Early words on Cloverfield.

Everyone's pointing to Harry Knowles's rave for Cloverfield; now, at Cinematical, Erik Davis is also readers: "Which Knowles Quote will Paramount Use in Future Cloverfield Advertisements"? Erik's also got a big Cloverfield linkage roundup.

"It's amazing in that it's so short (by my watch about 74 minutes without credits), and yet so fierce," writes Jeffrey Wells. "This movie is REM madness. It is Guillermo del Toro on a tab of brown acid with a little crack thrown in."

Updated through 1/16.

In the New York Sun, S James Snyder follows the trail of online crumbs dropped by the PR campaign.

Update: "Paramount Pictures has given Premiere.com two brand new Cloverfield TV spots as online exclusives."

Update, 1/16: "Cloverfield originated with Abrams wanting to reenergize the monster movie, to bring into the 21st century the creepy-fun flicks [JJ Abrams] had enjoyed as boy; not the charnel-house blood baths of current horror films but rather such enigmatic thrillers as Ridley Scott's Alien, David Cronenberg's The Fly and John Carpenter's The Thing - movies that surpassed any supposed limitations of the genre," writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. "'Cloverfield is meant to explore the very real and obvious fears we are all living with everyday,' said Abrams, 'to let the audience have the experience but in a much more safe and manageable way.... I believe there are a whole lot of people who want to have that kind of catharsis and who don't necessarily want to see documentaries about the very issues they are grappling with internally.'"

"Lower your expectations greatly and you won't be too disappointed in JJ Abrams' production Cloverfield," writes Grady Hendrix. "Technically compelling it manages to wring at least two goosebump moments out of sheer filmmaking skill alone, which is a good thing because the story, acting, actors, plot and pretty much everything else couldn't wring goosebumps out of a lumpy goose."

Also at Twitch: "Cloverfield is really a love story with a monster added in for good measure," writes The Visitor. "It's essentially about a guy who gets on an amazing race across Manhattan to save the girl he slept with, while a gigantic monster rampages in his path."

Keith Uhlich revisits "Top Movie Monsters" at UGO.

Quint to AICN readers: "Yes, I've seen the movie and yes it is good. But for the love of God I hope you guys lower your expectations."

"Watching it, you're struck by how American cinema is still struggling to process the events of 9/11," blogs Shane Danielson for the Guardian. "What Cloverfield does best is build a sense of catastrophic dread, much as Abrams did on TV with Lost."

"Since the ideal way to see Cloverfield is to know as little about it as possible, let me say right off the bat that the movie is exciting, terrifying and breathlessly entertaining," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "You should go see it and then come back to read the rest of this review, which contains a lot of spoilers."

Posted by dwhudson at January 11, 2008 11:06 AM