Before anyone asks, “Haz-Mat” is short for “Hazardous Materials.” This means anything from radioactive waste to enriched uranium cores used to make atomic bombs. One must wear a Haz-Mat suit to work with such deadly substances, much like my colleague in theoretical physics Dr. Gordon Freeman did in Half-Life and Half-Life 2.

And it is in honor of Dr. Freeman, The One Free Man, He Who Killed Head-Crabs For Your Sins, that I devote the fourth Wednesday of every month in my Doom Dispatch column towards “Haz-Mat Theater.”

Haz-Mat Theater is basically the Bizarro-World version of Masterpiece Theatre, in that I will review, for your reading pleasure, the worst of the worst in terms of motion picture entertainment.

But I will not pick the films to review”¦ No, that will be your job.

Yes, shoot me an email at and I will review the shit out of what YOU think are some of the worst movies ever made. And I promise each and every one of you that I shall regard these films with the same tact, decorum, and level-headed grace that I display towards Dane Cook and Eli Roth.

There Will Be Blood
2-Disc Collector’s Edition
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Dillon Freasier, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O’Connor
Paramount Home Video
Release Date: April 8, 2008
Rated R

The arrival of a new screener in the mail here at the Clemens compound is usually an instance of great wariness. It is either a low-budget horror movie that’s painful to sit through, or some middle of the road theatrical feature that needs all the help it can get now that it’s available on Netflix.

Oh sweet almighty Christ, is today’s movie an exception. I’ve gotten a lot of movies in the mail, some good, some bad, some that are so awful they shouldn’t be screened near an open flame. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood is the only one that will be remembered after all of us are dead and gone. That I got my grubby, heathen hands on it a week and a half before the rest of the world was enough to make me cackle like a mad scientist.

Freed from the sound and fury of a theater setting, one can fully burrow into There Will Be Blood on the level of the motivation and consciousness of the characters, particularly Daniel Day-Lewis‘ ego-driven Daniel Plainview. I think it’s safe to say that watching this film on DVD is almost a completely different experience from watching it in a darkened auditorium. The latter is like bearing witness to tragedy on an epic scale. The former is like being locked in a closet with a wild animal.

And in my continuing adventures in painting a huge bullseye on my back, I must start this week’s article by saying”¦

I just don’t give a shit about Fanboys. In fact, the whole thing’s starting to piss me off, and no, not in the way you think. I can’t seem to go anywhere on this hole of an Internet without tripping over an article by some window-licker with his Admiral Ackbar underoos in a bind because a movie he hasn’t seen has been transformed into ANOTHER movie he hasn’t seen.

For those of you not aware with the situation, a movie has been made called Fanboys. It was shot in 2005, independently, and was sold to Harvey Weinstein and his distributor The Weinstein Company. Fanboys was intended to be a kind of dramatic comedy about five friends, obsessed with Star Wars, who venture to Skywalker Ranch in Marin County in 1998 to break in, in an attempt to be the first people in the world to see Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

We all know how THAT would turn out.

I don’t think there’s a shortage of prissy, hipster fucks that can’t stand Dancing with the Stars. They don’t like it because, well, everyone else DOES like it. It’s a reality show. It’s a game show. Or any other surface reason that these people can find to devote the love and care that they only reserve for, well, not loving or caring about anything.

But one thing these people have in common is that they will dismiss a trifle like Dancing with the Stars“¦ Without actually having seen it. No, that would take away too much time from listening to tuneless indie music and watching small out-of-the-way movies for no other reason than the fact that they’re small and out-of-the-way.

I do not want to be like these people. They’re pants are tight, their sunglasses are oversized, their music is shitty, their women lack fire, and they have never wept with joy. So I took it upon myself to sacrifice my March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day) and the early part of my March 18 (National Hangover Awareness Morning) towards watching the season premiere of Dancing with the Stars and writing this column about it. Because I at least want to WATCH the show before I condemn it. This is the first episode of the show I’ve seen, and throughout all this, I have learned one very important thing:

That the only thing more annoying than prissy, hipster fucks”¦ are prissy hipster fucks when they’re right.

Face it, my geeky brothers and sisters, remaking movies has been the new black so long now that it’s turning gray. This apparent complete lack of originality has created a huge trend in the movie industry as of late resulting in an upcoming movie schedule that looks more like 1978 than 2008 — Prom Night, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser… the list goes on. There’s a lot of R-words you can use to describe them: Redux, Reboot, Rehash, Reimagining, but a few things that are for sure are that the Hollywood machine is FAR from being done with this practice, so in a effort to shine our geek-tinged light on all of the original films that these big dog movie studios are attempting to capitalize on, we give you Remakes Run Rampant — an ongoing series in which Geeks of Doom takes a look at the original films that are the basis for the do-overs.

This series will continue for as long as they keep unnecessarily remaking films…

Funny Games (1997)
Directed by Michael Haneke
Starring Susanne Lothar, Ulrich Mühe, Arno Frisch, Frank Giering, Stefan Clapczynski
Unrated

Upcoming Remake: Funny Games (2008)
Directed by Michael Haneke
Starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt
Release date: March 14, 2008
Geeks of Doom review