FOREIGN CONCEPT

Yeah...I'd see this version of Halloween: H20, starring demon possession and Tommy Lee Jones. And that tagline is kind of amazing.

YIKES

JOSHUA WARD HOUSE

The Joshua Ward House is one of the most haunted houses in America. Most believe the house is haunted by George Corwin, the High Sheriff, a man responsible for executing many “witches” during the infamous Salem Witch Trials.

This photo was taken by a real estate agent with a Polaroid camera during a tour of the house. Many believe that this may be one of the many souls condemned to death on the grounds where Joshua Ward House now stands.

MYERSES

1

2

4

5

6

7

8

Duty!

GREEN BOOTS

The body of David Sharp still sits in a cave, known as "Green Boots Cave," at the top of Mount Everest. David attempted the climb in 2005, and near the top, stopped in this cave to rest. His body eventually froze in place, rendering him unable to move. Over 30 climbers passed by him as he sat freezing to death. Some heard faint moans and realized he was still alive. They stopped and spoke with him. He was able to identify himself, but was unable to move. Brave climbers moved him into the sun in an attempt to thaw him, but eventually, realizing David would be unable to move, were forced to leave him to die. His body still sits in the cave and is used as a guide point for other climbers nearing the summit.

GIRL IN BLUE

In 1933, a girl dressed all in blue came to Willoughby, Ohio on a Greyhound bus. She stayed the night in a boarding house before spending the next day greeting everyone with heartfelt warmth. At the end of the day, she saw the train to New York approach, dropped her cases, sprinted for the track, was hit by the train and died of her injuries. No one knew her name for 60 years, yet 3,000 people attended her funeral. And no one will ever know if it was an accident or suicide.

RESPECT

OH, HELLO AGAIN, FALL

Where ya been all summer?

THE FOOTREST

Recent reminiscing with a friend of mine reminded us both of this very random and creepy occurrence that took place about five years ago or so at a movie theater somewhat local to us both, and where he used to work. This is going to sound like 100% bullshit, and I know everyone who's about to tell some kind of creepy tale always preempts with that disclaimer, but you should know that this really did happen. It's too bizarre to have made up. 

In the midst of this particular movie theater being bought out by yet another, larger movie theater company (which seemed to happen every 2-3 years), small signs began appearing on certain seats in one particular theater auditorium. This sign read something to the effect of:

"Part of our renovation process includes the installation of automatic footrests, which will engage once the lights dim and your feature begins."

During this time, customers began to experience the automatic footrests for themselves.

And then the feedback began.

The first feedback was quite negative, and for good reason. (More on that later.) Simply put: the footrests were not as advertised. Management did not take her concerns very seriously, assuming she was complaining just to get some free tickets.

A couple weeks later, the theater had their second customer feedback: the customer simply remarked that they liked the new automated footrests, had used them for the duration of the film, and had nothing more to add.

By this point, theater employees were mystified. You see, there were no automatic footrests installed anywhere in that theater.

One day, my buddy, who was a manager at the time, was asked to see about a situation that occurred within one of the auditoriums, and to assist the security staff as needed. Upon getting there, outside the auditorium in the hallway, he saw a frazzled girl, her angry boyfriend, and a strange looking man sitting on a bench in handcuffs, looking ashamed and terrified.

Clearly, something bad had gone down between all of them.

That strange looking man, it turns out, was the automatic footrest. He would place the sign on the seat where the "footrest" would engage, slide beneath the seat on his back once the lights went low, grab the person's feet with his hands, and stare up at them from the floor while holding the person's feet up above him.

Turns out: the first "customer feedback" had not only been quite negative, but flat-out described the situation for what it was: there was someone in an auditorium sneaking under seats and holding people's feet. She'd described the grabber's face as "ghostly white." The fact that staff did not find the "sign" she'd reported to be hung on the seat reinforced management's stance that she was pulling a scam. They even did a round of myth-busting and tried sliding on their backs under the seat to see if anyone could even fit.

No one could.

Following the second feedback about automated footrests, the light bulb went off and employees went to the auditorium and saw that the sign was still hanging on the seat.

