Sexy Witches.” Also that no one is sure whether one monster is a Sasquatch, a Wendigo or a Yeti.

There are some on-screen creatures that didn’t make the betting pool, notably the scorpion-like killbot and the tentacled thing that grabs Amy Acker. Pretty sure that I saw a giant centipede in the “zoo” shot. (A book called The Cabin in the Woods – The Official Visual Companion is being released tomorrow. Perhaps it will give a full accounting of the menagerie.)

One thing I didn’t mention in yesterday’s review was my appreciation of the film’s moral ambivalence. From a certain point of view, the staff of the murder factory are actually the heroes of the story, trying to save the world from ancient evil. It’s the resourceful “final girl” who dooms humanity by refusing to stick to the script. And yet, how can we root for the folks who have casually manipulated so many young people into gruesome deaths?

I was initially disappointed that the final shot of the Ancient One was of a humanoid hand and not a squamous, Lovecraftian horror. In hindsight, I get it. It’s one final horror trope: the hand bursting out of the earth ala Carrie. It also supports the metaphor that the Ancient Ones demanding blood are us.

Something I’ve been mulling: how many movies conclude with the end of the world and everyone in it? (Thus discounting post-apocalyptic stories as well as disaster flicks like When Worlds Collide and 2012 in which enough people survive to build anew.) In the Mouth of Madness comes to mind, and one could make a case for another John Carpenter film, Prince of Darkness. In the nuclear Armageddon category, there’s Dr. Strangelove, On the Beach, Beneath the Planet of the Apes* and (arguably) Miracle Mile**. I haven’t seen it, but I understand that Melancholia doesn’t pull any punches. Then there’s 1977′s cheapie End of the World, in which the Earth explodes in the final shot. You don’t get any more certain than that.

*Yes, Cornelius and Zira get away, but that’s not until Escape from the Planet of the Apes grants them a get-out-of-apocalypse pass.

**We can never be sure if anyone actually makes it to Antarctica.

Dave Movies The Cabin in the Woods, whiteboard

The Cabin in the Woods, the newly-released movie co-written by producer Joss Whedon and director Drew Goddard, is frustrating in that it both demands and defies discussion. Believe me, I very much want to dissect it, but like Fight Club the first rule of The Cabin in the Woods is that you do not talk about The Cabin in the Woods. The less you know the better.

So if you’re even thinking that you might see it–and if you’re at all a fan of horror films or even the idea of horror films, you should–log off the Internet right now and just go. We’ll catch up later.

(MILD SPOILERS AHEAD)

The Cabin in the Woods, from its generic title to its premise of five young people heading into the dark forest for a weekend of sin, sounds like every scary flick you’ve ever seen. Which is precisely the point.

But if you’ve seen any of its advertising you already know that there’s more going on. That’s not a spoiler. The very first scene features the office drones who are orchestrating the messy deaths of these doomed kids. That’s the what. The why is something else.

If this sounds more like the Scream franchise with its knowing winks at genre conventions, that’s closer to the truth. But not even Ghostface and friends are as “meta” as The Cabin in the Woods. This is a movie that wants to explain why those kids behave so stupidly and why we want to watch them die.

It’s worth saying that this is not all that frightening. Oh, there are jump scares and rushing torrents of blood, but as we start right off knowing that the scenario is artificial, it doesn’t grab you by the throat in the way that even the first Scream did. It’s okay, that’s not the goal.

I don’t want to oversell this as the best horror film ever. (“Apotheosis” is closer to the mark.) The characters are thin by design. The conclusions reached are not that deep. Still, it’s an experience I wholeheartedly recommend, and the sooner the better.

Okay, have you seen it yet? Good, because now I’m going to give away the whole thing. You have been warned.

(TOTAL SPOILERS AHEAD)

While there are plenty of obvious references to famous fright flicks–notably The Evil Dead and Hellraiser–The Cabin in the Woods left me thinking of other possible influences. One was an old Doctor Who storyline called “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” in which the characters performed a never-ending cavalcade of deadly acts to appease an audience of evil gods. Here the suggestion is that the show has been going on since our world began, with movies about cannibal zombie rednecks only the latest iteration of our propensity for telling tales about the butchery of the young.

The Cabin in the Woods argues that we have become too inured to this sort of thing, and that perhaps it’s time to wash off the chalkboard and start fresh. Moments after the lead office worker remarks how he’s almost rooting for the spunky “virgin” to win, he’s obliviously popping the champagne in celebration as the monitors in the background show her being relentlessly attacked by a beartrap-wielding zombie giant.

There’s a boardgame called Betrayal at the House on the Hill in which the players enter a spooky mansion and start fiddling with stuff until they set off one of a myriad of random scenarios based on horror tropes. The Cabin in the Woods called to mind what would happen if the staff of Wolfram & Hart* sat down for a game of Betrayal. Sure enough, the halls would soon run red with their own blood.

