Several months ago I saw a monster movie called Abominable, which is an affectionately tongue-in-cheek throwback flick that reminded me of stuff like Grizzly and Prophecy. And then I stumbled across Hatchet, which would make for a perfect double feature with Abominable, because it feels like an old-school slasher flick that's been hidden on a dusty shelf for the past twenty years. And yes, I mean that as a compliment. If you possess any affection for flicks like Friday the 13th, The Burning or (ha) Humongous, then you'll consider Hatchet a grade-A treat.

The directors of Abominable and Hatchet are just about my age, which tells me that my generation of horror geeks is poised to hit the indie circuit with a vengeance. (The indie circuit and beyond, hopefully.) Hatchet wears its genre love right there on its gore-soaked sleeve, and that's why I had such a good time with the flick. It's funny without being a parody, it's unapologetically gory, and it's packed with actors who are obviously having a real good time with the material.

The plot couldn't be simpler: A chintzy tour of a New Orleans swampland turns into sheer terror as a group of goofballs find themselves haunted and hunted by the legendary lunatic known as Victor Crowley. That's pretty much it, plot-wise.

American Eagle Outfitters is dipping its leather sandal-clad toes into the film business. Variety reports that the clothing manufacturer has launched an entertainment production arm called 77E. 77E will produce "original web series and content around events it sponsors, but also will use the entity to segue into TV, movies and music." The first self-produced AE project is a "webisodic comedy" about mall employees called It's a Mall World. The project was directed by Heroes star and Rocky's son, Milo Ventimiglia, who once asked out a friend of mine. The series stars Sam Huntington (Not Another Teen Movie, Superman Returns), and was written by Adam Green (Hatchet).

Where can you see these videos? Content will be available on AE.com, on video screens in American Eagle stores (can't a man shop in peace?), and through outside partners like MTV, which is showing Mall World. Clips will also be available on myspace, facebook, and youtube, which I am told are popular internet webbysites. Kathy Savitt, executive Vice President of American Eagle Outfitters, says of the kids today: "Content is so important to who they are and how they're living their life. They're so smart and discriminating. We need to make deposits into the cool jar." I would think step one on the path to being cool would be eliminating phrases like "cool jar" from one's vocabulary, but what do I know? AE's first film tie-in is expected to debut shortly. Can a deal between Abercrombie & Fitch and Larry Clark be far behind?

One night in Austin a few months back I was hanging out in front of the Alamo Drafthouse movie theater waiting for my next Fantastic Fest movie to begin, and (as often happens at film festivals) I struck up a conversation with a hardcore handful of horror freaks. I leaned over to introduce myself and one of the guys said "Scott Weinberg? You reviewed my movie!" -- to which I replied "Adam Green? I liked your movie!" Two weeks later, we were married.

Just kidding. Adam and I did, however, become good pals with one very important thing in common: We demand high quality from our horror flicks, whether they're Overpriced PG-13 Studio Remake Part 4 or Tiny Little Horror Indie That Needs Some Love. So with the announcement that Mr. Green's Hatchet will be hitting semi-wide theatrical release (on September 7!) courtesy of Anchor Bay, I figured it was time to nail Green down and demand a few answers from the guy. Here's how our chat went down:

Cinematical: One doesn't write & direct a movie like Hatchet without having some very intensive slasher training early in life. What were the flicks that turned you from a normal New England kiddie into a raving horror fanatic? Did your parents support your twisted habit?

Adam Green: I was lucky enough to have an older brother who shared the splatter flicks with me and I had parents who were cool and involved enough in my life to allow me to see them. I think my folks appreciated that I looked at these movies as a creative outlet ... almost like magic shows if you will. When I would see a knife go through someone, it never scared me as much as it challenged me. "How did they do that?" I was always a good kid and I never really got in trouble or (even worse) became that weird kid who watches horror movies all the time and doesn't talk to anybody. (You know the guy, I'm sure he was in your class, too!) I think if I had ever shown signs of this stuff having a negative impact on me then my parents would have put the kibosh on it. I'm sure now, seeing what is happening with Hatchet, they are glad they supported my horror habit. My earliest memories of horror are Friday the 13th Part 2, John Carpenter's The Thing, Halloween, An American Werewolf in London, and A Nightmare On Elm Street ... and Hatchet is so obviously inspired by those films that I may as well have made it in 1984.

You gotta be kidding me. Looks like the MPAA ratings board has saddled the indie horror flick Hatchet with an NC-17 rating for graphic violence. While Lionsgate, Universal, Sony and the Weinsteins get consistent "breaks" on their gory fare, the little guy now has to contend with the blatant hypocrisy of the schizophrenic ratings board. (I guarantee that if Hatchet had been a Paramount pick-up, instead of it belonging to Starz / Anchor Bay, it wouldn't have to deal with this crap.) What this means is that director Adam Green must slice out some of the splat and then re-submit the film to a panel of frigid finger-waggers who wouldn't understand the tone of Hatchet even if you bought 'em the Friday the 13th box set for Christmas.

