Why do you guys cover some movies—particularly in the horror genre—and not others?

That was essentially the question Ethan had for us recently. He wrote into Plugged In and asked:

Ethan, that's a very good question, and the simple answer is this:

Horror movies scare me. And my editor gets sick of me asking for combat pay.

I'd rather avoid horror movies if at all possible, and I'm not alone. Most of my fellow Plugged In-erites would rather sit through a whole season of The Smurfs than review Saw XXXIII. We really believe that watching too much of this stuff isn't great for anyone—even us. And so we're always more tempted to drop a middlin' horror flick from our review roster than, say, a family comedy.

Why review them at all, you ask? Well, because people watch them, of course—even our very discerning readers. Informally, we've found that 80% of our readers go to R-rated films on occasion, and we can't assume that Saw will never be among them.

So it's actually kind of rare for us to skip one. And if we do, we usually have a good reason. Sometimes it's because the horror film in question didn't have a very wide release. House of 1000 Corpses, which started its theatrical run quite small and never got above 1,000 screens, likely fell into this category. Sometimes it's because we're short-staffed or in the midst of a packed movie-review week: The Devil's Rejects, which did have a pretty wide release, was probably a casualty of this.

And, to tell the truth, those films came out years ago, and we're simply watching more movies these days—we set a record for films reviewed last year—which makes it all the more likely that even lower profile horror flicks will get covered. We want to give you, the reader, as much information about any film that might be coming to your local multiplex. And, personal preferences aside, we'll do whatever we can to make that happen.

Thanks, Ethan, for the note. Sorry we don't have a review of House of 1000 Corpses for you. But Saw VII? You can count on seeing something from us on that one. Unfortunately.

Granted, the fish in question—safely ensconced in a friend's dorm room—subsisted entirely on Cheetos, old test papers and unwary college freshmen, which means it didn't present a danger to normal folks.

But if piranhas splash around in Nebraska dormitories and gnaw on calculus textbooks ("the fish ate my homework, professor!"), maybe folks visiting Lake Havasu, Ariz., do have reason for concern over a South American fish attack. Maybe they're just being prudent.

Or maybe not.

Let's back up for a minute.

Lake Havasu is the real-world filming location for the 3-D remake of Piranha, the grade-Z horror film released into the wild today. The movie's scaly CGI stars are supposedly prehistoric piranhas, jarred awake from a looooong hibernation by an underwater earthquake to terrorize bikinied spring breakers.

It's cinema at its schlockiest—an R-rated gorefest that no one would take seriously. Would they?

But according to Lake Havasu officials, some guests refuse to dip their toes in the lake, fearing they might become the subject of a feeding frenzy. And that's before the flick's been released.

"Even with the assurances of our most astute hotel staff, they still have thumbed their noses at the thought of wading into our pearly blue waters," Douglas Traub, president of the Lake Havasu City Convention and Visitors Bureau, told Entertainment Weekly's Popwatch blog.

Popwatch tells its readers that Lake Havasu is, as far as anyone knows, completely piranha free. In a post detailing 10 reasons to visit Lake Havasu, six are variations on the theme, "there are no piranhas." Often with multiple exclamation marks.

"We have not had a piranha sighting," Traub insists, much less any piranha-related fatalities. "It may be a long time coming." Particularly if David Schleser (author of the book Piranhas—A Complete Pet Owner's Manual) is right in saying that piranhas don't seem to be that interested in devouring people in the first place. In fact, the critters are more often like Amazonian garbage disposals than cold-blooded killers. "You'll pass villages in the Amazon basin, and we know there are piranhas of several species there, and the kids are swimming, and they don't get attacked," Schleser says. "Even the ducks swimming in the water won't get attacked."

Still, even as visitors flock to Lake Havasu in advance of the movie, some would-be swimmers are staying safely on the beach, hoping fervently that the hypothetical piranhas won't sprout legs and make a mad dash for their coolers.

