Friday, 19 July 2013

Monday, 8 July 2013

Horror Films



Horror Films You Didn’t Realize Were Based on True Stories






While it’s true that many horror filmmakers have plastered the phony “true story” label on their movies in hopes of filling theater seats and winning box office gold, some scary movies have been inspired by real-life events. Tragic tales, actual murder cases, and dark memories are usually the basis for these films, proving that truth can be more terrifying than fiction. Most of us know the story behind famous fright films like The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, or even Texas Chainsaw Massacre (serial killer Ed Gein has inspired dozens of movies thanks to his gruesome history), but we wanted to fill you in on several lesser-known, real-life plotlines that influenced popular works of horror. Test your knowledge past the break, and feel free to chat about any of your favorite true terror tales in the comments.


A Nightmare on Elm Street
A story about a pizza-faced madman who terrorizes teens in their dreams doesn’t sound like it could possibly be based on a real-life story, but director Wes Craven was inspired to create the 1984 slasher classic after reading an article in the LA Times. The disturbing write-up detailed one man’s bizarre death. Craven explained more about the case behind A Nightmare on Elm Street  in a 2008 interview:
“It was a series of articles in the LA Times, about men from South East Asia, who were from immigrant families and who had died in the middle of nightmares — and the paper never correlated them, never said, ‘Hey, we’ve had another story like this.’ The third one was the son of a physician. He was about twenty-one; I’ve subsequently found out this is a phenomenon in Laos, Cambodia. Everybody in his family said almost exactly these lines: ‘You must sleep.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t understand; I’ve had nightmares before — this is different.’ He was given sleeping pills and told to take them and supposedly did, but he stayed up. I forget what the total days he stayed up was, but it was a phenomenal amount — something like six, seven days. Finally, he was watching television with the family, fell asleep on the couch, and everybody said, ‘Thank god.’ They literally carried him upstairs to bed; he was completely exhausted. Everybody went to bed, thinking it was all over. In the middle of the night, they heard screams and crashing. They ran into the room, and by the time they got to him he was dead. They had an autopsy performed, and there was no heart attack; he just had died for unexplained reasons. They found in his closet a Mr. Coffee maker, full of hot coffee that he had used to keep awake, and they also found all his sleeping pills that they thought he had taken; he had spit them back out and hidden them. It struck me as such an incredibly dramatic story that I was intrigued by it for a year, at least, before I finally thought I should write something about this kind of situation.”






Child’s Play
Writer Don Mancini conceived of the script for his killer doll movie Child’s Play as a satire about toy marketing and merchandising for children, but the idea developed into a horror film. In the creepy 1988 movie, a serial killer uses voodoo rituals to transfer his soul into a doll and possesses a child’s toy. The idea for this twist was apparently inspired by a real-life voodoo vendetta that a Jamaican nurse inflicted upon Key West painter and author Robert Eugene Otto. She gave Robert the Doll to Otto in 1904, but eventually turned against her employer and cursed it. The writer would apparently talk to the doll when he was a child. Otto’s family would find things missing or moved in his room, and heard him screaming at night. After Otto passed away, the doll was left behind and wound up with the new homeowners who also experienced similar attacks, claiming the doll could move and was trying to kill them. Robert now has his own website, has appeared on the travel channel, and is displayed in a museum where he’s a featured stop on a ghost tour.







The Hills Have Eyes
Director Wes Craven based his 1977 cult horror film The Hills Have Eyes — about a family hunted by deformed cannibals — on the Sawney Bean story. In 15th and 16th-century Scotland, Bean left home and took to the coastal caves with a woman where they lived for a number of years and had 14 children. The clan ambushed innocent passersby and murdered them for food. When locals began to notice the disappearances and body parts started washing up on shore, the family was hunted and brought to trial. At that time, they numbered 48, most of them the product of incest. The entire family was executed for the murder and cannibalization of over 1,000 people. Craven’s film puts an exploitation spin on the story with horrifying effect.







The Blob
Irvin Yeaworth’s 1958 film (and its 1988 remake) about an alien blob that falls from outer space and engulfs people into a miserable, gooey death was based on a 1950 case in Philadelphia. A group of policemen discovered a “domed disk of quivering jelly, six feet in diameter, one foot thick at the center and an inch or two near the edge.” When they tried to move it, it dissolved into a sticky scum. The substance is called star jelly and is usually reported seen near the site of a meteorite landing. However, due to the location of the event, it’s also believed that the substance the officers saw was industrial waste since the gas company was located in the same vicinity.







Dead Ringers
There really were twin gynecologists who operated on “mutant women.” David Cronenberg’s chilling tale of two brothers who succumb to drugs and depression in Dead Ringers was based on a novel by Bari Wood, which in turn was based on a troubling real-life story. Identical twin gynecologists in New York City Stewart and Cyril Marcus were successful doctors who shared everything, including a nasty addiction to barbiturates. In 1975, their decomposing bodies were found in their East Side apartment (dead about a week). Their slow decline had been largely ignored, despite incidents reported by hospital staff and patients about their strange behavior. They essential died from withdrawal, but the spin Cronenberg puts on the twins’ tragic story makes you wonder if there wasn’t some part of them that vowed to die together.






