As per yesterday:

Andrew Miller: What’s the best horror movie that most people haven’t heard of?

I’ll go with Demons 2, Dario Argento’s sequel to his somewhat more famous but less scary Demons. For those not in the know: the Demons films are essentially “fast zombie” films twenty years before fast zombie films became a thing – the titular demons attack and either kill their victims or turn them into more demons in a very zombie-like way, and the movies are gory and violent. The first one is okay, but the second one takes place entirely inside an apartment building where the demon attack begins when a girl watches a TV show with a demon in it and then the demon on the TV sees her and comes out of the TV – which is ridiculous, of course, but it sells the horror quite effectively and the movie as a whole is a pretty good take on the “locked in the building with zombies” genre. Except, as I said, twenty years before that was really a thing. The original Demons isn’t bad either, but I like the second one better.

What’s the best horror movie that has an undeservedly poor reputation?

Probably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. Yes, the one with Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey. I’m not going to say it’s good exactly, but it got pilloried for being total shit because it’s not like the earlier films in the series – this one is just sort of insane in a weirdly entertaining way and I think it deserves to be resurrected as a bold failure if nothing else.

Goattoucher: Why, God? WHYYYYY?!?

Bud Dry.

Darren K: Do you like travelling? Have you done much of it? Left the continent? Been to Winnipeg?

Yes, no, yes (Australia, Bolivia, and South Africa when I was little), and yes (it’s quite pretty along the river, but other than that – sorry, too small for me).

Bret: Pete Ross (The Superman supporting character): Why doesn’t he work?

Pete Ross doesn’t work because there is nothing special about him; he learns that Clark Kent is Superboy completely by accident and that is basically all there ever has been to the character, and it’s simply not enough because A) Lois either already knows or will eventually figure out that Clark is Superman, B) there’s a strong argument that Perry White and Jimmy Olsen know (or have at least guessed) and are just playing along because Clark is their friend and they’re covering his ass, as friends do, and C) Batman knows, and if you’re gonna write a Superman story, are you going to team him up with Batman or Pete Ross? The answer to that question is never going to be Pete Ross.

mason stormchild: Do you think reddit is basically becoming 4chan with a veneer of respectability?

“Becoming”?

Brendan: What do you think the best policy is for coming up with fantasy names/words without making them sound too silly?

Take a name from the culture you want the character to reflect/imitate (since nobody is really imaginative enough to truly come up with their own completely original culture, when you get down to it). Change 1-3 consonants depending on how many syllables the name has (if it’s two syllables or less, only one), keep the vowel sounds intact, and you’re done.

Kai: Marvel Studios, riding high on their successful series of movies all leading up to the Avengers (which is going to be a hit whether it’s actually awesome or manages to totally suck, let’s be honest here), is looking for their next big Marvel-verse thing and comes to your door with a dump truck full of cash and a request for you to take the helm of their newest project, a Doctor Strange movie. So how do you do it? Who do you cast? What’s your script breakdown look like? Bear in mind that you have to try and keep things roughly within the style and tone of the Marvel movies we’ve seen so far, but beyond that you can tackle it however you like.

Dr. Strange is, I think, one of the great unexploited origin stories in comics and a film version of it would be the wisest course for an initial Dr. Strange film: a bad (but not irredeemable) person becomes a good one when his quest to make himself whole becomes a quest of an entirely different sort. The overall tone would be more contemplative than your average Marvel film (although still with comic moments) and lean more in the direction of Guillermo del Toro visuals than Joss Whedon-style wit because you really have to sell the otherworldliness of Dr. Strange in order to make him stand out from the superheroic crowd, but you’d still have the vicious and awesome magical battle with Dormammu as your closing piece. I would probably borrow a few story elements from JMS’s Strange miniseries since it had some excellent ideas in it.

And: Benedict Cumberbatch as Strange, Daniel Dae-Kim as Wong, James Hong as the Ancient One, August Diehl (from The Counterfeiters) as Baron Mordo and Rosario Dawson as Clea.