Vanessa Zachos

Fri, 17 Apr 2009

South African actress Vanessa Zachos can be seen in the British horror film, Credo, premiering in the UK on Monday 20 April as part of the London Independent Film Festival 2009 Official Selection.

Zachos makes her professional acting debut alongside well known actors such as Colin Salmon (Die Another Day/ Resident Evil), Stephen Gately (Boyzone) and Clayton Watson (Matrix) in the prologue of this teenage horror flick. She plays the role of one of five theology students who are persuaded to summon up a demon in order to prove the existence of evil.
      “Horror is a genre I’ve always been rather passionate about, so being a part of Credo was really exciting for me,” says Zachos.
    The Johannesburg actress has been honing her acting skills in the UK. In 2008 she was selected at the Durban International Film Festival as one of 40 to represent South Africa at the Berlinale Talent Campus.
     Zachos has also completed filming her first leading role as the love interest in a British indie feature, and is attached to two UK features, which are currently in development.
Credo will be released 25 May on DVD in the UK.

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   Hundreds of racy, violent and sadomasochistic cartoons by Joe Shuster, one of the creators of Superman, have been unearthed by comic-book historian Craig Yoe.

Researching the secret origins behind America‘s favorite superheroes has revealed much in recent years, but never anything like this.

In the new book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster (Abrams ComicArts, $24.95), page after page of lascivious panels are reproduced from underground comics that Shuster drew in the early 1950s when the artist was down on his luck. Titled Nights of Horror, the crude, stapled pamphlets of erotic horror were sold under the counter at drugstores for $3.

Within are naked women with whips, brutish men brandishing red-hot pokers, exotic torture and politically incorrect spankings. What makes the illustrations more than simply a curiosity of the times is the disturbing fact that many of the characters look exactly like Shuster’s Superman and Lois Lane.

“Yes, they look like Lois and Clark,” Yoe says. “Joe obviously had some very dark fantasies. There’s a panel in an early Superman comic book where he has Lois over his knee and is spanking her. But certainly nothing of this depth or extremeness.”

Artist Shuster and writer Jerry Siegel created Superman in 1938 but didn’t benefit when the character exploded in popularity in the 1940s. By the 1950s, Shuster was barely working. He died in 1992.

It is not unusual for comic-book artists to handle sexier fare; MAD magazine’s Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder produced Little Annie Fanny in Playboy for 26 years.

But Stan Lee of Marvel Comics writes in an introduction that the Shuster work is “startling” in that it caters to “the basest of man’s character. … It clearly indicates how desperate Joe must have been.”

Says Yoe, who found the complete 16-issue run of the crude publication at a used-book store: “There are some who say I should have left this stuff buried and not ruin Joe’s reputation. But this is a major body of work by the creator of the superhero. Some of the drawings are beautiful, showing the great craftsman that he was. There’s even an innocence.

“I can’t say I’d frame it and put it above my mantel, but it’s a very important find for comic-book history and cultural history.”

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Rabid starring Marilynn Chambers

Tuesday, April 14th 2009

Marilyn Chambers, the angelic-looking, blue-eyed blond who symbolized purity while selling laundry detergent then went on to become one of the first mainstream porn superstars, died Sunday in her Los Angeles home. She was 56.

Chambers briefly worked as a legitimate model, most notably as the mother on an Ivory Snow box holding a baby under the tag line “99 & 4-4/100% pure.”

She later had a bit part in the 1970 Barbra Streisand flick “The Owl and the Pussycat,” before breaking into the adult film world with a role in 1972′s “Behind the Green Door” – the first porn film released widely in the U.S.

Marilynn starred in 1977’s Rabid, Directed by David Cronenberg. She starred as Rose, who is involved in a motorcycle accident, and has experimental surgery performed in order to save her life. However, she develops a taste for blood. Her victims grow in number as well as madness, turning the city into chaos.

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Marilynn Chambers

Noot Seear

It’s no secret that the “Twilight” movies have an uber-hot cast, and now yet another stunner has been added to the list – fashion model Noot Seear.