Audrey Rose
After Elliot Hoover loses his daughter in a fiery car crash, 11 years later he becomes convinced that a little girl named Ivy is really his little girl reincarnated. The surreal 1977 film Audrey Rose is based on Frank De Felitta’s 1975 novel of the same name, and was inspired by a real-life experience the author had with his own son. A 1976 People article details the background of De Felitta’s mysterious encounter with the metaphysical and how Audrey Rose was born:
“He and his wife, Dorothy, were relaxing on the terrace of their Los Angeles home in the summer of 1971. Suddenly they heard piano music in the style of Fats Waller coming from the house. ‘We went in and there was Raymond at the piano, going like the devil. We were shocked. In fact, we were scared. Raymond said his fingers were doing it.’ The boy, then 6, had never before displayed any hint of musical talent.
De Felitta consulted a Los Angeles occultist named Barbara Ryan, who explained Raymond’s mystifying talent as ‘an incarnation leak.’ ‘She told me that Raymond was one of those souls who had been through many lifetimes,’ De Felitta says. ‘They have innate memories of past lives, and they pick up where they left off in a past life.’ Fascinated, Frank began to read American mystic Edgar Cayce, Hindu texts on reincarnation and the works of a University of Virginia psychiatrist investigating the subject.”







Jaws
It’s not a far stretch to believe that a series of real-life shark attacks inspired the novel that became the framework for the first American blockbuster, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Peter Benchley’s book of the same name looked to a set of 1916 shark attacks in New Jersey that killed four people and injured many others. The beasts caused a national panic and saw seaside communities abandoning waters in droves, despite the attacks being a mostly rare occurrence. The grisly incident is largely responsible for the public opinion of sharks as man-eating murderers.







The Girl Next Door
Jack Ketchum’s disturbing novel The Girl Next Door was adapted for the big screen in 2007. The film about the sadistic torture and murder of an innocent, orphaned girl is brutal and extremely challenging to watch — which makes the fact that it’s based on a real-life case bone chilling. The real girl next door was Sylvia Likens who was the abandoned child of carnival workers, left to a local family (along with her sister) in the hopes of the children living a righteous life. Instead, she was severely abused and killed at the hands of Gertrude Baniszewski and her children. She had only lived in the house for three months.







The Strangers
Filming home invasion horror flick The Strangers was a personal experience for writer-director Bryan Bertino. “As a kid, I lived in a house on a street in the middle of nowhere. One night, while our parents were out, somebody knocked on the front door and my little sister answered it. At the door were some people asking for somebody that didn’t live there,” he explained in his production notes. “We later found out that these people were knocking on doors in the area and, if no one was home, breaking into the houses. In The Strangers, the fact that someone is at home does not deter the people who’ve knocked on the front door; it’s the reverse.” Bertino’s main inspirations for the story, however, are the Manson murders and the unsolved quadruple homicide case known as the Keddie Cabin Murders. In 1981 at a resort town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, an entire family was stabbed, strangled, and bludgeoned to death.







The Shining
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining seems to be one of those movies that has fans in opposite camps: those who love the movie, but have never read the book, and those that dislike the film and praise Stephen King’s 1977 novel as the real hero. Part of that may be influenced by King himself, who was very vocal in his hatred for Kubrick’s movie — at least upon its initial release. King has a strong personal attachment to the story about a family that spends one winter playing caretaker for a massive hotel. Isolation and strange phenomenon overtakes them. King and his wife Tabitha spent an evening in a similar Colorado hotel that was eerily empty. “When we arrived, they were just getting ready to close for the season,” the author once explained. “We found ourselves the only guests in the place — with all those long, empty corridors… ” After a surreal dinner in a dining room where King and his wife were the only guests, and a terrible nightmare later that evening, King knew what kind of story he was being compelled to write. “That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire-hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.”

Sunday, 7 July 2013

London Science Museum

Open and free

Open every day except 24 to 26 December
10.00 to 18.00 (last entry 17.15) 


Visiting the Science Museum

View our location on google maps
Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London, SW7 2DD


If you ever want a good day out why not visit The London Sicence Museum it is free to enter but if you want to you can make a donation.
There is plenty to see you have the space centre where you can see rockets the moon landing and return capsole space suits the type of food they took etc.


On 7 December 1972, Apollo 17 blasted into orbit. To this day, Apollo 17 remains the most recently manned mission to the moon and the final mission of the US Apolllo space programme.
Why not celebrate the 40th anniversary of this momentous voyage by taking your own trip to the moon in the Science Museum's 4D Cinema?
Feel the impact of a Saturn V rocket launch, be part of a moon landing and discover the smell of space in Legend of Apollo at our 4D cinema.
Experience for yourself being part of the ground-breaking Apollo missions of the 1960’s and 1970’s through NASA film archives and exceptional 3D computer animation.

