[Insert bad "Who watches the Watchmen? - nobody if they can help it" type joke here]

As the final nail in a pretty damn secure, lead-lined critical coffin, Jessica Hopper tells me everything I need to know about the Watchmen movie in one convenient paragraph.

I remember years ago reading an interview with Alan Moore in which he talked about how he found overblown, poorly thought out Hollywood blockbusters to be actively offensive, saying something to the effect of; if I write a shitty comic, ok it wastes some paper, but I'm not throwing away $150,000,000 that could be used for the betterment of mankind on realising some teenage videogamer's wank fantasy.

So quite what karmic/magickal evils the poor guy must have wrought in a past life in order to see ALL of his major writerly works transformed into a series of movies so point-missingly crippled at birth that they alone could stand as a pretty thorough A, B, C of everything that's wrong with the past two decades of Hollywood cinema, I can scarcely imagine.

Seriously: all we need now is M. Night Whatshisname doing an Americanised 'Voice of the Fire' in small town Ohio and Ridley Scott's idiot cousin making his directoral debut dragging that woman in the leather from the Underworld movies through the mill as Halo Jones, and that's Moore's whole life's work, shot in the belly and left for dead.

I guess he must at least be enjoying the royalties, extra sales, publicity, suits reading "V For Vendetta" on the tube etc, and can rest safe in the knowledge that he still has a pretty huge cadre of longtime fans who are able to appreciate his work on it's own merit, but still, it must hurt.

And, word to wise: if I were an evil, scheming studio mogul who was gonna set out to desecrate the work of one cantankerous cult author, I probably wouldn't pick a guy who looks like this, carries a big stick everywhere and practices ceremonial magic:


I've seen "Theatre of Blood". I know what's coming down.