According to FOX Pop Tarts, Seear has just signed on to appear in the next three “Twilight” sequels.  She’ll be playing “vixen vampire” Heidi, who seduces unwitting victims to follow her back to her lair.

Noot is super excited to have landed the gig, especially given the fact that she hasn’t ever really acted in a movie before, though she’s a mainstay on runway shows and magazine pages.

Meanwhile, Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and the rest of the cast are still busily working on “New Moon” in Vancouver, ahead of its November 20th release date.

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Noot Seear

Rabbit for dinner

Joseph Serna – Daily Pilot

A Newport Beach city worker happened upon a startling find Monday morning off the coast when he opened a bag that had washed up and found beheaded and dismembered animals inside.

Authorities speculate the bag was the remnants of a Santería religious ceremony, which includes animal sacrifice. About 7:20 a.m. Monday the city worker found a bag in the surf off 24th Street and West Ocean Front and pulled it out of the water. He found a hoof and bird legs poking out of it, and when he opened it up completely, found a beheaded and dismembered black and white goat along with two headless chickens and some vegetables, Lt. Craig Fox said.

The bag was the first of two situations city employees faced Monday as others found a dead duck and chicken caught in the kelp off the jetty near 28th Street with their throats cut, officials said.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Santería (“The Way of the Saints” in Spanish) is a religion developed in Cuba in the early 19th century when the people of the Yoruban nations of West Africa were taken to the island as slaves. The name Santería comes from the contacts some devotees made between the original Yoruba deities and the Roman Catholic saints. The religion is based upon the individual’s relationship with the gods, which is developed through divination, mediums and sacrifice. Often a sacrifice, such as an animal, is required to talk to an oracle, or a trained priest.

Michael Rodriguez, a native of Haiti who works at Botanica Santa Martha, a Santa Ana shop that sells items for people who practice Santería, said sacrifices are made to cleanse the body of bad spirits.

Cases of sacrificed animals have been popping up in Newport Beach lately, officials said.

Besides Monday’s incident, animal control officers came upon three dead rabbits off a walking trail in the Back Bay on Thursday, police said. Thursday afternoon an animal control officer found three black rabbits dead off the road in the grass on the west side of Back Bay Drive near San Joaquin Hills Road.

The three adult animals did not have any visible signs of injury, Fox said.

The morning of March 23, police received a call of suspicious circumstances at Castaways Park by landscape workers there. When police arrived, they found more apparent sacrifices 20 yards off the beaten path.

Authorities found a jar filled with a dark liquid, crushed peppers and packed with a dead, black chicken with a cut neck. The jar reeked of vinegar, police said.

Though the visuals may be startling for children, police said, outside of that there’s nothing particularly wrong with the three incidents.

“It’s something we’ve seen before and something other cities have dealt with before,” Fox said. “It’s not of great concern to us obviously from the law-enforcement side.”

There’s possibly a violation in disposing of animals in public places, but outside of that, it’s clear those practicing the religion are aiming to keep it discreet, he said.

“We respect people’s rights to pursue their religious beliefs,” he said.

The 1993 Supreme Court case Church of the Lukumi Babalu v. The City of Hialeah upheld devotees’ rights to sacrifice animals.

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Dungeons and Dragons

 

 

MINNEAPOLIS, April 10 (UPI) — Dave Arneson, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game “Dungeons & Dragons,” has died in St. Paul, Minn., at the age of 61, his family said.

Following a falling-out with late “Dungeons” co-creator Gary Gygax and the company that published their work, Arneson went on to co-found two other companies — 4D Interactive Systems and Adventure Games — and taught game design at Full Sail University in a suburb of Orlando, Fla., the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press said.

Arneson’s daughter, Malia Weinhagen, recalled his love of gaming in an interview with the newspaper.

“Any house I ever lived in with him always had a basement devoted to gaming. I thought everyone grew up with dragons and fairies. It was quite a shock in elementary school when I found out I was not the norm,” Weinhagen said.

