Top five movies of 2007:

5. Hatchet
This movie probably ranks higher on my list than it should, but my experience seeing it screened at the November Horror Hound convention was far and away the most fun I've ever had seeing a horror film. Sure it's sophomoric and silly, but it also throws down the gauntlet to all other genre fans and film makers out there. Let's forget about all of the remakes and J-Horror inspired dreck and let's get back to what made us fans in the first place: bloody, irreverent fun!

4. No Country for Old Men
I'm always pretty psyched for a new offering from the Cohens, but I have to admit that this one left me a bit baffled watching the closing credits. I was so mesmerized by Josh Brolin's and Javier Bardem's performances that I never realized it wasn't even their film. Definitely an awesome movie, but one that requires a good deal of discourse over dinner afterwards.

3. 30 Days of Night
The shaky-cam sequences got a bit tiresome, but this movie hit everything else squarely on the head! The typically irksome Josh Hartnett turns in a performance that is actually decent, and the story is as engrossingly ruthless as it is novel. Get ready for the glut of vampire-centric horror films and meet me in 2009 when we'll all complain that none of them were nearly as good as 30 Days of Night.

2. Eastern Promises
Cronenberg has an affinity for stories dealing with infection and disease. Most often it's a literal breakdown of the human form, but in his latest couple of films he's been focusing more upon the metaphorical infection caused by deception within relationships. In A History of Violence we see Viggo Mortensen playing the role of a bad guy posing as a good guy. In Eastern Promises we get Mortensen playing the reversal of that role as an undercover agent infiltrating the Russian mafia. It is, hands down, the best performance of the year in a film that too few people got out to see. Sure it was marketed as an "edge of your seat," thriller type of movie, but it also has the best action I've seen in years. Amazing stuff that everyone needs to check out.

1. Grindhouse
Are you really surprised? I've said it before, and I'll say it again. It's a movie that was made for people like me. I revel in classic exploitation cinema, and the idea of bringing that primal attitude toward entertainment into the multiplexes makes me giddy. Don't get me wrong, this stuff isn't Bergman. But that's the point. It's visual storytelling boiled down to its essence. It's all bang and zero pretense. It's cinema as a communal thrill ride, something that you don't get to experience at theaters today... ever... and that's sad.

Five also worth noting:

Black Snake Moan (In a year infatuated with recreating 1970s sleaze cinema, Craig Brewer serves up a slice of the real deal. Forget Pulp Fiction; Black Snake Moan is Samuel L.'s tour de force.)

The Simpsons Movie (There were lots of complaints about this being little more than an hour-long version of the television series. To this I say, "What did you expect?" For umpteen years The Simpsons has been one of a very few consistently great shows on the tube, and the movie is a suiting complement to that legacy.)

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (Yes, it was straight to video. Yes, some of the acting is sub-par. But this low-budget indie (I would guess that licensing the Talking Heads for the closing credits cost more than the whole film) does the whole "post-modern horror" thing better than the big studio offerings.)

300 (Far and away not my favorite film of the year, but still a groundbreaking piece of work. Each individual frame could stand on it's own as a captivating piece of art .)

Hot Fuzz (Didn't dig Shaun of the Dead as much as others, but I'll have to go back and give it another chance after enjoying this one as much as I did. It's a bit sad that the Brits are better at spoofing American genre films than we are.)

Five biggest disappointments:

Halloween (I never really viewed the original as the untouchable genre masterpiece that many others do, but even I felt violated after watching this steaming log fester on screen for an hour and a half. Shame on you, Robert Zombie.)

Spider-man 3 (So much has been said about this train wreck already that it seems like a waste of breath to spell out the list of offenses committed by Raimi and Co. on this outing. Suffice it to say that the third installment was overstuffed... with extra cheese.)

Beowulf (Crispin Glover was excellent as Grendel, but that's pretty much the end of the compliments I can extend to this film. In its best scenes the CG characters were a nifty gimmick. In its worst, they looked like characters that weren't good enough to make it into Shrek the Third.)

Mr. Bean's Holiday (Every year there's one movie that I'm ashamed to admit that I went to see. This year that honor goes to Mr. Bean's Holiday. I don't know what it is that made the original television series so funny, but in two attempts they have yet to translate it to the big screen. )

Ghostrider (I would have preferred a big screen adaptation of Ghostwriter to this abysmal chunk of crap.)

Top five I wanted to watch, but didn't ... yet:

The Mist (Wasn't really interested in seeing this one until I heard everyone talking about "the ending." Now it's killing me, and I have to wait until it's released on DVD.)

Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (A doc about the former Clash frontman would have piqued my interest on its own, but the fact that it was directed by the same guy who brought us The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury makes me ashamed for not tracking this one down while it was in theaters.)

I'm Not There. (I'm not one of those guys that goes nuts for Bob Dylan, but the idea of six actors (including Cate Blanchett) playing Dylan at various points in his career is interesting.)

Redacted (Brian De Palma revisits the themes laid out in his 1989 film Casualties of War within the context of the current war in Iraq. It's a rare opportunity to watch a legendary filmmaker meditate on the inhumanities of war at two different points in his life)

Five most anticpated in 2008:

Cloverfield (Regardless of how good the film actually is, this one is already a testament to the power of viral marketing. Only the man behind Lost could promise us absolutely nothing and have everybody ready to queue up for a ticket.)

Be Kind, Rewind (Contemporary blockbusters remade with Michel Gondry's craft corner aesthetic? A pack of wild (hand-crafted, patch-work) horses couldn't keep me away.)

Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero goes back to making movies on his own terms, and the early word is that the result is some of his best work in recent years.)

Choke (The first Chuck Palahniuk novel to be given the movie treatment since Fight Club. Hopefully if this one is half as good as Fight Club we'll get Invisible Monsters too!)

The Incredible Hulk (Yeah, I know. The prospect of a complete series reboot after one film is a bit unsettling, but the Hulk is just too good of a character to not get a second chance. Plus, have you seen the cast list? Tim Blake Nelson, William Hurt, Tim Roth, Liv Tyler and Edward Norton as Bruce Banner!?!? I've got high hopes for this one.)

Mmmmm...

Just thinkin' about it makes me want some chocolate milk real bad.