For those not keeping up...

So, what do you think? Is it Cthulhu? Is it a non-Godzilla Godzilla? A giant whale? An adaptation of the video game Rampage? I'm talking, of course, about Cloverfield, JJ Abrams's (until recently unnamed) monster movie, which entered the hearts and minds of geeks everywhere when its teaser was released alongside Transformers this summer. The speculation - over what exactly the creature(s?) wreaking havoc in New York will be - was further fueled when the new trailer premiered before Beowulf this weekend.

Theories abound across the internets, which is to be expected when you market your film as Blair Witch meets Godzilla - complete with an endless array of websites somehow connected to the film, whether officially or not. But general consensus, weirdly, seems to be that the Japanese Slusho, a fictional slushy drink Abrams made popular on Alias, is heavily involved in the plot.

Yup, word is that Rob, the protagonist from the trailers, was planning to leave New York for a job move to Japan's Slusho parent company, Tagruato Corp. Turns out, Tagruato has been deep-sea drilling for the mysterious secret ingredient ("seabed nectar") which makes Slusho so addictive. Now that Slusho has begun its American marketing push, the story goes, all this somehow gets tied back to our monster.

Does drinking Slusho when it hasn't been properly frozen cause consumers to literally burst, as we seem to see in the trailer (Slusho's website tells us, "I'm so happy and full of Slusho that I might burst!")? Or somehow become mini-versions of a giant whale (the site also informs us that "Everyone who drinks Slusho will become a small whale!")? Or, worse yet, cause an infection which results in little monsters - or "parasites" to burst out of them? However they show up, there seems to be some evidence of smaller creatures terrorizing people in the trailer. But why does the monster show up in the first place? And is this going to turn out to be a Heroes movie? (It better not.)

So many questions. The most important of which may be, "Are they just pulling our leg?" I'd say chances are good that we'll never even really see this monster (you'll recall that we never saw the Blair Witch, and didn't see much of Jaws the shark or Alien the alien). Chances could be equally good that, come the infamous 1-18-08, some folks will be mad they were thinking hard about Slusho when that didn't turn out to have anything to do with anything. But hey, when there's this much hype and mystery, some people are bound to be disappointed, right?

In any case, two things are certain: Abrams is a marketing genius; Cloverfield's gonna be crazy.