Salt

The Other Guys, a Will Ferrell-helmed send-up of those action-packed buddy-cop flicks that have flourished on the big screen since, oh, In the Heat of the Night, gunned its way to the top of the box office with $35.6 million. The comedy nearly doubled the $18.6 million take of second-place Inception—a rude wake-up call indeed. Step Up 3D, the week's other major newcomer, spun its way to a respectable third with $15.5 mil. Salt and Schmucks rounded out the top five with $11.1 million and $10.5 million, respectively.

I never quite know what to expect when I see a Will Ferrell movie anymore. The stuff of his I've reviewed for Plugged In—Semi-Pro and Step Brothers—both finished near the top of my "least favorite movies" list. But I thought Stranger Than Fiction was a pretty fascinating flick, and Elf was strangely charming. Granted, these films had their problems (most films do), but were a cut above what I usually see from Ferrell.

So for me, The Other Guys was both a pleasant surprise and a profound disappointment. I really liked the movie's underlying message—that living one's life within some reasonable boundaries can be, frankly, kinda cool. And it was pretty funny at times. Plus, being a Honda Fit owner and Simon & Garfunkel aficionado, I can't help but have a soft spot for a lead character who drives a Toyota Prius and listens to Little River Band. But the content got really burdensome. There was just too much gunk here to excuse. I'd like to like The Other Guys more … but I can't.

So, oil's still washing up on the gulf, the economy's in the doldrums, the honey bees are dying and my favorite baseball team, the Colorado Rockies, have lost nine of their last 11 games.

Naturally, my thoughts turn to zombies.

I'm only half kidding. Zombies are big in the entertainment biz these days, which pretty much forces me to pay attention to them. We've seen zombie movies (Zombieland), zombie video games (Singularity) and I even recently read a bit of zombie literature (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Now I understand that Brad Pitt has just signed to be the lead character—living, I presume—for World War Z, a movie based on a novel written by today's modern-day zombie expert, Max Brooks (author of The Zombie Survival Guide, which recently sold its 1 millionth copy).

In an interview with Time magazine, Brooks says that all of our minds tend to turn to zombies in times of trouble. "We're living in times where there are really big problems," Brooks says. "We've got terrorism, economic problems, unpopular wars, social meltdowns. The last time we dealt with this stuff was in the '70s, and that was the last time zombies were really popular." He adds:

Now, zombies are an inherently problematic genre of entertainment for the thinking Christian. Beyond the obvious grisly content concerns (rarely will Plugged In laud a movie in which the undead are gorily dispatched with shotgun blasts), zombies stir a host of theological issues, too. If there's nothing beyond the realm of God's saving grace, should we Christians try to evangelize the shambling masses? If we meet a zombie, should we try to invite it to church or small group?

But all that aside, it makes me wonder: Are our societal concerns sometimes imperfectly mirrored in our entertainment, however flawed that entertainment might be? I go back to the 1950s, in the dawning of the atomic age, when movie theaters were filled with B-movie blobs and aliens and giant crayfish. Or the 1930s, in the heart of the Great Depression, when Dracula and Frankenstein were brought to the silver screen. It seems that Brooks may have a point. But then when I think about World War II—perhaps the greatest crisis of the last century—most of our films during that period were … well, not very horrific. What gives?

Holdover Despicable Me scratched to second place with $32.7 million, while another newcomer, Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, conjured up a disappointing $17.3 million for third. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Toy Story 3 rounded out the top five.

But while Eclipse and TS3 pushed their collective 2010 takes to $265 mil and $363 mil, respectively (TS3 is the year's highest-grossing film), the story this weekend was Inception: A live-action, high-concept, original film released in (gasp) the summer. Isn't summertime supposed to be the days of sequels and reboots and movies featuring1980s playthings? Could Inception be the start of a trend?

Color me skeptical. The high-wattage presence of DiCaprio and the pedigree of Nolan (the guy behind the camera of The Dark Knight) made Inception a reasonably safe bet for Warner Brothers. Still, I think the premise of the film (and the eye-catching trailers) drew lots of folks to the theaters, and the fact that it was pretty well crafted (well, I thought so, at any rate) may keep them coming back.