On the day of the third and final reported instance, the grabber had finally been caught. The boyfriend had seen the man take his place below his girlfriend's seat and ripped him out from under it, understandably ready to beat the ever-loving stuff out of him until others had broken up the fight. At that point, security and management had intervened.

This strange man – described as little and pale – had been doing this for months before he was finally caught. In at least one confirmed instance, he'd held a person's feet for the duration of an entire film, and that person never knew. Makes you wonder how many people he'd actually done it to, but who never bothered to provide feedback for these "automated footrests."

See you at the movies.

SUN-DRIED

Finnish soldiers displaying the skins of Soviet soldiers near Maaselkä, on the strand of lake Seesjärvi during Continuation War on the 15th of December in 1942. Original caption: “An enemy recon patrol that was cut out of food supplies had butchered a few members of their own patrol group, and had eaten most of them.”

MADNESS

 

Your guess is as good as mine...

SEAT'S TAKEN

In 1702, a convicted murderer named Thomas Busby was about to be hanged for his crimes. His last request was to have his final meal served at his favorite pub in Thirsk, England. He finished his meal, stood up, and said, “May sudden death come to anyone who dare sit in my chair.”

The chair remained in the pub for centuries, and patrons would often dare one another to sit in the cursed seat. During World War II, airmen from a nearby base frequented the pub, and locals noticed that the soldiers who sat in the chair would never return from war.

In 1967, two Royal Air Force pilots sat in the chair, only to crash their truck into a tree just after they left. In 1970, a mason tested his fate in the hot seat, only to die that same afternoon by falling into a hole at his job site. A year after that, a roofer who sat in it died after the roof he was working on collapsed. When the pub’s cleaning lady tripped and fell into the chair, she died shortly afterwards from a brain tumor.

This list goes on, and finally the pub owner moved the chair into the basement. Unfortunately, even in storage the chair claimed another victim. After a delivery man took a quick rest while unloading packages in the store room, he was killed in a car accident that same day.

Eventually, the pub owner donated the chair to the local museum in 1972. The museum displays the chair by hanging it five feet in the air so that no one can possibly sit in it by mistake again. Fortunately, no one has sat in the chair since. 

SHITTY FLICKS: SAVAGE PLANET

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant, camp-girl penis. 

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

I've seen a lot of dreck. I've seen dreck from low-rent filmmakers, and I've seen dreck made by established directors with access to multi-million budgets. I've sought dreck and gotten quality; and, in turn, I've sought quality, and boy oh boy, did I get dreck. It happens. It's unavoidable. And all during this, Savage Planet comes along - a cinematic equivalent of a really, really bad liar - comes up right behind us all, and says, "Sorry I'm late. I forgot how doors worked.”

Savage Planet is pretty special. Not just because it's "ha ha" bad, and not just because it was made by the Sci-Fi Channel back when their original television movies were bad by accident instead of kitschy bad-on-purpose nonsense like Sharknado, but for a very different and special reason. We'll get to that reason in a bit. I suppose it should be considered a spoiler - not because it will ruin the "plot," but because it would ruin the moment during the film that you would be struck by the sheer stupidity of its "villain" and be so utterly taken aback in joy that I kind of don't want to let the air out of your tires.

But, if you choose to keep reading, that's on you.

The film opens with a group of scientists on another "planet" machetteing their way through a thick wood. The leader takes readings with a gizmo and mentions how the levels of whatever on this planet are better than on Earth. It's really important that the film establish right away that these guys are most def NOT on earth, because what are clearly very plain woodsy areas of Canada should at NO point be mistaken for Planet Earth.

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 1

Lead guy gets his hand hacked off by a machete completely by accident and falls into a hole, where he burns his hand stump in a puddle of radioactive green goo. His hand grows back (kind of), and he is then viciously attacked by a space alien. This poor man's fear is paramount. Never, back on Planet Earth, had he ever encountered such an otherworldly monster, but yet here he is, facing something harvested from his nightmares, something so indescribable and beyond comprehension that H.P. Lovecraft would have needed two volumes and limitless cognac to properly describe every detail. 

