No self-respecting column called Biteback could ignore the YouTube mash-up in which the lovelorn Twilight vampire Edward Cullen stalks Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s six minutes of joy that remind us how sparky and formidable Buffy was, and how wet the Twilight teen favourites are. Cullen’s inamorata, Bella, is a step backwards for a young woman looking for an assertive and fun role model, and creepy Edward richly deserves the fate unleashed by Buffy.

Speaking of the afterlife, after Twitter folk spread gossip about George Clooney’s death in a plane crash, Harrison Ford vanishing, Robert Maxwell-style, off a yacht (more likely the other way around) and Jeff Goldblum plunging to his doom off a New Zealand cliff, Goldblum apparitioned onto Stephen Colbert’s television show to read his own obituary.

“No one will miss Jeff Goldblum more than me,” the lively actor opined. “He was not only a friend and a mentor, but also me. His performances combined the muscularity of Brando, the pathos of Streep and the musky sensuality of a pride of baboons. One former conquest raved that sleeping with Jeff Goldblum was like being caught in a flesh storm, with a 90% chance of satisfaction. I cannot overstate how amazing Jeff Goldblum was in bed. I will be missed, especially Sundays at 9pm in Law and Order: Criminal Intent.” Even in fake death, Goldblum is shameless.

Within 24 hours of last week’s Mexico City headline “Midget wrestlers murdered by fake hookers”, local film-makers, funded by Guillermo del Toro (director of Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth), had snapped up the movie rights. It’s a sad story: La Parkita, or Little Death, after the skeleton costume he wore in the ring, and his brother Espectrito Jr were fatally “roofied” (slipped knockout drugs) in a seedy hotel room by two female robbers. Maybe del Toro will work such unlikely events into his next two films, both based on British novels where such things would never happen: The Witches and The Hobbit.

Bernard Cornwell, expat author of the Sharpe novels, often casts a wary eye on both corporate religion and high literature. So why is he treading the boards next month as Friar Laurence in the Monomoy Community Theater’s production of Romeo and Juliet, in Chatham, Massachusetts? Given the pig’s ear the hapless friar makes of everything, is this rare performance another dark warning about trusting clerics of all stripes?

The psychiatrist Arthur Shapiro, who loved The Exorcist, reckoned the 14-year-old Maryland boy who was the basis for Linda Blair’s swearing and spewing character was not possessed. Instead, he suffered from Tourette syndrome, accentuated by a demand for attention. That triumph of bad bedroom manners took place in 1949, and the boy got over it: today, he would blend in without comment at most high schools.

Three years ago, when Roland Emmerich was casting his forthcoming apocalypse movie, 2012, the German director wrote that he wanted a “cool black president, as if that junior senator from Illinois won the big election”. Okay, so he cast Danny Glover, but Glover’s Obamaisms remain spooky. What else does the director of The Day After Tomorrow know about the end of the world, as predicted by the end of the Mayan calendar? It seems John Cusack will fret a lot, charmingly, and Thandie Newton will survive, beautifully.

Universal is opening a “ragin’ rockin’ show”, based on its 1950s B-movie Creature from the Black Lagoon, at its LA theme park. Yes, it’s a promotion for a movie, due in 2011, that one hopes will include more than a man singing in a mud-caked rubber suit. In a season of lame movie ideas, Universal has also beaten three other studios to the rights to make a film based on Asteroids, the 1979 Atari pub game. By comparison, Ridley Scott, who is turning the board game Monopoly into a film, has a rich palette to work from.

An unsettling thought from Michael Pollan, author of the new book In Defence of Food: “More Americans watch TV programmes about making food than cook meals themselves.”

Richard Brooks is away

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