The last 20 minutes of The Cabin in the Woods, in which literally all hell breaks loose, are monstrously entertaining. I want to go again right away just to get a better look at the vast menagerie of creatures slashing and swallowing the hapless salarymen. While the money shot of the movie might be the Cube-like image of the terrible underground zoo, my favorite moment is when all of those elevator doors open and every nightmare ever emerges.

*The demonic law firm seen in Whedon’s TV series Angel. Goddard contributed a number of scripts for that show.

Dave Movies Joss Whedon, reviews, The Cabin in the Woods

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about tabletop role-playing games. In addition to news and speculation about the upcoming 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve been following a number of gaming blogs for their tips on running a better campaign. That’s when I stumbled across the One Page Dungeon Contest, an annual challenge in which Dungeon Masters submit complete adventures formatted to fit a single sheet of paper–maps, descriptions and all. Many of the past winners were entertaining, clever and inspiring.

I decided to try my hand at it and enter this year’s competition. However, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, so rather than starting from scratch, I revised an old scenario I wrote for the one and only time that I ran a 3rd Edition D&D session.

The original version was my unofficial sequel to a gaming community in-joke. Years ago, professional game designer Monte Cook (now leading the 5th Edition design team) wrote a humor piece entitled “The World’s Shortest (Yet Technically Complete) Adventure,” aka “The Orc and the Pie.” (Sample text: “Adventure Background: An orc has a pie.”) It ended with a suggestion for a follow-up: “Somewhere, there is a bakery making these good pies. Perhaps it’s guarded by more orcs.”

I took that as a challenge. And so it was that one day a band of stout-hearted heroes delved deep underground to find the source of those wondrous baked goods. Goblins were murdered, pies were thrown. Good times.

Anyhow, it struck me that this adventure would be relatively easy to recraft as a One Page Dungeon. I drew a new cavern map and condensed my overwritten descriptions to the bare essentials. The result just fits on one page, though I did have to resort to an 8 point font.

Click on the .jpg below for the actual .pdf of “The Ovens of Ar-Gar.”

Not everything from the original made the cut. I left out the unhelpful old woman obsessively prattling on about her potatoes. (Crazy old ladies are a role-playing fallback for me.) I also excised the bit in which the party stumbled across the site of Monte Cook’s own adventure, a literal 10′ stone cube containing a dead orc and an eaten pie.

However, most everything else is there, including some stuff I’d forgotten about. My favorite is the Angry Fish, inspired by what I imagined to be the resentment felt by a goldfish in a bowl. The Angry Fish swims back and forth in its underground grotto, fiercely guarding its single gold coin.

You’ll note that the descriptions are short and generic. That’s because the contest specifically requests that entries be game system-agnostic. I also left the number of monsters and the composition of treasure up to the Game Master so that the scenario can be scaled to fit his or her needs.

That’s about it. Enjoy!

Dave Games Angry Fish, Dungeons & Dragons

I know that there’s no way to spin the second weekend box office for John Carter into anything good. Even Disney has already stopped trying, announcing that they expect to lose $200 million on the film once the Martian dust has settled.

However, I want to take a few moments to write about expectations and reality.

We all know that John Carter was a flop. Boxofficemojo.com began its March 11 weekend report with this: “After months upon months of box office speculation, John Carter finally opened and as expected was a huge disappointment.” They noted that it earned only $30.2 million domestically during its initial weekend. The report continued, “Disney’s marketing department has been beat up on pretty good for the lackluster John Carter campaign, and to their credit the movie doesn’t really lend itself to an easy sell. Still, making the movie is the responsibility of production, and selling the movie is the responsibility of marketing, and in that regard they clearly failed.”

Fast-forward a week.

On March 18, Boxofficemojo.com reported “With its broadly-appealing premise, popular lead actors and well-executed marketing campaign, 21 Jump Street cruised in to first place at the box office this weekend ahead of two-time winner The Lorax.” So, how much did 21 Jump Street make? $36.3 million domestically. Just $6.1 million more than the mega-flop that is John Carter. We can now quantify the advantage of a broadly-appealing premise and well-executed marketing campaign*.

Looking at the international box office–where the real money is made–John Carter grossed $70.6 million in its opening weekend, and was up to $126.1 million as of Monday morning. 21 Jump Street made $7.2 million…one-tenth of Carter‘s first weekend. Granted, the comedy played in far fewer countries, but–as the article I linked to in the opening paragraph explains–that’s because action films are an easier sell in foreign-language markets.

Nevertheless, 21 Jump Street is a hit. You can bet that they’re already planning the sequel, and that everyone else will be looking to dust off other ’80s cop shows to remake as comedies. John Carter, however? Floparoo. Only $180 million worldwide. What a stinker.