On a planet that savage, aliens look like this:

Okay, you got me. It’s bears. And not just plain old bears, but "mutant" alien bears. This is also something they will say over and over to Jedi-mind-trick you into believing you're seeing, like, gigantic mutant bears. But, you're not. Even the DVD packaging goes very far out of the way to avoid dropping the "b" word. The front cover is a picture of a mossy-looking planet, on the back is nary a photo of a bear, and the summary reads:

Earth is declared uninhabitable from years of toxic pollution and ecological damage. A team of scientists are sent to visit an unknown planet in hopes of finding a new, safe, world. But within the lush and verdant landscape of the new planet they find a mutated species that turns their expedition deadly. They expected and needed utopia but instead found something more deadly than what they left behind.  

Bears are what they found. 

They found bears.

Sean Patrick Flannery plays Randall Cain, a sad earthling with a haunted past who has a giant scar across his chest that looks like an even gianter Cronenbergian sex bug. It's off-putting to look at, and even more off-putting to pet. He lives in a "Dystopian" future, which means everything looks exactly the same as it does now, except for the first establishing shot of the city, which is a 3D generation of smoothed-over metallic building blocks probably designed by the guys who made Candy Crush while they were each on their own toilet. 

Cain's vacation of looking sad and lying in a future cot with that weird bug-looking scar thing across his person is interrupted by his superiors and is brought on to be briefed on a very important mission that he apparently has no choice but to endure. There, he is told that a planet nearly identical to Earth (let's just get that established as soon as possible) has been discovered and I guess some dudes and dudettes need to go there and do some science stuff to determine if the people of Earth can go live there. The planet is called Planet Oxygen, which is just as imaginative as the person whosever idea it was to film a movie set on an alien planet in the not-so-alien looking woods of Ontario. (See, because there's a whole bunch more vegetation on this planet, and hence, a whole bunch more oxygen.)

Cain and his rag-tag group of colleagues, including Not Stephen Moyer, Guy Who Looks Like A Grown-Up Baby, Token Black Guy, and Almost Lisa Kudrow are beamed directly onto Planet Oxygen using an invention called DST (standing for distance travel). 

Each time someone is beamed onto the planet, the director is quick to use split screen, so we can see everyone's understandably amazed faces while the person disappears right before their eyes!

If they think that's amazing, wait till they see how LARGE these bears are!

Alien Bear steps on a Lego.

One of the last people to beam through - and also the guy in charge of security - dies during transference. He hilariously makes pain sounds identical to that of a monkey's, his bones disappear, and he crumbles into a pile of thin, blankety, wet man. Carlson says, "We all agree this is a tragedy," without looking all that bothered by it, and then he--

Oh, shit!

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 2

Where were we? 

Oh, right.

So, these scientists, I guess, are about to--

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 3

Jeeze. 

So, the scientists begin their expedition--

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 4

Right.

During their recon, they locate the body of a dead bear.

"What the hell is it?" asks one of the many people claiming to be a scientist.

After an autopsy of sorts, this amazing exchange takes place:

"It's a prehistoric cave bear; been extinct on Earth for over ten thousand years...The most formidable predator in its day." 

"How does an extinct bear come to get on this planet?"

"Somehow its DNA sequence regressed. No modern bear, even full-grown, has claws this big, or a hide this dense...Their only known enemy was man."

Later, everyone has a philosophical conversation about whether or not the lives of those already lost are worth whatever discoveries they might find on Planet Oxygen. If this were real life, of course the lives lost would be deemed irrelevant, but since this is television - brainless, brainless television - these scientists have hearts and decide it's not worth it and everyone wants to go home. Not Carlson, though, because he's the movie's resident money/fame-driven penis head.

"For a scientist, you know a lot about death, but nothing about life," someone says to Carlson, and god damn does he look SHUT DOWN.

(No he doesn't.)

Also:

References To Being On Alien Planet And Definitely Not Earth: 5

One of the scientists decides it would be best to go off on her own. I think her name was Bird Seed(?)

Weird, right?

Then this happens:

It was quite a sight to see!

Cain attempts to take control of the mission, since the whole science part of it seems to have gone out the window and now it's more about survival, which means Carlson can be 100% dick. Bears come and Cain asks Carlson to shoot some of them, but Carlson says "fuck that" and him and his eyebrows peace out of the scene. Cain promptly falls and hits his head on a gigantic rock.

