Holy crap I am a sucker for this digital painting by concept designer Alex Broeckel, who created it earlier this year for steampunk art contest on CGTalk. Broeckel has worked over a decade in the film industry as a digital lighting effects designer on movies like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. You can check out his gallery, which is packed with more amazing stuff. Hey Hollywood and Gamewood, Broeckel is freelance and taking on new clients - hire this guy already!

Below, you can see the short film version of $quid, which is pretty much completely awesome — though the musical interlude could have used a little bit more of the Dr. Horrible treatment, at least in terms of the lyrics.

Here's what filmmakers Daley Pearson and Luke Tierney say about the feature-length version of $quid:

Imagine Anaconda directed by the Coen Brothers; a 'creature feature' driven by character rather than action. Then imagine a giant squid attacking a singles cruise on the out skirts of the Brisbane River. That is the inspiration for the feature film, $quid. [It's] about a giant squid that terrorises a New Year's Eve cruise on the Brisbane River.

Can't wait for this kickass new flick. The romster comedy really needs a reboot after My Stepmother Is an Alien.

$quid Movie Synopsis [$quid site] Thanks, Avery Guerra!!!

Early in Cloverfield, when the monster first attacks New York, we see nothing of the giant beast — only the destruction it's leaving behind. As bloodied people stumble from the wreckage of leaning skyscrapers, dazed and covered in a thick layer of dust, one cannot help but recall the first, terrifying images that leaked from New York after the World Trade Center was hit. Most of it came from shaky, amateur footage. Likewise, Cloverfield is shot to look like it comes from a handheld camera dragged around by a group of rich twenty-somethings fleeing the wreckage of a party. So Cloverfield isn't just reenacting the attacks. It's reenacting TV news images of the attacks too. There is something genuinely shocking and brilliant about those moments in the film when you know you're watching scenes so clearly inspired by 9/11. It feels risky and wrong, and therefore you are profoundly relieved to see the comical, rubbery monster come on the scene, stomping and roaring and shedding lice the size of great danes. That creature, who does all the appropriate monstery things like resist conventional weapons and open its mouth really wide to reveal layers of weird teeth, is profound reassurance that we are firmly in the realm of fantasy. New York has not been attacked. It's just a silly dream about a monster so goofy-looking that you can hardly look at it without giggling. (Don't believe me? See the Cloverfield monster do its funky chicken dance in our morning spoilers.)

Director Matt Reeves knows what he's doing with his monster, bringing it blundering into the story whenever we get too close to remembering the real disaster that inspired it. In fact, one of the most genuinely horrifying scenes in the film has no monster at all. Several characters decide to rescue their friend from a sixty-story building that has collapsed against another one. Exhausted and in shock from watching their other friends die, they climb those sixty flights up the non-collapsed building, and jump into the slowly-crumbling one next door to get to their friend. Nothing is more terrifying than these vacant, tottering buildings whose blasted walls howl with wind.

And then, just as you start to contemplate those other blasted buildings, those other terrified people trapped inside them, the monster arrives and suddenly everything is fun, B-movie goodness. It takes smart writing and directing to make a movie like this, that pushes raw historical tragedy right into our eyeballs and then deftly distracts us with old-fashioned entertainment.

Sure, you can go see Cloverfield for the stomping and roaring, and you won't be disappointed. But when the movie's images of a destroyed New York fallen into chaos haunt you for days afterward, you'll start to realize that Reeves and his twangy-ass monster have given the U.S. its first great movie about 9/11.

The best part of this made-for-SciFi Channel movie is that they couldn't stop with undead mammoth; they even couldn't stop with alien-controlled undead mammoth; no, they had to make it a vampire undead alien-controlled mammoth. At the end of this clip, you can see the mammoth sucking life force out of the special agent. Using its trunk. What kind of drugs enabled this pitch meeting? Seriously, I need to know so I can take some.