And I'm not just railing against the ratings board out of ignorance. I've already seen Hatchet, and I've also seen "R rated" fare like Grindhouse, 28 Weeks Later, Turistas, Hostel, Saw 3, The Hitcher and The Hills Have Eyes 2. And if those flicks (especially that last one) can earn an R, then it's a pathetic (and very suspicious) joke that Hatchet has been branded with an NC-17. (Hills 2 opens with a crotch-bursting birth scene and closes with a mutant viciously raping a young woman.)

The only difference between those flicks and this one? They come from established and very profitable distributors, whereas Hatchet will be the first wide release from a fledgling partnership. So basically the MPAA is picking and choosing which horror flicks they want to make "an example" out of, and hey, it's a whole lot easier to pick on Starz / Anchor Bay than it is to risk annoying someone at Lionsgate, Fox or Universal. (Yes, many of the aforementioned films had to lose some footage in order to get their R rating, but the theatrical cut of Hills 2, for example, is infinitely more "disturbing" than anything found in Hatchet.)

Matter of fact, the gore geysers in Hatchet are actually a little LESS disturbing than the material found in those other flicks -- and that's because of the tone Adam Green is employing in his debut flick. It's a very pulpy, very broad and enthusiastically "over the top" approach, one that will definitely tickle the intended audience -- but asking the MPAA to pay attention to the TONE of a horror flick, when all they really do is jot down a checklist of onscreen offenses, is obviously asking too much. "We have a movie with a swamp monster chasing comedians with a gas-powered belt sander and they gave us an NC-17 ... I'm trying to go back to when it was fun," is what Green had to say, clearly unhappy about being neutered in his first flick -- but perhaps not all that upset about the NC-17 news hitting Variety and blogs just like this one. Obviously the deletion of a few gory frames is not going to RUIN a very fun horror movie, but I'm just so tired of the blatant hypocrisy when it comes to the MPAA vs. the Little Guys.

Two of the more entertaining indie horrors that I've seen floating around festivals over the past year were Adam Green's Hatchet and Jacob Foreman's All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. (OK, Mandy was actually directed by Jonathan Levine, whereas Foreman wrote the screenplay, but I was stuck in the "possessive credit" mode and I had to think fast.) So when I got a chance to shoot the breeze with Mr. Green (hoo boy is there an interview on the way!) and he told me that he had a sequel and a romantic comedy on the way, I knew his adaptation of Dead West was going to have to wait!

But no! Thanks to the power of horror geekdom, it looks like Green has handed over the writing duties to Mr. Foreman, which means the flick won't have to wait another seven years to get rolling. (Maybe only three.) According to Bloody-Disgusting.com, the Rick Spears & Rob G. graphic novel will be directed by Green and written by Foreman ... and wait till you hear what it's about: Native American zombies! Green explains it most colorfully:

"Just imagine one of the Leone spaghetti westerns... if the Indians came back from the dead and could still fight as viscously and intelligently as they could have in life. Forget what you've seen the undead do - no lumbering about, moaning, eating brains, tired sh!t - these are hardcore PISSED off Indians that just so happen to be decomposed and horrific looking. This is going to be brutal."

Also on deck from Mr. Green is Spiral, a dramatic thriller that stars Joel Moore, Amber Tamblyn and Zachary Levi and has just begun hitting the festival circuit.

When it comes to horror on DVD, we start with outfits like Lionsgate and Anchor Bay, and since I spend a good deal of time saying very nice things about (most of) LG's horror output, now's the time to celebrate a milestone for Anchor Bay: No, not another re-issue of Halloween or Army of Darkness ... They've picked a flick for their very first* theatrical rollout! That Hatchet movie! (And let's give it up for the festival-fave horror indies; both Hatchet AND Behind the Mask will be earning theatrical releases early next year, which is a testament to the quality of both flicks; movies like these -- good, bad or awful -- generally get remanded straight to the video stores.)

Yes, it's Adam Green's Hatchet that (according to a recent press release) will hit theaters next April, a film that's played a whole bunch of festivals and gave me a very entertaining 90 minutes when it screened at last September's Fantastic Fest. Chock-full of old-school horror staples (Kane Hodder, Robert Englund, Tony Todd, etc.), a sly sense of humor and more than a few ferocious flurries of gore, Hatchet is precisely the sort of horror flick that'll please anyone who grew up on the earliest exploits of Freddy, Jason and Mikey.

Check back in a few weeks for our interview with Gory Adam Green; you won't believe what his next project is.

