Never Go Through A Tunnel

It seems like a quick and easy way out, but dark and scary passageways usually house bad things that you don't want to bother with in the middle of fleeing for your life. It's simple: tunnels=death, for at least one person in the group. This is a tried and true fact of apocalyptic movies. Take for example the idiot drivers who decided to take the tunnel in Independence Day, toasted via fire ball (except for the ones who had that dog, but more on that later). Also who could forget the night vision moments in Cloverfield walking through New York's subway system. Avoid tunnels at all costs.

Do Not Join A Theme Gang

With the world ending, there will be many sad sacks who will try and recreate a Mad Max road warrior gang. Resist the urge to join anything theme-oriented. Basic rule of thumb: if you look like an idiot with a face tattoo or a fool running around in Medieval garb, you're going to get the sharp end of the death stick. Doomsday spelled this out pretty clearly: everyone who looked ridiculous got a ridiculous ending. Motorcycle gangs count too, don't forget even Romero's Dawn of the Dead leather riders got their just rewards for their hideous outfits and bad attitudes. Stick to the rag-tag refugee look, or lone wolf army motif. If you have to join a gang, stay in the back and never do anything you might later regret — like eat people.

Do Not Go Back For Loved Ones

If the world is ending, you may feel the need to find love ones that are in Princeton, a New York Library or a high rise apartment. This is a bad idea. Let go of your emotions and assume that everyone else in the world is dead, or trying to steal your food supplies. Going after loved ones almost always means your own death or the death of someone in the group. Look at it this way, it your loved one has survived and you meet up with them, bonus for you. But most likely they died from the plague, zombies, earthquake flood or whatever.

Never Be The First

I can't believe this even has to be said but no, do not go exploring in rooms, attic, caves, hallways or apartments where you are the first one in the door. My favorite character from Resident Evil Extinction, L.J., got bit by a zombie lady because he was checking out all the rooms to make sure it was safe. Let someone else do this, get a job as a medic or cook. There is no need for you to be first to go anywhere — let someone else do the exploring. If they find something really good, you can kill them and take it anyway.

Bring Your Pet

If you don't have a pet, I suggest you go to the pet store and steal one, looter style, or take care of your dead neighbors'. You may need this pet to help you keep your sanity or sacrifice its life for you, like in I Am Legend. Either way, animals are good luck when the chips are down for humans. You never know when a pair of love birds will come in handy to calm down a flock of murderous seagulls and crows. The same rule sometimes applies to children, but you will have to feed them considerably more.

Ditch The Biggest Guy In Your Group

They will turn into a zombie or rage machine, it's proven. Kill them before they kill you, or just ditch them at the next pass.

Don't Trust People In Uniform Unless They Have Defected From The System

Never trust the government, especially when the world is ending. It's a terrible idea, they would rather nuke the whole place than deal with people. If you see the military, run the other way or hide. Do not do what they say. The friendly people of Hollywood followed the advice of the government from Right At Your Door, and what happened to them? Same with the people of Raccoon City, from Resident Evil Apocalypse. Granted an ex-military person hell-bent on sticking it to the man can be a wonderful asset during the end of the world, just be sure to know the difference between the two.

Don't Barricade Yourself In

It always seems like a good idea, but 9 times out of 10 whatever you're trying to keep out gets in and now you're trapped. Think of the mess it caused for the cute little family in the beginning of28 Weeks Later and Shaun of the Dead. I say build a sky city in the trees.

Finally if all else fails, find the closest fridge, step in, and pray for a miracle.

1. People should dress like grown-ups. That means no pajamas. No shiny gold or silver fabrics. No GWAR gear. No matter what era you're writing about, professional people will wear clothes that allow everyone else to take them seriously. And space travelers will probably wear outfits that are functional and help keep them alive.

2. No jolly lectures. This is more of a book thing. When a character stands around for three pages explaining the author's philosophies in a cheery tone, it's the prose version of a giant glittery tiara. I'm looking at you, Robert Anson Heinlein.

3. Take off that shiny apron, robot! The robots of the future will be stronger, smarter and more durable than anything we have today — they'll basically be able to sever your spine with a flick of one of their little microfilaments. So it's understandable and desirable for robots to be cute or sexy to distract us from their genocidal potential. But "cute" doesn't have to include a silly cartoon voice, a catch-phrase like "beady beady" or a funny walk.

