My girlfriend things realistic horror movies are scary, like I'm not about to leap through her window and punch her in the snoot. I think alien/monster movies are scary, like she's not about to command her Alpha Centauri buddies to tractor me into their spaceship and grind me into a delicious pink paste.

I am now going to say some positive things about Roland Emmerich's latest movie, so I'd better rule out the only rational explanation by declaring I'm in no way related to him.

Part of Big Awful Friday is about appreciating movies that stretch the traditional boundaries of entertainment. A much larger part of it is about pointing and laughing at cinematic garbage, but in the spirit of that smaller, not-just-made-up part, we should stretch ourselves as viewers, too.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe aliens built the Space Needle.

I think the real draw of social networking is it lets us pretend to be way cooler than we really are.

The movie industry must have caught on to the fact Halloween has transitioned from a children's holiday to one big adult party where all the men get drunk and all the women dress slutty, because apparently they don't trust us to not be too hungover to go see any new releases this weekend.

I'm still trying to pinpoint why vampires and their ilk are all the new hotness. My best theory so far is we all secretly yearn to get drained like a bottle of pop, but I'm working on that one.

It feels like just yesterday I was getting tortured in the theater by Saw V.

The more of them I watch, the more I'm convinced all movies from 1988-1992 need to be fired directly into the sun. There is a chance, however small, that some day an alien race will land on Earth and judge our right to exist based on our contribution to the arts, and if they choose that time period to examine, we are completely and helplessly screwed.

A good scary movie exploits our basic anxieties. Thus the runaway brilliance of The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan's timeless tale of killer trees.

When you sit down and really think about it, society-wide vigilantism is probably the way to go.

After seeing Tim Roth whine his way through Reservoir Dogs (so you got shot in the stomach, walk it off already), it's always been a dream of mine to watch a two-hour movie about him getting tortured.

I think the ultimate secret about marriage is that nobody has any clue what a marriage actually is.

Certain movies are like beef-tongue tacos: they're good while you're consuming them, but the more time you have to digest them, the more you want to vomit.

Quick show of hands: who's always dreamed of flying through space for destinations and adventures unknown?

This is how much I love you people: at this moment, it's 3:30 on a weekday morning, and I've spent the last three hours watching a 40-year-old western musical that features an intermission, two distinct forms of polygamy, and a singing Clint Eastwood. The unlucky among you will have already guessed I'm wrapping up Western Month with Paint Your Wagon, one of the most bizarre movies I've ever stumbled across.

Much as I love them, most action blockbusters are so stupid that as soon as I get home from one I have to go to my bookshelf, get out Moby Dick, fall asleep, and drool all over page iii.

Proof that zombie movies, grand as they are, are probably played out: when I do these theme months, I don't even have to try to find a zombie movie that fits the bill. I could probably do "Giant Space Crocodiles Who Conquer Earth for the Sole Purpose of Making Us All Pinochle-Slaves" Month, spend three seconds on the Netflix website, and have a theme-appropriate title in my mailbox the next day.

Just a heads-up, but Jennifer's Body is the most misleading name I've run into since finding out the Chicago Bears are played by humans.

Every day I spend at least three hours thanking the heavens television and internet cat videos have atrophied the imaginations of a generation of our youth.

Learn from my experience: being beautiful but dumb isn't everything it's cracked up to be.

Tempted as I am to break Western Month to cover the works of the departed Patrick Swayze, a man whose films I only just began to love, I am, like the gunslingers of the Wild West, honorbound to see my mission to the very end. This isn't the only way I'm like those men of yore, but since I promised my editor I wouldn't mention soiled doves again for the rest of the year, let's move on.

I've got bad news for you if you couldn't figure this out by watching his creations, but Mike Judge (Idiocracy, Beavis and Butt-head, etc.) doesn't much like stupid people.

I rag on horror sequels a lot for being so bad even Jesus can't forgive them, but the opportunity is there for them to be better than their originals.

Given that every other horror franchise in the history of sequels tries to take its later entries in a different direction from the first one, the guys running Final Destination are either remarkably confident in the staying power of their concept or hilariously disinterested in giving us anything new.

