Five-Legged Iguana

AFTERTHOUGHTS (3)

3.1 My sincerest apologies to Neil Marshall and Neil Jordan.
In my review of Blood and Chocolate (Archive: March 2007), I completely forgot to mention Dog Soldiers and The Company of Wolves as quality lycanthrope cinema.
And really, the only reason why that is, is due to the fact that Marshall’s subsequent film, The Descent, blew Dog Soldiers away. A very dark and brutal yin to Dog Soldiers’ testosterone-laden yang, The Descent is always at the forefront of my thoughts when it comes to Neil Marshall, so Dog Soldiers often gets overlooked, thus my failure to recall it when I was writing my Blood and Chocolate review.
For those who haven’t seen it, it’s about British soldiers running into some hairy opposition in the Scottish boonies.
It’s also spawned a sequel, Dog Soldiers: Fresh Meat, though this one is being helmed by Rob Green, who brought us the World War II-set The Bunker.
Now, as for the Jordan oversight, absolutely no bloody excuse except senility. So very sorry. His adaptation of the late Angela Carter’s work is dark and phantasmagoric and a must-see for any werewolf completists out there.
(I have also yet to see the Ginger Snaps films, so who knows, there could be some gems there too.)

3.2 In my review of Season 1 of Showtime’s Dexter (Archive: March 2007), I made mention of its brilliant opening credits sequence.
Well, it ended up as #3 on A.V. Club’s list of 22 TV Opening-Credit Sequences That Fit Their Shows Perfectly.

(3) Dexter
According to Showtime’s engrossing series Dexter, being a serial killer—even a serial killer who preys on his fellow killers—is all about hiding. Hiding bodies, hiding slides of blood in the back of an air conditioner, and hiding a pronounced lack of human emotion. But mostly it’s about hiding those pesky sociopathic tendencies that seethe just underneath the surface. Dexter’s opening credits hint heavily at those tendencies, with a highly sensory sequence of Michael C. Hall going through the motions of his morning routine. Hall swats a buzzing mosquito on his arm in extreme close-up, then smiles. From there, the fine line between morning routine and homicide gets blurrier and blurrier. The most graphic scenes come when Hall prepares his breakfast. He slices ham with a sharp knife, butter sizzles in the pan, a blood orange is sawed in half—all shot in the heightened style often referred to as “food porn.” Here, it’s closer to “food snuff film.”
(coloured text from avclub.com)

Check the list out. It’s got links to YouTube, where you can see the sequences yourself.