Or maybe Inception owes its success to teams of dream-agents scouring the country, invading our dreams and planting ideas like, "I've just got to see Inception! I don't care if it'll cost twelve bucks, not counting popcorn!"

Come to think of it, my sleep has been a bit restless …

With that kind of payday, you wouldn't think there'd be moviegoers left over to see anything else. Au contraire, my friend. Avatar: The Last Airbender conjured its way to more than $70.5 million for second place, while Toy Story 3 managed to squeeze another $42.2 million from the box office: The Pixar film earned $301.5 mil in three weeks.

But the big story is still Twilight and its legion of rabid, movie-going fans—perhaps the world's mightiest army not on a government till. You mess with Twihards at your own peril, as I learned after I posted a less-than-vampire-skin-sparkling review of the film. Lots of angry girls and women promptly wrote Plugged In to tell me how completely clueless I was: Several were particularly put out that I took issue with Jacob's oft-shirtless presence on screen, including in a driving snowstorm (I called it "abs-solutely silly"—a line since removed), seeing as how Jacob perpetually runs a 108-degree temperature.

Which makes me wonder why, if the body temperature is such an issue, Jake bothers with pants. Particularly those heavy jeans.

Others thought that Bella wasn't at all hasty in wishing to be undead, or quibbled with the degree to which characters lie to one another ("they just didn't tell the whole truth," one said), or my argument that the film gives viewers a slightly distorted view of what love's all about. Wrote one young reader:

Which is great, and maybe even true! Edward does treat Bella just like I'd want my 16-year-old daughter's hypothetical boyfriend to treat her. Edward is "old school," as Bella says—big on courtesy and a massive proponent of abstinence before marriage.  He seems like a pretty cool guy, despite the fact he's technically dead and all. All I'm saying is that we all get morning breath and leave the toilet seat up sometimes: Endless love is possible. Endless bliss … well, that might be a stretch.

Many of the letters I received were pretty polite, others less so. But I really, um, appreciated all the passion and thoughtfulness that went in to each and every one of 'em (though I'm also quite thankful Twihard nation doesn't know where I live).

Not that I'm taking anything back, mind you. Eclipse has some stuff going for it, but it's got its problems, too. And I can't help but wonder … if Jacob ever got a job at, like, Plugged In, will he be allowed to come into work shirtless? I mean, given his high body temperature and all?

So, given your choice of watching children's toys act like adults or real adults act like children, what would you pick?

Most Americans went with the playthings this week, pushing Toy Story 3 to the top of the weekend's movie charts again with $59 million, according to Box Office Mojo. The Adam Sandler-helmed Grown Ups, in which a group of childhood pals reunite for a long (looooong) weekend, scored $41 million to finish second, and Tom Cruise's spy-caper Knight and Day made $20.5 million for third.

Toy Story 3 has already made more than $226 million in less than two weeks, which means that four of the year's top five films (Alice in Wonderland, Shrek Forever After and How to Train Your Dragon are the others) were specifically made for families and rated G or PG. Pretty interesting.

In a bizarre sort of way, the PG-13-rated Grown Ups was scrambling to be about family, too. Sandler and most of his childhood buddies are family men now, and we see through the course of the film how much their spouses and children mean to them. I walked away from the film strangely encouraged.

Not that Grown Ups' sweeter-than-expected heart made the film any better, either artistically or content-wise. The whole film often felt like an excuse to wedge several funny folks (the cast includes Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade and Rob Schneider) onto the screen at the same time in the hopes that something mildly amusing might happen along the way.

It doesn't. Instead, the cast simply fire off a series of put-downs and sexual entendres at each other, making the whole film feel, at times, like an HR instructional video on bullying than a clever comedy.

But enough of my grousing. Any of you see Grown Ups? Or did you visit Toy Story 3? What did you think?