Buffy The Vampire Slayer

I saw Cloverfield Saturday night, opening weekend, with Dark Horse Publicity Director Jeremy Atkins and International Licensing Coordinator Tim Wiesch, in a packed theatre at a ten o’clock show. Don’t avoid the crowds on this one—see it on the big screen. I was expecting to be entertained, but it blew away those expectations. While my body was tense through most of the movie, ready to run as soon as the sirens went off, I found myself laughing over and over. I love when filmmakers bother to write great scripts for the sort of movie for which someone else would have pasted together throwaway lines of dialogue that they remembered from the drive-ins.

The writer of Cloverfield, Drew Goddard, started his career on the seventh season of the Buffy show; his second credit’s the award-winning episode "Conversations with Dead People." After writing scripts for Angel, Alias, Lost, and now Cloverfield, his most recent scripts, thanks in part to the WGA strike, are all for Buffy Season Eight, "Wolves at the Gate." The epic sense of drama that you associate with the TV shows he’s worked on translates perfectly to the story that he and Joss have come up with, and, if you’ll pardon an unavoidable pun, the stakes are staggeringly high this time around.

Drew’s also one of the funniest writers from the Buffy series—those laugh-out-loud bits from Cloverfield are signature Drew moments. He wrings laughter from the audience without ever stooping to telling jokes, and he can put the funniest lines in the mouths of relatively witless characters, like Cloverfield’s Hud, without ever taking them out of character—although with "Conversations with Dead People," as with "Wolves at the Gate," Drew defines the character of Andrew Wells, one of the sharpest if most absurd wits in all of TV or comics.

I’m not much for movie reviews, but go see Cloverfield. It’s bleak, but it’s a roller coaster, and nothing’s more fun than that. And don’t miss the next big thing for Buffy, with "Wolves at the Gate," first issue of which is on sale March 5.