*I could be wrong on this. Anyone out there know if Anchor Bay went theatrical on something before Hatchet?

Two of the more entertaining indie horror flicks I've seen recently are Ryan Schifrin's Abominable and Adam Green's Hatchet. And after meeting both knuckleheads at Austin's Fantastic Fest, I can safely state that these guys are horror nerds on par with the guys who run Fangoria, Bloody-Disgusting and Weinberg's Own Brain. These guys know the body count from Friday 3, the DP on Elm Street 4, and what the hell actually happened at the end of Halloween 5. So when I saw that these two gorehounds had collaborated on a short film called King in the Box, I just knew I had to check it out.

The story is about one particular junk food mascot who earns the unholy wrath of a second drive-thru deity -- and the result is pretty darn amusing. The short is a comedy, to be sure, although I have a sneaky suspicion that the terror-fans might get a nice goofy kick out of the thing as well. And while the mini-movie does get a little gory towards the end, it's nothing that wouldn't clean up with a medium Coke and a super-sized fries.

(Unfortunately it looks like Mr. Green's official website was unable to withstand all the traffic, so I'll offer you an alternate link ... at YouTube, of course.)

And, of course, Happy Halloween.

If there's one thing the media really loves to do, it's lump a bunch of barely-connected people into an ill-fitting group -- and then give that group a clever name. Whether it's The Rat Pack, The Brat Pack or The Splat Pack, I just get irked whenever a new "pack" makes it into the cultural lexicon. Oh, you're not familiar with that last one? Yeah, it's a moniker that's been given to a bunch of "new" horror filmmakers, one that seems to imply that these guys get together every weekend to smoke weed and watch Halloween 2 together.

According to a recent article in Time Magazine, one that seems to approach horror flicks the same way a prissy schoolmarm would approach some inappropriate comic books, the members of "The Splat Pack" are Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel), Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, The Descent), Alex Aja (High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes), Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects), and James Wan, Leigh Whannell and Darren Lynn Bousman of the Saw trilogy. (Apparently Wolf Creek director Greg McLean was part of the original pack, although he goes unmentioned in the Time article, probably because he hasn't made much money yet.)

But what do these guys have in common, really, other than the fact that they all make horror flicks? I see Americans, Brits, Aussies and a Frenchman in the mix, and while some of the guys are fresh-faced and 20-something, guys like Roth have been toiling away in backstage anonymity for years. Plus, c'mon, Rob Zombie is 42 years old, so how exactly does he tie in with these kids? And why is it that Neil Marshall never seems to be quoted in these articles? Is he just included because his horror movies are ... GOOD? Apparently the Splat Pack label was created by Alan Jones of Total Film, and I'm sure the guy's an absolute expert on horror flicks -- but labels create limits, exclusions and oversights. And, ultimately, articles like this one, I suppose. (Either way, I bet Jones bangs out a book called The Splat Pack by the end of 2008.)

The UK's Christopher Smith (Creep, Severance) is young and horror-heavy, so why isn't he a member of The Pack? Shouldn't (Dawn of the Dead screenwriter, Slither director) James Gunn be one of the den mothers? Lucky McKee has made only two feature films (May and The Woods), but they're both downright excellent pieces of horror. Why's he not a member? Uwe Boll's done a bunch of horror flicks that could be accurately described as " laden with torture," so why not throw him an invitation? You want a guy who loves the word splat? Try Jake West, the guy who directed Evil Aliens. Plus I read another article a while back in which Jonathan Liebesman (Darkness Falls, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) was considered a member of The SP! Now, if that guy can be considered some sort of "future of horror," I'll eat my hat.

The common themes among the Splat Packers are ... what? They all like horror movies, they don't shy away from intense chills, harsh themes or copious gore, and they're all carbon-based life forms, I guess. But really: Does anyone out there think the work of Eli Roth is even remotely similar to that of Neil Marshall? Does a Rob Zombie flick remind you of what was seen in, say, High Tension? I mean, if you're going to define a term, then define it. And as a big fan of just about all these movies, I just gotta scratch my head when I hear these guys lumped together in one basket.

And what happens when guys like Ryan Schifrin (Abominable), Adam Green (Hatchet), J.T. Petty (S&Man) Scott Glosserman (Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon), Jon Levine (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane) and Adam Mason (Broken) start to make their way up the ranks? Will we have the arrival of Splat Pack 2: The New Generation? Back in the late '70s/early '80s, did we need a goofy little heading to remember names like Carpenter, Hooper, Craven, Dante, Landis and Cunningham?

Ultimately, I have no real point. I'd just seen the phrase "Splat Pack" one too many times and felt the need to vent. Opposing viewpoints are welcome, as long as they agree with my own opinions.