Let me be clear here. I’m well aware that John Carter cost an insane amount of money to make and sell: somewhere upwards of $350 million. And according to Boxofficemojo.com, the production budget of 21 Jump Street was a mere $42 million. In terms of return on investment, there’s a clear winner here. (Jump also received significantly better notices, but I suspect that the most brutal reviews of  Carter had less to do with its actual merits than with its bottom line.)

As an audience member, why should I give a shit how much the studio spent? Theaters don’t offer discount pricing for inexpensively-made movies. Marketing budgets and production overruns matter to bean-counters and entertainment reporters. The only real difference any of this makes to me is the extent to which the return on investment influences future film production. When movies I like are perceived as poor performers, studios are less likely to make movies I like.

There, unfortunately, the market has spoken.

*I have nothing against 21 Jump Street. I haven’t seen it yet. By most accounts, it’s pretty funny.

Dave Movies John Carter, just sayin'

Look, I get it. My tastes and yours rarely overlap. Your eyes glazed over for Speed Racer. When Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow premiered, you said that you were washing your cat. And you don’t even own a cat. So I wasn’t surprised that you didn’t even meet the film industry’s tragically lowered expectations for the opening weekend of John Carter. But, really. Fewer of you showed up for the first-ever film adaptation of the century-old, seminal work of sci-fi adventure than did for Battle: Los Angeles, 10,000 B.C. or Cowboys & Aliens. Cowboys. And. Aliens.

I’m ashamed of you.

Oh, we can blame Disney’s marketing department for not understanding how to sell you on it. They went so far as to castrate John Carter of Mars to plain ol’ John Carter after they concluded that you avoided last year’s expensive boondoggle Mars Needs Moms because of the word “Mars.” (Instead of the more likely offender, “Moms.”)

We can also look at the disappointing history of films that appealed first and foremost to hardcore geeks. But heck, even Watchmen nearly doubled John Carter‘s $30 million weekend. You really, really didn’t want to see this one.

What truly gets me are the reviews, many of which are as scorching as the desert wastes of Barsoom. I feel as if you didn’t even see the same film I did, that perhaps the theater accidentally screened some early ’80s leftover starring Reb Brown. Because while I won’t claim that John Carter was Raiders of the Lost Ark, it wasn’t Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull either.

What I saw was a good-humored adventure with visual spectacle, a scantily-clad and muscular cast, plenty of PG-13 bloodletting and an adorable slug-puppy companion that should have been the Breakout Animated Character of 2012.

I’ll grant you that it has a slow build in the way that action films once did before Steven Spielberg strapped them to the front of a runaway mine car. It takes a while to get to the action, but once John Carter, sword in hand, begins leaping Martian airships in a single bound*, the movie becomes giddy fun.

I feel that John Carter is perhaps the purest distillation of early pulp sci-fi we’re likely to see. It even works in some of the quirkiness of author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fantasy worlds. We all know Burroughs from Tarzan, but his other series–such as those set in the inner world of Pellucidar or the prehistoric island of Caprona–have some very weird shit going on.  You get a taste of that in this film, what the mysterious energy source of the “Ninth Ray” and the hyper-advanced Therns who use its power to shape the development of civilization on Mars (and beyond).

The brutal criticism and–more importantly–your apathetic response have pretty much scuttled any hope of a follow-up, and will probably send former Pixar director Andrew Stanton back to making features about animated dustmops, but you can’t take this film away from me.

*While the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian stories on Star Wars and Avatar is obvious, I previously hadn’t given much thought to the connection between John Carter and the original incarnation of Superman. They even have the same rationale for their strength and super-jumping ability: the relatively lower gravity of their adoptive worlds.

Dave Movies disappointment, John Carter

RIP Ralph McQuarrie, the artist who did the earliest concept design work for the original Star Wars.

McQuarrie performed similar duties on both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Battlestar Galactica, completing a hat trick of late ’70s sci-fi pop culture design.

A few years back, Hasbro produced action figures based on McQuarrie’s designs that accompanied the early drafts of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.

Thanks, Ralph, for providing the images of so many of my young adult dreams.

Dave Star Wars obituaries, Ralph McQuarrie

The guy in the center just rolled a “natural 20″ on the “Gender and Relative Attractiveness of Your Fellow Players” chart. (Also the “Unlikely Occurrences” chart.)

By the way, I used to have those dungeon tiles. I bought them at Gen Con. They were made of cheap particle wood, but did I ever love constructing labyrinths out of them.

Image from the late, lamented kids’ magazine Dynamite. The full article is surprisingly fair and well-written for what appears to have been 1980.

