This is my official entry to the Slusho!! commercial contest. It is a fictional commercial for a fictional drink that may or may not somehow play into the new film "Cloverfield," produced by J.J. Abrams. Or doesn't it?

For those of you who think that sounds vague, let me explain:

It is.

Last summer, the movie "Transformers" opened in theatres across the U.S. (yeah, I loved it, so sue me). Immediately after the first East Coast screenings let out, Google began getting hit with thousands of searches for things like "mystery jj abrams trailer transformers" and "transformers trailer monster movie" and "1-18-08" and "free porn." With the exception of the last search, all of this was seriously pleasing the folks over at Bad Robot productions. Why? Before "Transformers," audiences were treated to a movie trailer (or "preview," if you will) consisting of a sort of first person video clip of what appeared to be a monster attack on New York City. It began with the taping of a surprise going away party and ended with the severed head of the Statue of Liberty skidding down a SoHo street. Vague bits of dialog like "I saw it! It's alive! It's huge!" could be heard through the chaos of the crowded streets below, as the party-goers evacuate their apartment and attempt to glean more information. The audience was given nothing more than the name of the producers ("Lost" creator J.J. Abrams and his parent companies, Bad Robot and Paramount Pictures), and what seemed to be a release date of 1-18-08. A wave of "what the f*@$?!" spread across the crowd. A massive viral marketing campaign was born...

Youtube was soon inundated with pirated copies of the trailer, the web world was abuzz with "what's it all about" speculation, Paramount pictures was "denying" involvement in this titleless production, and geeks and "Lost" fans like myself were salivating over having a new way to waste precious time.

Fine. What the hell does this have to do with some slushy drink thing? Honestly, no one knows! The drink was first mentioned in an episode of "Alias" (also created by Abrams, also a show that I love). Additionally, in the original trailer, one of the characters from the film was wearing a slusho! shirt. It didn't take web geeks like myself long to find the slusho! web site, where even more oddness was revealed (like a donkey swimming underwater while thinking of a blue oven mitt and a bizarre story about some "secret" deep sea ingredient that is evidentially used in the manufacture of slusho).

Now it appears that some company called "Tagruato Corp." has been harvesting this slusho ingredient (?) using off shore oil rigs, one of which (according to foreign "news sources" whose videos are available on YouTube) was just destroyed this last weekend, as the monster makes its way to New York City. Also, the main character from the movie trailer, Rob, has announced on "his" MySpace page that he is going to go work for this company...

This kind of realtime buildup to movies and alternate reality gaming is fascinating to me. The Internet is becoming an increasingly collaborative and accessible space for the human race.

I'm really looking forward to the film. At this point, I have an almost scientific fascination with it. I'll only be disappointed if, like so many other movies this year, this turns out to be yet another zombie movie...