4. Rock music cannot possibly get sillier. There are limits to what even the brain-damaged tweens of the 22nd century will bop around to — and there's no way it could be dumber than Debbie Gibson or Aaron Carter. Barring radical brain mutations, future pop music will at least be sorta catchy and have a few okay lyrics. The worst is when a novel or comic book reproduces song lyrics of the future — and they're the author's bad poetry. Somehow, these things are always worse on the page.

5. Neologisms should be plausible. In other words, if you have a future technology, and you're coming up with a name or slang term for it, it should be something you could imagine grown-ups saying. Comedy shows us what not to do in serious SF, with the zany slang in Woody Allen's Sleeper: "It's not only cool, it's Koogat!"

6. Yay sex, but boo zany ironic dominatrixes. That's pretty much all I had to say about that.

7. Cut down on the eyeliner, Mr. Spock! Yes, it matches your blue top. But just listen to Yahoo Answers: light-blue eyeshadow looks "tacky and outdated."

8. In general, aliens should be alien, not human ethnic groups or stereotypes. This pertains to campiness because the number one cause of campy aliens is a failure to imagine a truly non-human lifeform. Instead of the shock of an organism whose life cycle and culture are totally at odds with ours, we get the wacky Jamaicans in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

9. And no more cultures with just one wise saying. If an alien race has managed to make it into interstellar space and develop artificial gravity, it might also be advanced enough to afford two great philosophers or schools of thought. Worst of all are the Ferengi on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, who quote the Rules of Acquisition as if they're the only book Ferenginar has ever produced.

10. If you must have villains, make them awesome. Mike Meyers did us a favor creating Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies — by giving us a template for what villains should not be like outside of comedies. Villains can be scary, or understated, or believable people whose agendas are at odds with the hero's... but they shouldn't kill us with cuteness.

11. If you must tackle religion, avoid being woo-woo. That means no priests with funny outfits. Yes, priests dress funny in real life, but they're still campy on screen. That also means no prophecies, especially ones with funny names. Visions are okay, if they're more David Lynch and less Derek Jarman.

12. Musicals are inherently campy. Do you ever find yourself watching the Buffy musical episode, or Rocky Horror, and thinking, "Gee, I wish there was more stuff like this in my science fiction?" If so, then maybe you should spend some time in fantasy-land instead. People bursting into song and doing that thing with their hands is directly opposed to the willing suspension of disbelief thing.

13. Punk is campy. Maybe it wasn't in the 1960s, or whenever you guys invented it, but it is now. Sorry. That goes for regular punk (just watch Doomsday) as well as cyberpunk (watch the Matrix sequels) and definitely steampunk. Steampunk is camp-tastic.

14. Time-travel leads to culture shock, not Culture Club. Journeying to another era shouldn't be an excuse for Renfaire/Society for Creative Anachronism goofiness. I've seen enough pithy Victorians (especially on Doctor Who) and doughty Medievals to last me a thousand time warps. And our ancestors may have been less technologically advanced, but they weren't freaking morons. (Well, okay, some of them were.)

15. Robots shouldn't pee. They shouldn't pee on people. They shouldn't pee in space. They shouldn't "vent coolant" in the middle of a hot robo-fisting scene. Robotic urine just should not be part of our lexicon at all.

16. A certain amount of cheesiness may be inevitable in science fiction. Just accept it. The difference between cheesiness and camp is that camp is self-aware and deliberate, and cheesiness is a result of someone fervently saying, "We're going to have giant robots fighting for ten minutes and it's going to be stupendous! Yeah!!"

17. Don't go retro. Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow winks so hard at classic scifi it's got a permanent squint. The 1930s fin-headed scifi was the original reference point for much of the seminal works of camp, and earns a starring role in Susan Sontag's foundational 1964 essay on camp. So looking backwards will only make you look ironic and funnily subversive.

18. Absolutely no go-go boots or sparkles. And no epaulets. Or shoulderpads. Or giant buckles, or insignias that are bigger than someone's hand.

19. No more Angelina Jolie. She's cute, but she camps up every role she's in. Just look at Tomb Raider. And the aforementioned Sky Captain. She's the main reason why this summer's Wanted will be a huge camp-fest.

20. War is hell, but shouty-jumpy soldiers belong in Monty Python. Yes, we get it — you're subverting the deadly conformity of military protocol by having your soldiers act like loons. But a little bit of armed-forces wackiness and slogan-shouting goes a long way. And that goes double for Starship Troopers' fake war propaganda.

21. Don't confuse "campiness" with "fun." You can create a fun, exciting storyline without going the campiness route. Space battles can be adrenaline-blasting, without any need for funny computer voices or zany puppet aliens. We like to watch people kickbox on the the deck of a satellite that's breaking up as much as anybody. Just, you know, without the shiny pajamas. Movie screencaps taken from Wetcircuit.