Dave Games Dungeons & Dragons, highly unlikely, smokin' hot geeks

Whatever I may feel about the prequel trilogy and the ancillary stories that have clogged the arteries of Star Wars fandom since the publishing of Timothy Zahn’s post-Return of the Jedi novel Heir to the Empire back in 1991, I’ll admit that that particular fictional world continues to fascinate me. So it was that I was intrigued by James Luceno’s recent hardcover novel, Darth Plagueis. It details the backstory of the Dark Lord described by Chancellor Palpatine to young Anakin in the movie Revenge of the Sith.

While the movie only implied that Plagueis was the former master of Darth Sidious (Palpatine’s own Sith secret identity), the novel promised to make their relationship clear. I hoped that it might also clarify one of the nagging questions at the heart of the story, the matter of Anakin Skywalker’s parentage.

The first of the Star Wars prequels, The Phantom Menace, introduced a number of controversial elements. (I mean, besides Jar Jar.) Chief among these were the so-called “midi-chlorians,” quasi-scientific fictional organelles similar to our own mitochondria. They were said to provide a link to the mystical Force from which both the Jedi and Sith warriors drew their powers. Furthermore, it was suggested that these microscopic organisms had somehow impregnated Anakin’s mother, thus fulfilling the prophecy of a Chosen One who would bring “balance to the Force,” whatever that meant. (You know, I’m a little embarrassed just typing out all of this.)

In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine’s retelling of “The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis” included a reference to the Dark Lord’s ability to influence midi-chlorians not only to hold back death, but to create life. Many viewers inferred that the off-screen Plagueis might have astrally knocked-up Anakin’s mom as part of the decades-long scheme to subvert the Republic and its Jedi protectors.

Here was Lucas doubling down on some of the sillier bits of The Phantom Menace. And yet I was kinda willing to go along with it, if only because it made the Sith Lords’ plan that much more devious. I liked the idea that Plagueis might have taken advantage of the old Jedi prophecy to plant an unwitting mole in their midst.

So it was that I voluntarily dove into 368 pages’ worth of Sithtastic history.

Darth Plagueis, the novel, is the literary equivalent of spackling. It’s an attempt to tie together disparate story strands from various Star Wars spin-offs and explain what was going on behind the scenes in the lead-up to the Clone Wars. I’m not well-versed in many of the comics and novels, but even I recognized elements from Heir to the Empire, Shadows of the Empire, the current story arc of the Clone Wars TV show, and even the old Droids Saturday morning cartoon. Passages of the book read like an accounting of random Wookieepedia entries. An example:

If any Jedi were present, they would be sitting in contemplation, as Maul knew he should be doing, as well. Or if not meditating, then completing work on the graciously curved speeder bike he had named Bloodfin or the droid called C-3PX, or perfecting his skill at using the wrist-mounted projectile launcher know as the lanvarok.

Personages such as Wilhuff Tarkin, Jorus C’baoth and Mother Talzin are name-checked, but play no actual role in events. An enormous cast of characters exist on the periphery, there mostly to suggest that one is reading the Grand Unified Theory of Star Wars.

As befits a story set in the decades before the prequel trilogy, there’s a lot of politicking and discussion of interstellar commerce. If you ever wanted to know more about the taxation of trade routes cited in the opening crawl of The Phantom Menace, here’s your chance.

There’s also a surprising amount of gore for a universe in which people usually fall to cleanly-cauterized lightsaber wounds. Young Palpatine (no first name, he’s already that much of a douchebag) goes all serial killer on his family on his path to the Dark Side, and it’s pretty intense for a tie-in to what George Lucas keeps insisting is a property targeting 10-year-olds.

Your enjoyment of Darth Plagueis may depend on how much you like spending time around the unrepentantly evil. The Sith philosophy at times seems to be an especially noxious variant of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. But while the Dark Lords insist that they merely view the Force from a different perspective than the Jedi, they delight in cruelty. There are good guys in the book, but they’re off on the sidelines having adventures while our protagonists are front and center kicking puppies.

One objection that I have to the book is that some major events occur off the page. Luceno devotes an entire chapter to Plagueis’ hunt for those Force-sensitive individuals that his own former Sith Master had been grooming as potential disciples–a narrative dead-end–yet tosses away other actions of far more significance. More on this in a few moments.

Okay, I’m being hard on this book–which, objectively, is not very well written–but I won’t go as far as to say that I didn’t find it worthwhile. I came for the hole-filling, and enough holes were filled to leave me satisfied overall. But to talk about that I’m going to have to get into big-time spoilers. If you’re adverse to these, skip the following and rejoin me for the final paragraph.

One notable revelation is that Darth Plagueis is still alive and active throughout most of the events of The Phantom Menace. Whereas the movie tells us flat out that Darth Sidious and his own apprentice Darth Maul are the only two Sith Lords, Plagueis is there as well, observing events right up to the final few minutes. I suppose that this bit of retconning doesn’t really change anything, but I found it interesting nonetheless. (Sidious’ murder of his Master just prior to his own appointment as Supreme Chancellor o