Like all members of my generation, I only know if things exist if The Simpsons has made fun of it. I wouldn't have known there were parts of the world that weren't America if not for that episode where they go to that country where all the animals live in pouches.

If cutting movie trailers is an art, whoever put together the one for Inglourious Basterds must have ordered his training off the back of a matchbook cover.

Who among us has never trembled at the thought of organized frog armies hopping through our front doors to pillage our housefly supplies and stare into our deepest failings with their frowny frog faces? All right, hands down, entire population of the world. I get the point: more people are afraid of getting eaten by malfunctioning dryers than they are of frogs.

You don't get a lot of romances told from the dude's perspective, but then again we males are emotional redoubts who would never ever do something like write a song about a girl or drink whiskey with the lights off thinking about how we screwed up or any of those things other, wimpier genders do when they're heartbroken.

The great flaw in science fiction films where aliens land on Earth is the built-in assumption that, just because they can zoom city-sized spaceships across the universe, their societies are equally advanced.

Even as a kid, I thought it was pretty ridiculous how no one ever died in a G.I. Joe battle.

What's the worst thing in the world? The magma-lamprey that lives in the Earth's core and is going to swallow us all in 2012.

Here's the measure of how flawless Judd Apatow's track record has been: when I saw Adam Sandler was the star of Apatow's new Funny People, I stopped thinking it would blow before the trailer was done.

Speaking of suspension of disbelief, you really have to drum up a lot of it for romantic comedies, too.

Apparently the trailers for Orphan were pressured into dropping the line where the evil little girl suggests it's harder to love an adopted kid than a biological one.

For us showbiz types, the biggest threat we face is getting typecast. These days I can't break into Gerard Butler's office to steal a script without getting typed as the walking slab of brawn who gets all the exercise I need just throwing hysterical chicks away from me.

In my continuing quest to appeal to no one, this weekend I decided to skip Harry Potter Makes So Much Money the Rest of Us Have to Use Seashells for Currency in favor of a semi-indie sci-fi movie that's already been out here a couple weeks.

I know I haven't done a Big Awful Friday in a while, but I had a realization. That realization was I can't track down my favorite terrible movies without dropping $20-100 a pop.

No matter how many times I yell at my kitten that he looks like a donut with whiskers, I haven't yet seen him jump on the Soloflex.

According to popular media, which hasn't yet led any of us astray, the way to emotional health is to always tell everyone else what's on your mind and in your heart.

Forget penicillin and pictures of naked ladies, the finest invention of the last two centuries has to be Netflix.

Forget penicillin and pictures of naked ladies, the finest invention of the last two centuries has to be Netflix. It's especially great if, like me, your organizational system consists of throwing things on the floor until the only way you can get in your house is by punching a hole in the roof and junk-swimming your way toward where your bed might be.

At heart, I think all of us want to be a criminal. If I'm just wrong and that's just me, then I amend my statement to say we all want to be cops--I don't even know what crimes are, let alone how one "commits" them--but there's got to be something to explain the enduring appeal of crime stories.

As the first movie I gave an F to, Transformers holds a special place in my heart.

If zombies tried to pull an outbreak on us these days, those things would be screwed.

Maybe this is just the homelessness talking, but after a while, doing the same thing every day gets kind of old.

My thirteen wives and four husbands are always shocked when we hear about how hard marriage is for some people.

Martial Arts Month has been a fun one for me. Last week I got to unleash my whip-fast sat sao technique on the Black Needle Gang, who was upset I'd revealed the secret of their Ten Form Fist. Tragically, my life went rapidly downhill and hasn't yet recovered when I had to watch 1989's Robot Ninja, the subject of this month's Big Awful Friday and capper to a feature I'll have to visit again as soon as I regrow the eyes I lost in that fight.

As a former mole-person of the New York City subway tunnels, it always gets me to see the old homestead portrayed so biasedly in movies.

When the rebellion rolls around, you'd better sign on board for the big win, because if movies have taught us anything it's that the renegades always win.