A memorial will be held for the Minneapolis native and University of Minnesota graduate, who was diagnosed last year with cancer, on April 20 at Bradshaw Funeral Home in St. Paul. A funeral service is slated for April 21at Immanuel Lutheran Church in St. Paul, the Pioneer Press said.

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      Behold Mallika Sherawat, star of Hiss, directed by Jennifer Lynch (Surveillance). The film, “a modern day retelling of the ancient tale of the ichhadahari nagin (snake woman),” follows a ruthless American who captures nagin’s mate for magical powers and is the recipient of snake woman havoc wreaked when nagin assumes a gorgeous femme fetale form and exacts revenge. More importantly, the feature is labeled as a Bollywood (India) creature film with former KNB maestro now Precinct 13 maestro and boasts the tagline: “She’s sexy… venomous… and she’ll swallow you whole…”

Sexy Snake Woman

Make-up FX artist Robert Kurtzman created Sherwat’s sleek, disturbing visage. He is known for his makeup special effects work in 13 Ghosts, Army of Darkness, From Dusk ’til Dawn and Evil Dead 2, to name a few.

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The Cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Part of the 125-year-old building will be preserved, though, and it will include a mental health museum to exhibit props from the film, including a “hydrotherapy” device that one character throws through a window to make his escape.

“It’s the thing that many people remember about the movie,” said hospital spokeswoman Patricia Feeny.

The movie based on Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel was fictional, but it has become closely associated over the years with real-life problems at Oregon‘s crumbling, overcrowded psychiatric facility.

On Monday, workers operating a trackhoe with a 95-foot arm began tearing off the roof of the hospital’s J Building, a demolition project that will make way for a new 620-bed hospital complex that’s to be finished by 2011.

The J Building’s south wing is where much of the filming was done on “Cuckoo’s Nest,” the Oscar-winning story of Randle P. McMurphy, played by Nicholson, locking horns with the authoritarian Nurse Ratched.

The demolition project means there will be little remaining of the places where most of the filming was done.

However, part of the J Building will be preserved, and there are plans to put a museum of mental health in it — with a section devoted to the filming of “Cuckoo’s Nest.”

The main artifact in that section will be the “hydrotherapy” device, a prop that resembled a large bathroom sink with various faucets and spigots. Feeny said the producers donated it to the hospital, where it has been on display outside the hospital superintendent’s office.

In the movie’s climax, a silent Chief Bromden becomes enraged after hospital officials perform a brain-cutting lobotomy on Nicholson’s character. He then lifts the machine over his head and throws it through a screened window, clearing the way for his escape.

Other props from the movie also will be included in the museum display, including a bathtub used by Danny DeVito’s character and a large broom Chief Bromden pushes throughout the film.

Hospital superintendent Roy Orr said mental health advocates are divided on whether “Cuckoo’s Nest” helped promote the cause of the mentally ill or was an overly sensationalized depiction of brutality in state mental institutions.

Orr said he supports devoting part of the museum to the movie, through.

“I guess I just view it as a part of our past; and now it’s time to move on,” he said.

One of Oregon‘s leading advocates for the mentally ill, Bob Joondeph of Disability Rights Oregon, was at the state hospital Monday to observe the beginning of demolition.

Joondeph said the movie was a positive thing in that it helped humanize patients in psychiatric institutions.

“One of the things we run up against is that people are often afraid of those with mental illness,” he said. “Jack Nicholson’s character recognized the patients as individuals with their own personalities

BRAD CAIN/Associated Press Writer

Andy Hallet, who played Lorne on the TV show Angel, has died at the age of 33. Lorne was the singing demon who could read people’s thoughts if they sang to him. Below is a great Lorne scene from Angel.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glLWdVlWsUM&feature=player_embedded]

The new Freddy Krueger!

Watchmen star Jackie Earle Haley has signed on to play Freddy Krueger in New Line’s forthcoming Nightmare on Elm Street reboot. The actor, who received an Oscar nomination for his role as a sex offender in 2006′s Little Children, will take on the part famously originated by Robert Englund when cameras roll on the franchise’s ninth film, titled A Nightmare on Elm Street, on May 5 in Chicago.

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