Two new villains are stepping up to take the place as the antagonist in Smallville. Expect to see the DC Comics' character Doomsday (notorious for slaying Superman) along with an unknown female baddie. But this may not be the last you hear from Luthor. Although he's no longer a series regular, producers of Smallville released a statement that hinted at a few cameos later in the year saying, "He is one of the best actors on television and has never failed to bring a new layer to the character of Lex Luthor in every episode. While Michael won't be a series regular and we won't have the pleasure of working with him on a weekly basis this fall, we like to think that we haven't seen the last of Lex Luthor."

But the real question is, now that Doomsday is coming to the show are they going to try and kill Superman only to bring him back as four other versions of Superman, like in the comics? Or will young Clark Kent kick Doomsday's ass? [Hollywood Reporter]

I mentioned the other day that Doomsday wasn't screened for critics, and it's easy to see why. I had to go see the first showing at our local theater, which was at noon — exactly 12 hours too early for this sort of movie. If you don't care about logic, or story, or characters, or pretty much anything except for seeing a hot woman dismember people in a tanktop — punctuated by some really, really over the top musical segments — then you'll love this film. It's not Shakespeare. It's not even Shakespeare In Love. But it's better than Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, the last film on this level that I saw.

Here's the plot in a nutshell: in April 2008, a deadly virus (The Reaper) breaks out in Glasgow and spreads like wildfire. The authorities decide, in a very 28 Weeks Later sequence, to quarantine the country and shoot down anybody who tries to get out. But then, 30 years later, a deeply dystopian and slummy London sparks a new outbreak of the virus (which feeds off poverty and overcrowding). The government sends a team up to Scotland to find out why some people survived the virus up there, led by Rhona Mitra's super-commando. Unfortunately, the last survivors of Scotland have fallen into total barbarism.

Doomsday won me over the moment I saw Rhona Mitra's removable eye. Rhona plays Eden Sinclair, who loses an eye as a small girl during the final evacuation of Scotland. When we see her as an adult, she has a prosthetic eye, with a tiny camera inside. The camera goes to a video screen (and digital recorder) in her wristwatch. So she can take her eye out and use it to look around corners, or make secret recordings of whatever she sees. It's really the only scifi-ish thing in the movie, but the first time we see it in action is (sorry) literally eye-popping.

And I'm happy to report that despite all director Neil Marshall (The Descent)'s talk about Mitra's character "keeping her femininity," she's a total hard-ass who doesn't give a shit about anything. We see plenty of scenes of her being a crazy bad-ass and not giving a shit, but just in case we miss it, Marshall has several characters look at her and say things like, "You don't give a shit, do you?" Right at the start of the movie, there's a great scene where her boss, played by Bob Hoskins, smokes with her and tells her that if she keeps going like this, she'll wind up one seriously fucked-up individual. Good to know, Bob. (The great joy of Hoskins these days is watching him slowly morph into Ed Asner.) She does cry once, right at the end, but it's brief and actually appropriate under the circumstances.

The movie is massively over the top from the first few minutes, with a blood spattering massacre at the new Great Wall of Scotland, and then a sequence where Mitra's character takes a bunch of random bad guys. (There's a naked woman in the bathtub, so of course she has a shotgun with her. Who wouldn't?) And it just gets crazier and crazier.

Inside Scotland, there are two groups of survivors. The first, in Glasgow, have turned to cannibalism and really excessive gothpunk fashion. If you don't take joy in watching the blond-mohawked leader of a cannibal tribe dance around to the Fine Young Cannibals, with two pole dancers in fishnets flanking him, then there's just no joy in you. I'm serious. The cannibal leader does a dance routine to Fine Young Cannibals. And then they roast a member of Mitra's team alive and eat him with their bare hands.

The other group of survivors, up north, is led by Malcolm McDowell. And here's where the movie just slides right off the rails. McDowell plays a scientist who was in Glasgow working on a cure for the plague when the country was closed off. And now somehow he's turned into the king of a castle, full of people in fake medieval garb. It's an entire Society for Creative Anachronism culture. And McDowell's scientist character recreates the Spanish inquisition and accuses Mitra of "sin" by having brought the outside world to his castle. (McDowell tries to trick his followers into thinking the rest of the world is dead — but doesn't seem that worried about showing off Mitra and her gang to his followers, even though they're evidence the rest of the world is fine.)

