The week's big movie has not yet graced (or tainted, depending on its quality) my eyeballs, but as of right now, I can safely say that there is at least one great movie you guys should check out. It's This is the End, a raunchy stoner comedy from first time Co-Directors Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen.

Some of you may be a bit skeptical of this film, and I wouldn't blame you. At first glance, it seems like a Happy Gilmore-esque vanity project: the filmmakers got a bunch of their friends together and spent a few weeks thinking up a comedy on the spot as a thinly-veiled paid vacation. But TITE differs from those movies in that it's actually hilarious, with a premise that's taken to its logical extreme.

That premise involves a group of film actors being caught in the middle of a disaster while partying at one of the actor's houses and forced to survive together. The twist comes in the fact that the characters are the film's actors (Jay Baruchel, Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, and Danny McBride) playing exaggerated versions of themselves, and the disaster in question is the Biblical Apocalypse, complete with the Rapture, fire and brimstone, sinkholes that lead directly to Hell, and demons marauding the ruined landscape.

In that lies half of the reason this movie works: much like in Shaun of the Dead, the genre elements are played almost completely straight. The movie features a visceral depiction of what the Book of Revelations would actually look like, the deaths of many of the celebrity cameos (also playing themselves, of course) are gruesome and violent, the demons are actually quite terrifying when the filmmakers want them to be, and there's something genuinely unnerving about the scenario. Plus, the fact that none of the Hollywood actors didn't ascend during the Rapture makes for some great writing, as the "characters" start looking at who they really are and why they didn't go to Heaven.

The comedy instead comes from everyone's extreme reactions to the Apocalypse and their interactions while living with each other in Franco's house. Like I said, it's obvious they just got together to improv a comedy for fun, but it also feels like they had a lot of fun doing so, and to borrow from James Rolfe's review of Dawn of the Dead, that fun transcends onto the audience. A lot of that fun comes from the actors enjoying playing up the character types they always seem to play (Franco's is pretentious and weird, Hill's a narcissist, McBride is a self-centered asshole, etc.), with the occasional skewing of expectations played to the extreme (Michael Cera as a coke fiend). Its essentially one of those That Guy With The Glasses crossover epics, with the emphasis on all the characters being trapped in a enclose space while their wildly varying personalities bounce off each other.

And when you get down to it, the movie is just plain funny, which is always enough to make a movie worthwhile. Comedy is subjective, and it really depends on your tolerance for dick jokes (and trust me, there is a lot of dick jokes), but odds are you'll laugh at least once. Probably more. Highlights include an argument regarding McBride's more unsavory habits and Rogen and Franco filming the long awaited sequel to Pineapple Express.

So yeah, the movie rocks, for a multitude of reasons. One of the best apocalypse movies ever made, if not the greatest. Seriously, go see it.

9/10

Man of Steel review will be up soon.