I don't blame him. Maybe he accidentally watched a little bit of his own movie.

As everyone makes plans to spelunk down a cave wall, let's all pause for a moment of out-of-context dialog:

"Okay, here's the plan: I'm gonna go down first, followed by the two girls." 

Day dims, night comes, and it's almost too easy to take out these attacking bears with a shot gun. A perfect juxtaposition of: stock footage of roaring bear, man with shot gun, stock footage of roaring bear calmly lowering from two feet down to all four = man successfully killed bear with a shotgun. 

Movie magic.

After one of the dudes' girlfriends gets dragged from her tent and eaten perfectly in half, the other scientists begin to really doubt their own faith in science. Talk about horror!

- "And in my dreams, the bear and I were one."
- "Okay.”

The bears continue to take out our scientist characters one by one, and shockingly, Token Black Guy is still hanging in. Even Harold Perrineau was bear meat at this point in The Edge. 

Have you seen The Edge? 

It's great.

Anyway, this shit has gotten far too complicated for a killer alien film where the aliens are played by bears. There's something happening now about "life serums" and Planet Oxygen's habitat becoming "increasingly unstable." All I know is: more bears, please. Token Black Guy is still breathing, as is Guy Who Looks Like A Grown-Up Baby.

Whoop. Never mind.

As the bear viciously attacks Token Black Guy and begins tearing apart his innards and ripping off one limb after another, he screams for Cain to shoot him and put him out of his misery. Count how long Cain stands there holding his shot gun with a stupid look on his face before he actually does anything to alleviate Token Black Guy's suffering, and then convert that to Bear Time. 

Rest in peace, Token Black Guy!

Dear god, I've never seen a more boring film where bears play aliens and aliens rip apart really terrible dummies filled with gooey balloons that play the people. My time would've been better spent digging a hole in my backyard and shitting directly into it, and when my one neighbor called the cops and the cops came and asked, "Just what on Earth were you thinking?" I would say, "Well, it was either that or watch Savage Planet," and they would be like, "Say no more, we totally get it. Please shit some more into that hole you dug," and I would say "Thanks, officer," and I might even buy a couple tickets to their Policeman's Ball, even though I'd have no one to go with, because who's gonna go to a ball with someone who shits in the backyard?

No one. :(

Carlson gets his head beared off and things begin to look really dire for our remaining heroes. Almost Lisa Kudrow manages to beam herself back to earth while Cain falls down for something like the hundredth time, and then a large mutant alien bear with regressed DNA, bigger claws, and a denser hide (read: normal bear) attacks Cain before he can beam back to Earth.

The scene cuts to several days (weeks? months?) into the future at a press conference where it's revealed that Cain somehow survived his attack even though I'm pretty sure he was within the snares of a bear and moments away from having his fake head slapped off. I couldn't tell you what happened during this scene because I was already ejecting the disc and dreaming of the fifty cents I'd get for it at MovieStop.

Production is underway on Savage Planet 2: Beary Scary, and it will star Norman Reedus from "The Walking Dead," which is both a stupid joke I just made up and also an excuse to put the words "Norman Reedus" and "The Walking Dead" into this review, just so a bunch of pre-teen girls and lonely moms can find it by accident when Googling the phrases "Norman Reedus no shirt" and "Norman Reedus kiss me" and "Norman Reedus friend bear movie."

Sean Patrick Flannery was in the movie Powder. He played 'Powder.'

Good night.

HEY, KNOW WHAT'S A REAL MOVIE?

(aka: The Headless Ghost)

MADE OF STONE

ACCORDING to Dante, the Styx is not just a river but a vast, deathly swamp filling the entire fifth circle of hell. Perhaps the staff of New Scientist will see it when our time comes but, until then, Lake Natron in northern Tanzania does a pretty good job of illustrating Dante's vision.

Unless you are an alkaline tilapia (Alcolapia alcalica) – an extremophile fish adapted to the harsh conditions – it is not the best place to live. Temperatures in the lake can reach 60 °C, and its alkalinity is between pH 9 and pH 10.5.

The lake takes its name from natron, a naturally occurring compound made mainly of sodium carbonate, with a bit of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) thrown in. Here, this has come from volcanic ash, accumulated from the Great Rift valley. Animals that become immersed in the water die and are calcified.