The final reel, when Mitra finds a mint-condition Bentley car in a fallout shelter, and manages to fill the tank with gas, is just bizarre. There's literally a moment where everybody involved seems to decide that if you've watched this far, you're in for the whole ride, and there's no point in trying to make sense any more. I don't know if I should spoil the end of the movie totally, but it succumbs to total dementia. I'm not an epidemiologist, but I'm a tad confused as to how Mitra's "cure" for the disease will work, and why she didn't just avail herself of it two hours earlier. And then Bob Hoskins develops the power of teleportation and becomes mildly psychic. And then Mitra makes some decisions that I can't fathom at all.

Oh, and did I mention that the leader of the cannibals is Malcolm McDowell's son? And that in the final showdown between Mitra's Bentley and the cannibals' ragtag collection of crappy cars and motorcycles, we hear a version of "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood? And the cannibal leader has a biohazard symbol tattooed on his back, and a leashed slave in full rubber bondage gear? And McDowell's medieval freaks have biohazard insignias — and biohazard stained glass?

Bottom line: Doomsday is a worthy addition to the Resident Evil canon of "butt-kicking babe in a ruined world" movies. Just don't ask any hard questions, like where the cannibals get all their pink hair dye and pristine latex bodysuits, and you'll enjoy the dancing, crashing, exploding, splattering, multiple decapitating goodness.

It sounds as though Rhona Mitra's mission to a plague-quarantined Scotland, to find a cure for the plague which is starting to hit the outside world, may turn out to be futile. Unless, of course, Malcolm McDowell is wrong... which is almost unthinkable.

• In Michel Gondry's next film, Return Of The Ice Kids (not Kings, as previously reported), teenagers invent water that makes you hear music while you drink it. And in one scene, a teenager relives a moment when he made a farting noise with his mouth during an exam, and everyone noticed, so he kept making noises "to cover his nerves," but it sounded like he was covering up a fart. Apparently this actually happened to the teenage Gondry. The kids in the film are "writing a book of peace," and it features some utopian scenes. [MTV movies]
• The live-action Star Wars TV series, which takes place between episodes three and four of the movies, may be about a Sopranos-esque crime family during the rise of the Empire. [IESB]
• Sam Rockwell's space traveler stranded in a moon base is "lonely but not alone," in Moon, the directorial debut of David Bowie's son Zowie, which just finished shooting. [ShockTillYouDrop]
• Lost's ageless island-dweller Richard, played by Nestor Carbonell, will be back in at least one episode later this Spring, and his return leads to "interesting revelations." Also, in one of the season's final five episodes, we meet two Bedouin horsemen and a luxury doorman of "British extraction" in a flash-back or flash-forward... and they may have something to do with the enigmatic Charles Widmore. [Ask Ausiello]
• With Lana missing for much of Smallville season eight, Clark's next love interest may be Lori Lemaris, the mermaid living among people from the comics. Also, season eight will still feature Chloe as a series regular, and may feature a fair bit of no-longer-regulars Lana and Lex too. [Ask Ausiello again]

The Descent and Doomsday both focus on women venturing into perilous situations. Do you think it's important that the heroes in your films are women? Do you write women characters differently, or are they just heroes who happen to be women?

It's certainly not some kind of career plan to have my heroes be women, it's just turned out that way. I actually wrote the story for Doomsday several years before I made The Descent. It was one of 3 scripts I tried to get made in the wake of The Descent and it was the one that Rogue Pictures chose to back, so it's really just a coincidence that my new hero is also a woman and I saw no reason to change the character into a man just because of what I'd done previously.

I try to write women as authentically as possible. Above all things, no matter how tough and rugged I make the characters, they should never lose their femininity.

The thing that seems most intriguing to me about Doomsday is that it seems to straddle genre lines, including horror, scifi, medical thriller, etc. Do you think this is true? Are you consciously trying to blend genres?

I love to blend genres. Taking the best elements from different inspirations and throwing them all into the mix is what makes it fun. Besides, I think the lines between genres have often been blurred at best, and that's no bad thing.

Most post-apocalyptic movies nowadays feature monsters (28 days, I Am Legend, etc. ) Are you consciously trying to reclaim post-apocalyptic movies from the monster-movie genre?

Absolutely! It's like there's an unspoken rule in movies now that virus = zombies! Well that's not what post-apocalyptic movies are about for me. It should be about human survival, because the day the next big global pandemic arrives, there won't be any zombies running around, I can promise you that. This is real, terrifying stuff, just as real as nuclear war was when the last great post apocalyptic movies (like The Road Warrior) came out. And that's the kind of gritty, savage world I'm trying to revisit with this movie.

