Our big news this week, as Shannon mentioned in the post below, is the amazing time we had at Crypticon. We’ll have full reviews of all the movies we saw there (as well as everything else) on Thursday’s podcast but I wanted to at least mention the titles and give some preliminary impressions.

On Friday we saw two movies, Pig Hunt and The Revenant. Pig Hunt is, as you might guess from the title, about a giant killer pig. It is closer to traditional splatter horror than many of the other films we saw but with some fresh elements. Shannon enjoyed it more than I did but I didn’t hate it which is better than I expected. The Revenant is still in progress. The cut that was shown at Crypticon was slightly different from the one that had been shown at previous festivals and cons. It is a vampire movie but the mythology they use is closer to the traditional European roots of vampirism and set in modern times. The movie has the potential to be great but still needs a little work.

On Saturday we saw Pontypool a movie based on the book Pontypool Changes Everything. This is unquestionably one of the best movies I have seen in quite some time. IFC is going to be showing it on their “After Midnight” on demand channel and you should watch it.

On Sunday we saw Dead Snow which is an Evil Dead-esque Nazi zombie movie. It is definitely structured like the traditional teen-slasher movie but has a lot of over the top Shaun of the Dead like humor.

Again, we’ll be talking about these movies in more detail on Episode #18 of our podcast coming later this week.

The Monday news roundup is under the fold

Comics

♦Marvel has announced Strange Tales MAX, a three issue limited series starting in September that will feature numerous independent artists creating original stories using Marvel characters. Artists featured will include Paul Pope (THB, Heavy Liquid), Peter Bagge (Hate), Junko Mizuno (Cinderalla, Hansel and Gretal, Princess Mermaid) and many others. Robot 6 has the story and also a sample page from a Dr. Strange story with art by Dash Shaw (Bottomless Belly Button, Love Eats Brains)

♦People may remember the story from a couple weeks ago in which Megan Fox denied rumors that she would be playing Wonder Woman in the upcoming movie by saying that Wonder Woman was a “lame hero”. Brian Michael Bendis latched on to that and twittered a few even more disparaging comments about Wonder Woman. In response, io9 has a very good editorial decrying all the Wonder Woman hate.

Boardgames

♦Rio Grande Games is releasing Rebel vs Imperium, the second expansion for Race for the Galaxy. Boardgame News has a detailed review. Rebel vs Imperium will be in stores sometime within the next month.

Movies

♦The BBC has a good interview with Guillermo del Toro in which he talks about his work on The Hobbit movie, his new book with co-author Chuck Hogan and some other upcoming projects.

♦Bleeding Cool got a look at the script for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s new movie Paul. Paul is the story of two british comic book fans making a pilgrimage to San Diego for Comic Con and encountering an alien along the way. It sounds like its going to be a good one.

TV

♦My initial reaction to this next story is dismay and dread. Variety is reporting that the *shudder* SyFy Channel is going to be airing an adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age. The adaptation is being written by Zoë Green and produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov. I have serious doubts that story could be adapted into anything that comes close to doing justice to the book, especially given *shudder* SyFy’s less than admirable track record in this area.

♦Finally, this isn’t really geeky news but I just couldn’t resist it. The BBC is reporting on a French court ruling that contestants on reality shows are actually employees and are thus entitled to overtime pay and other benefits. The case was brought by three contestants on the French version of Temptation Island. I can only hope that this ruling sets a precedent and that the prospect of having to pay contestants on shows like Survivor and Big Brother for working 24 hours a day for the duration of a contest may discourage the endless stream of crappy reality shows being produced.

Video Games

E3 wrapped up this weekend. There is way more to cover than can possibly be done in just a quick roundup, but highlights included the announcement of Halo: Reach, Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, Uncharted 2, Final Fantasy XIV, new Super Mario Brothers, Zelda and Metroid games, Beatles Rock Band, Left 4 Dead 2, Facebook and Twitter applications for XBox Live as well as Project Natal, the full body motion controller for Xbox. Hopefully we will have an opportunity to see some of this stuff first hand at PAX this fall.