Source/more.

CRAPPYPASTA: DARK BEES

legands talk for bees about in past that didd horrble things and had the curses but nobody belived silly story and laugh at them but they would be wrong and pay for it with death

it was at the farm and sam the farmer went to his bee area of te farm and fed them some honey “good bees” he said but then one got in his anti bee suit and stung him “ouch stop that hurt” he sout and then the bee went inside his skin and made a bee hive in his body and it hurted but he thought it was just cold “i go dinner and bed” said sam

sam ate the dinner and went to bed and heard buzzing “what is buzzing” he say and then he felt sore and his chest burst and bees came out and the bees started eating him and he was sekelton and then the bees open a window and go to city.

at the city people where shoping and having fun and ice cream and it was ghood day “ouch daddy a bee stung me” said a girl and the dad patted her on head “it alright bees just want friends” said the dad but it was too late because she was a bee hive and die and bees eated her and her dad and there was screaming and death as city was bee city now

a man kiss his wife “let me love you forever” said the wife and then she turn into bees and cover the man in bees and he die

on a hill there was a blue man in gas mask and it was leader of the bees and creator of creepypasteas mrcreepypasta “remember live good life or bees find you to” he laugh

the police got to city nexct day but there was no sign of bees and they decise that everyone just had car accdants and forgot what happen but there was scary legands about bees but nobody belive them which was foolash of them but people never laern.

the end
 
by megamangx

Quite possibly my favorite CrappyPasta...ever.

Source.

REVIEW: WORLD OF TROUBLE (BOOK 3 OF THE LAST POLICEMAN TRILOGY)

 

"...But on the core fact there is one consensus: the asteroid 2011GV₁, known as Maia, measuring six and a half kilometers in diameter and traveling at a speed of between thirty-five thousand and forty thousand miles per hour, will make landfall in Indonesia at an angle from horizontal of nineteen degrees. This will happen on October 3. A week from Wednesday, around lunchtime."

Detective Henry Palace returns in the third and final entry in the Last Policeman trilogy, Ben H. Winters' "existential detective series" about one man and the last few cases that fall in his lap leading to the end of days, caused by an asteroid that is on an unavoidable destructive path with the earth. In the first novel, The Last Policeman, Palace's case was his job; in the second, Countdown City, his case was a favor; and in this, the final hurrah for Henry Palace and all the other earthlings, his case is his most personal yet: his sister, Nico, has gone missing, and he's got to find her, desperate to make amends before Maia the asteroid comes along and puts an end to everything. Believing Nico to be in the company of other like-minded folks who are convinced they have found a way destroy the asteroid before it can touch down, Palace, along with his unlikely team of companions - Cortez, a man who'd attempted to kill him with a staple gun in the previous book, and Palace's rescue dog, Houdini - travel the ruined landscapes of America in an effort to find his missing sister. But, as is usually the case, there's more than just a missing sibling. There's two bloody trails leading in and out of an abandoned Ohio police station. There's the barely-alive young girl with the slit throat Palace found in the woods. And there's the missing scientist who may or may not be with this end-of-the-world group of would-be heroes insistent they know how to avert the apocalypse.

World of Trouble is a solid finale for a solid series. The world has continued to regress since the last book, and different factions of people are acting in different ways. Some have taken to the streets in groups of vigilantes to take over stores filled with potential rations; others hide in their homes behind drawn shades, clutching shotguns and nervously peering out windows. Two particular well-meaning teens let all the animals out of the zoo to prevent them from starving to death in captivity, and one of them being immediately cornered by a tiger. These details and the many more flesh out this pre-apocalyptic world and turn it into something both surreal but also entirely believable.

For his swan song, Winters has embraced an almost-The Road type device for his tale, which puts Hank Palace on a rather innocuous task (finding a sledgehammer to bust through a suspicious and newly-installed hatch in a police station parking garage floor), but during which Palace, instead, crosses paths with several different characters, all of whom are reacting to the end of times in very different ways. In prior Last Policeman novels, the characters with whom Palace interacted were all part of the larger mystery - the "point" of the respective novel. But now, instead, there is less of a focus on unraveling a mystery than there is immersing in the drama of this environment. The mystery is still front, center, and fully accounted for, but Winters is instead weaving human experience in and out of Palace's mystery. Each character provides a missing piece of the puzzle, sure, but they're also there to provide something else: humanity.

