Want to know why movie nerds of my approximate age have a real fanboy affection for director Joe Dante? Here's why: Piranha, Rock 'n' Roll High School, The Howling, Gremlins, Explorers, Innerspace, The 'burbs, Gremlins 2, and Matinee. Hell, I even enjoyed his last movie, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, although I seem to be in the vast minority on that one. Unfortunately Mr. Dante is not nearly as prolific as his fans would like, so when word comes down that the flick-lovin' filmmaker has not one but TWO new projects on the horizon, we get all excited. Ooh, and both of 'em are horror movies!

We'd already heard a little bit about Bat Out of Hell, which looks to be a flick that combines air travel, hijackers, and vampires. That script comes from the horror-geek writing team of Scott Swan and Drew McWeeny, and it's one I'm certainly looking forward to. But now comes Shock with some info on another Dante assignment, and it sounds interesting enough: The Hole will be about a family of fugitives who "hole" up in a house that has a very strange ... PIT ... in the basement. Shock's Ryan Rotten says this one will be a PG-13-style horror flick, and in most cases that'd irritate me -- but Joe Dante has never really gone for the hardcore gore or nasty ultra-violence, so in this case I don't feel so bad. (I bet The Howling would be PG-13 if it came out today.)

More on these projects as the info becomes available. I'm still hoping the director decides to remake a certain Dario Argento flick, just so we can see a movie poster that says "(Joe) Dante's Inferno." That'd make me chuckle.

The CD/MP3 generation has lost something that those of us who grew up listening to vinyl used to take for granted: the ability to see cover art at a decent size. It was far easier to appreciate the cover art on an LP than on a CD or the display screen of an I-Pod, and Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell had one of the coolest covers of all time. The artwork by comics legend Richard Corben featured a muscle-bound hero riding a rocket-powered motorcycle as it bursts out of a grave. Now that's an image with which to conjure.

According to Movie Hole, Michael Lee Aday, better known as Meat Loaf, is in talks to adapt his debut album into a motion picture. The Loaf-meister is expected to produce and appear in the flick, though not as the star. Apparently the likelihood of this movie getting out of the starting gate is linked to the success of his new CD, Bat Out of Hell 3. Meat Loaf has held his own quite well in films like Fight Club, and Crazy In Alabama in which he did a respectable turn as a bigoted southern sheriff, so I see his presence in the film as a plus. No word on what the movie might actually be about, but my mind keeps racing back to that classic album cover. Might this be a Heavy Metal-esque science fiction fantasy? Maybe a horror film? Perhaps a cooking show (his name is Meat Loaf)? Time will tell, I suppose.

Not to sound negative, but it takes a lot of guts to call a movie Bat Out of Hell. In the event that the film bombs and is yanked from theaters after only a few weeks, some smarty pants blogger (and make no mistake, it might very well be me) is going to use "Meat Loaf Film Leaves Theaters Like a Bat Out of Hell" as a headline. Hey, when you're blogging at 3:00 AM and you have to be up for work in a few hours, you don't always have the luxury of being clever.