• Here are those Wolverine set photos, showing Liev Schrieber's Sabretooth and Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, hanging out and eating apples. Schrieber has sideburns that match Hugh's, but crazy nails instead of metal claws. The photos are not that exciting, but they do give you a sense of how closely the two "animal" mutants will resemble each other in the new movie. And this is probably from a segment where the two mutants are part of some kind of military black-ops team, hence the uniforms. Just Jared, via FirstShowing]
• Here's a roundup of mostly old spoilers for Iron Man, Marvel's new movie about a guilt-ridden weapons merchant who dresses in a suit of power armor. It does include some wacky rumors, like the idea that Hillary Swank will play the Black Widow, a Russian super-spy, and Edward Norton's Bruce Banner will turn up. [UGO]
• Here's another new clip from the post-apocalyptic disease movie Doomsday, which opens March 14. [MTV Movies]
• As you may have heard, Smallville is getting an eighth season. But it turns out Michael Rosenbaum (Lex Luthor) and Kristin Kreuk (Lana Lang) won't be back as regulars. They may make guest appearances, however. Also, a Smallville regular dies in the April 17 episode, the first one written after the strike. This won't be a fake death, or a clone death, but real and irrevocable. [Ask Ausiello]
• In the Kyle XY season finale, everybody goes to the prom! Wheee! Kyle struggles to plan a night that Amanda won't forget, Josh wonders what Andy has planned for their big date, and Declan resolves to show Lori his true feelings. But meanwhile Kyle's female counterpart Jessi XX has some news about her relationship with her mom, played by Ally Sheedy. And here's a Sheedy's appearance in the episode before that, which airs March 10. [Spoiler TV]

[ShockTillYOuDrop]

In Doomsday, the lethal Reaper virus nearly wipes out a small country (I think it's England, but the synopses don't make that clear), so the rest of the world walls off that country to keep the virus in. (As far as I can tell, the virus doesn't make you savage or mean, it just kills you, unless you're lucky.) Three decades pass, and the rest of the world remains virus-free. Until one day, the virus turns up in a major city. The authorities send Rhona Mitra into the quarantined country to try and retrieve a cure to the virus by any means necessary. But you just know that if two women enter this country, only one woman will leave. It's that sort of country. Doomsday, directed by Marshall (The Descent, Dog Soldiers) opens March 14 from Universal Pictures.

The vault will hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds for the world's main food crops, allowing humanity to re-establish agriculture if our main food plants disappear due to a catastrophe. Already, "gene vaults" from Iraq and Afghanistan were destroyed due to the wars in those countries. Images by AP.

[AFP]

#3: The Doomsday Machine: Okay, so this danger from a 1967 episode of Star Trek isn't exactly a person as much as a giant machine that consumes planets to fuel its own destructive rampage, but dude! Consuming planets! One of Trek's better fear-of-technology menaces, this particular planet eater gains extra points for destroying an entire starship and, according to a novel written more than twenty years later by Peter David, having been created to destroy Next Generation villains the Borg by a whole race of Whoopi Goldbergs.

#2: Unicron: Only one man could properly portray the voice of a planet that transforms into a robot that eats planets - self-loathing much? - and that man had to be Orson Welles, ending his career with a suitable bookend to his Citizen Kane start with his last ever role in 1986's Transformers: The Movie. If you were twelve years old when the movie came out then Unicron was possibly the greatest evil Transformer ever, mostly because of the fact that he made shitty old Megatron into the Leonard Nimoy-voiced Galvatron. More proof that he was awesome came in the fact that it took toymakers seventeen years to come up with a toy that measured up to fans' expectations. But even Unicron is just a pale imitation of...

#1: Galactus: Easily the biggest and best of sci-fi's planet eaters, Galactus' victory comes from the fact that - unlike Unicron or the Doomsday Machine - he isn't a robot but an honest-to-goodness force of nature. The sole survivor of a pre-Big Bang universe, the Fantastic Four's largest enemy may have been killed more than once in various stories since his 1966 first appearance (including being eaten by superhuman zombies in parallel world comedy Marvel Zombies), but nothing can keep a large purple-bucket-headed cosmic entity down for that long, even one given to pretentious monologues about how hungry he is.