World of Trouble's ending is bittersweet, and obviously while I won't reveal if the world comes to an end, or if Nico's band of anti-asteroid misfits manage to come through and destroy the means in which the world will end, there's still an ending here:

Hank Palace has solved his last mystery.

Buy it.

OVERBOARD

SCREAMED MY NAME

I moonlight as a paramedic and working EMS you will see all kinds of creepy and fucked up things. Every shift I go in I do so with the knowledge that there is a good chance my face will be the last or first thing a person sees as they leave or enter this world. The one that sends a chill up my spine though happened last year while I was still doing clinicals. We received a call to a nursing home for a unresponsive 87-year-old woman. When we picked her up it was obvious she was not long for this world. She coded three times on us before we got her to the ER. What freaked me out though was when she became responsive briefly during transport. I was starting an IV and she just sprang to life, grabbed my arm with a strength unholy for a frail old woman, looked me square in the eye and in a raspy, guttural way quietly screamed my name. The look in her eyes was unlike anything I had seen before or since. It felt like she was staring straight into my soul.

What is so disturbing about that is that during no point had I introduced myself to her as she was unresponsive. Also being a dumb student I had forgotten my ID badge that day as well. I had never worked her before as a patient, nor meet her that I can recall in any capacity. Could be she mistook me for somebody else by the same name but it sure seemed meant for me. She died less than an hour after admission. To this day I still remember everything about that call like it just happened and it makes my blood run cold to remember her face and the way she called to me. Sometimes I close my eyes and still see that face.

Story source.

CABIN FEVER

"It's a slang term for the claustrophobic reaction that can occur when people are shut in together over long periods of time. The feeling of claustrophobia is externalized as dislike for the people you happen to be shut in with. In extreme cases it can result in hallucinations and violence—murder […]."

REVIEW: SONNO PROFONDO (AKA DEEP SLEEP)

I love revival films. I love this idea of resurrecting a time period from cinema history and finding ways to cleverly and lovingly recreate it in ways that are both genuine homage but still effective enough to create a strong and competent standalone film.

I've explored this art of imitation in a previous post, in which I highlighted certain modern horror films that lovingly revisited every major horror movement in cinematic history, starting with the silent era, and up to and including the 1980s. Sonno Profondo, produced by Italian filmmakers (though lensed in Argentina) is as successful an homage I've seen since Ti West's '70s satanic thriller House of the Devil.

The giallo was a sub-genre of which I have always been aware and always respected for its ability to combine often graphic horror, hypersexuality, and poetry of the camera to create an altogether different and revolutionary cinematic experience. Though my previous experience of the giallo resides entirely within the confines of Dario Argento and the brutal masterpiece of absurdity that is Pieces (it totally counts), it's not hard to have developed at least a rudimentary idea of what defines a giallo film: the killer's point of view, the leather gloves, the rich red blood, the discotheque score, the unrestrained sexuality, and the abstract non-linear sense of time. Add a killer with a whacked background and fixations on the fairer sex, and, well:

Giallo is back, and its name is Sonno Profondo.

Written/directed/resurrected by Luciano Onetti, Sonno Profondo is not just a love letter to the giallo movement. It's a fever-dream art house exploration of madness – what it is, what feeds it, and the chaos it creates. There is very little dialogue outside of some television reports; lacking (though not suffering because of it) are any kind of "big picture" shots. No sweeping exterior scenes of *coughcough*Italy, no day or night establishing shots. As was often the case in previous giallo films, and in the case of Sonno Profondo, scenes of murder and mayhem were always shot from the killer's point of view, but would often cut back either to the protagonist as she or he dealt with the repercussions of the killer's presence, or the inevitable detective hot on the trail of the killer. Not the case here. Similar to last year's Maniac redux, the entire film takes place behind the killers' eyes (and no, my apostrophe is not in the wrong place - we're dealing with two killers, here: the first killer [black leather gloves] responsible for the murder and mayhem, and the second killer [white surgical gloves] who begins to methodically blackmail and stalk the first). 

Sonno Profondo preserves the sensibilities of '70s-era European filmmakers – Michelangelo Antonioni, for example, who assumed his audience was prepared to have patience for the journey he was about reveal to them – even going as far as dirtying up the film's negative to add all the cracks and pops one would come to expect from a forty-year-old film. Manufactured to look like it was both produced as well as set in the 1970s, Sonno Profondo is as immersive an homage you're likely to find in the independent scene. Lots of filmmakers are pledging to make films in the vein of paranoid-at-home thrillers of the 1970s and cheese-ball gimmick dead-teenager flicks of the 1980s; very few have endeavored to recreate the giallo, a movement that likened the horror genre as close to pornography (in terms of tastelessness) as it could get until the VCR boom of the mid-1980s, in which it actually did kind of become the kind of pornography as we know it today. (The Astron-6 crew [Manborg, Bio-Cop, Father's Day] are also working on their own giallo homage: The Editor.)

The first giallo trend would continue for some time and travel to American shores, even becoming embraced by Hollywood powerhouse directors like Hitchcock, though the style would become so watered down that it barely resembled everything that had directly inspired it. Psycho first, and then Halloween later, would both be termed as variations of the giallo movement; Carpenter would state for years he had been a big fan of Argento's Suspiria, around which he had modeled portions of Halloween.

Make no mistake, Sonno Profondo is not a film for the uninitiated. If you've never seen any giallo films before, don't start here. Start with the very first credited entry - Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much - and continue on with Argento (but skip the Adrian Brody film Giallo while you're at it), whose collaborations with composers Ennio Morricone and Goblin would soon cement the importance of the soundtrack on the giallo movement. Only when you're immersed in the movement can you truly appreciate the homage.

If Sonno Profondo is successful or unsuccessful just on the merits of being a film alone, I couldn't say. When you have no choice but to experience the murderous exploits of either one or both off-screen killers, you've got no one to root for. You've got no sympathetic protagonist to whom you're supposed to relate. Some audiences don't know how to respond to such an idea.

And that's how you know if you're ready.

Buy it now.

JAWSESES

THE SOFA CORPSE

Samantha Clairmont, 11, was a girl with Muscular Dystrophy who was beaten to death with a kettle and hammer by her grandmother and a nun in 1974, then stuffed into a sofa, because she would not eat her chocolate pudding. The body was found when they dropped it off at a garage sale to be auctioned and a man's dog sniffed it out.

LEVITY: THE USUAL SUSPECTS

BUNDY

SANE, SANE, SANE

“Then she did see it there - just a face, peering through the curtains, hanging in midair like a mask. A head-scarf concealed the hair and the glassy eyes stared inhumanly, but it wasn’t a mask, it couldn’t be. The skin had been powdered dead-white and two hectic spots of rouge centered on the cheekbones. It wasn’t a mask. It was the face of a crazy old woman. Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head.”

SURPRISE ROOMMATE

Tokyo Homeless Woman Lived in Stranger's Cupboard for a Year

A homeless woman has been arrested after living undetected for almost a year in a tiny cupboard in a man's house in Japan.

The woman, identified as 58-year-old Tatsuko Horikawa, was found by police searching the home of the man, who believed he lived alone in Fukuoka.

The resident of the house, who has not been named, became suspicious that he was the victim of repeat burglaries after he noticed food was going missing from his refrigerator.

The man decided to install security cameras linked to his mobile phone and on Wednesday caught images of a woman walking around the house while he was out.

Believing he had detected the burglar, the man contacted police and, after an exhaustive search of the property, officers found the woman hiding in the top of a built-in cupboard designed to store bedding and mattresses.

Behind the sliding door, she had laid out a thin futon and had several plastic drinks bottles, police said. There was just enough room for her to lay down, they added.

"We searched the house, checking everywhere that someone could possibly hide," said Hiroki Itakura, a police spokesman. "When we slid open the closet door, there she was, curled up nervously on her side."

Horikawa told police that she had nowhere to live and had first taken up residence in the cupboard, in a room that the man rarely used, about one year previously when the owner of the house had gone out and not locked the door.

Source.

ROADKILL