Others may come and try to steal Galactus' crown but, really, who even remembers DC Comics' Imperiex, even if he does call himself "the devourer of galaxies"? Exactly. Created by comic greats Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Galactus is proof that sometimes, the biggest threat really is the best. But what about the rest of you? Is there another villain of planetary appetite that should be added to the list?

The Doomsday Machine [Star Trek.com]
Unicron [Teletraan 1]
Galactus [Marvel Directory.com]

Doomsday, coming in May, is post-apocalyptic but not a zombie movie. People assume Doomsday features zombies because it's about a plague that wipes out most of the population, complains director Neil Marshall. But no. The plague liquefies your insides, but you don't ever come back to (un)life after that. People probably also jump to the zombie conclusion because Doomsday involves the infected Scotland being walled off, and everybody knows Scotland is full of zombies already. [Rabid Doll]

• Emily will keep getting closer to Jake on Jericho now that her city-slicker fiance Roger is out of the picture, judging from this new preview pic. Plus Emily bakes a cake to console Jake's mom over his dad's death. Thrilling. [Televisionista]
• Fox confirmed it won't screen Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem for critics, a surefire sign of toxic buzz in the making. [Cinemablend]
• The X-Men's Wolverine spin-off lost a little bit of its appeal when Gerald Butler [300] said he was definitely not co-starring. [MovieHole]
• Another movie nobody has high hopes for: video game adaptation Tekken, directed by Dwight Little (Anacondas: The Hunt For The Blood Orchid.) Near-future scifi, man against evil corporation, martial arts, you get the idea. [Slashfilm]
• Rhona Mitra (Boston Legal) stars in May's Doomsday as a leader of an elite military squad sent into a quarantined Scotland to find a cure for a deadly virus. [Actress Archives]
• The Cloverfield monster bites emo dudes' heads off and rubs its body against buildings, and then little creatures crawl away from its body and fuck things up. [AICN]

Crash another planet into Earth. In an episode of the Transformers cartoon, the villain Megatron tried to bring his home planet, Cybertron, into Earth's atmosphere. The Cybermen also brought their home planet Mondas close to Earth in Doctor Who, and tried to suck the life-force out of our planet, which is sort of similar.

Freeze it to death. In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, a substance called ice-nine freezes all water on Earth, causing the extinction of most creatures, including humans, within a few days.

Poison it. In the James Bond classic Moonraker, Hugo Drax distills the poison from a rare orchid and puts it inside globes, which he plans to launch from a space station to points all over Earth. The result: total obliteration.

Cause the sun to go nova. Evil Star, a Green Lantern villain, wanted to plant a device in the Earth's sun that would make it go nova, so he could feast on the stellar energy. The NOVA bomb in Halo: First Strike would do the same thing.

Materialize another planet around it. In the Doctor Who story "The Pirate Planet," a giant hollow planet materializes around smaller planets and crushes the life out of them, then strips them for all their mineral wealth.

Bombard it with garbage. In the Futurama episode "A Big Piece of Garbage," New York launches a giant ball of its trash into space in 2052 — only to have it crash back towards Earth, threatening destruction, years later.

Set up giant mirrors in space. This aspiring mad scientist has a plan to create a giant balloon in space, then cut it in half and coat each half with a reflective surface. If positioned the right way, they could reflect a ton of sunlight on a specific point on Earth.

Biological warfare. In the latest season of Heroes, the Company created a nasty virus that would kill almost the entire human race. And that white Samurai guy was so mad that Hiro kissed his GF that he decided to unleash it.

Killer robot army. In the classic video game Robotron 2084, a swarm of killer robots succeeds in wiping out the entire human race. Only one humanoid mutant remains to fight them off.

Knock it off its perch. Doctor Impossible plots to throw the Earth out of its orbit around the sun in Austin Grossman's novel Soon I Will Be Invincible. "As the Earth grows colder, my power becomes apparent, and the nations submit," he says. And the eponymous monsters in Zombies of the Stratosphere plot to send the Earth off course so Mars can take its place.

Crater From 1908 Russian Space Strike Found, Says Team [National Geographic]

Crunchy goodness: 2

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: After millions of people bought Superman #75 thinking it would some day become incredibly valuable (ha), tons of other superheroes "died" or became paralyzed or turned out to be clones. More recently, animation diva Bruce Timm put out a straight-to-DVD adaptation called Superman: Doomsday.

Elevator pitch: What if someone punched Superman really really really REALLY hard?? No, no, harder than that. A whole bunch of times. What then?

Deadliest spoiler: Superman comes back from the dead, but he pays a terrible price. He's stuck with a disfiguring mullet.

ComicVine - Death and Return of Superman