You have the Red Arrows flight sim fee to go on


Discover the thrill of flying with the RAF Red Arrows during one of their sensational aerial aerobatics displays in Red Arrows 3D.
With stunning 3D vision and flight simulator technology, see and feel what it’s like in the cockpit in our incredible Red Arrows 3D cinema.
Then take the controls in one of our Fly 360 jet flight simulators.



IMAX Films fee to see

Penguins 3D
Narrated by David Attenborough .
 
Astronaut from Hubble IMAX film
Journey through distant galaxies on this mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope.
 
Giant turtle from Deep Sea IMAX film
Dive into this magical 3D adventure and swim with some of the planet's most colourful creatures.
 
Flies from the Fly me to the Moon IMAX film
Join three curious flies as they sneak on board the Apollo 11 mission for an incredible space journey.
 
Astronaut from Space Station IMAX film
Blast off to space to see the building of the International Space Station in breathtaking 3D.
 
Orangutans from Born to be Wild
Meet orphaned orangutans and elephants, and the people who rescue them.

 

Galleries and exhibitions


Object-rich Galleries

Exhibits in Making the Modern World
This unique, breathtaking gallery chronologically presents 150 of the most significant items from the Science Museum's collections from 1750 to 2000.
 
Indentical twins in the Who am I? gallery
What makes you, you? Who am I? investigates everyone’s favourite subject – themselves.
 
Flight gallery
Share the dreams of the flight pioneers: see the development of aviation from its tentative beginnings to the modern era of mass air travel.
 
 
 
 
There are also plenty of places to eat and drink it really is a great day out

Wednesday, 3 July 2013

My Holiday

Got back from Malta yesterday morning at 4:00 am to a miserable morning of rain and when we got back to our bungalow we had a nice water leak in airing cupboard all me and the wife wanted to do is turn round and go back out there.
We had a fantastic time this is our six year at the same hotel we go there two three times a year and we have made some really good friends out there the average temperature was around 34 to 38 degrees had a couple of cold days where temperature only hit 40 degrees plus lol.
Finally won Mr Melli aha after my fith attempt at doing it you have to get up on stage there are four of us and there are five task you have to do, first is you have a hat straw and a chair and you have to do the opposite of the host if he puts hat on you take yours of, if he sits on chair you stand up, if he  puts straw in mouth you take yours out etc i won that, then you run around kissing as many women as you can on the cheek in twenty seconds i won that, then you have to do a Tarzan cry i also won that, the you blow up a balloon with out holding on to it you can only use your mouth i came second and finally you have to drink half a pint of beer as quick as you can i came second lost by around half a second was a good laugh got a paper crown with Mr Melli aha on it. Normally quite shy but meet some other couples that we made friends with and me and this guy keep getting up on stage and making people laugh they said we should form an act and do it full time even made the bar staff and manager laugh it was great fun.
We did a cruise around Malta and over to Gozo looking at all the caves as we went, then we stop at the blue lagoon for the afternoon what a beautiful  bay went on this speedboat the fastest in Malta does 90mph on water very fast. Our hotel is one of the only one that every room has a sea view and what a view, it has its only private beach beautiful gardens and all the water sports you can do  right at the hotel, the food is fantastic and you could not get better staff everyone we spoke to that it was there first time there said they would go again.Not a religious person but went to see the famous Mosta church that really is something everyone who goes  to Malta should see out of this world it is famous for the fact that during the war there was 300 people in the church singing and praying when a huge bomb went through the roof hit the floor bounced and rolled across the church without blowing up god was on there side that day. Another place to see is the silent city best time is  night time with all the lights not seen nothing like it. In all we had a fantastic Holiday we are looking at moving out there soon hoping to do it this year if not next year can't wait.

Sunday, 16 June 2013

Holiday

Today is my last day at home tomorrow i will be jetting out to Malta for two weeks of sunshine i can not wait.
The only part of the Holiday i do not like is the journey to the airport and the waiting around for the flight.
We have an hours journey to  the airport then check in suitcases and then have to hang around the airport for around three hours. (if only there was a faster way to do it) Once we get going we have a three and a half hour flight, then an hour coach journey to our hotel.
We have to leave around 2:00pm for the 06:00pm flight, but we will not reach the hotel until around 11:00pm.
Still once we get there we can then relax and enjoy the 30 plus degree sunshine around the pool, go for nice walks, go on a nice cruise around the island, jet skiing, etc, then chill out in the evenings to a nice meal, a few drinks and good entertainment. The only bad bit will be having to come home the wife and i have made some really good friends out there and we are looking to move out there in the near future.
If i could get the work out there while i was on holiday we would not even bother to come back.

Mosta Church Malta



Just about every holidaymaker who goes sightseeing in Malta visits the famous Parish Church of St Mary in the town of Mosta. Its beautiful Rotunda, the third largest in the world, stands like a beacon dominating the skyline towards the north of the Island. As visitors stand in awe underneath the magnificent dome, they hear a story from the darkest hours of World War 2.

Mosta was in the direct flight path of enemy bombers retreating from or heading to the RAF base at Ta Qali. As a result the town was heavily bombed in the first four months of 1942, and civilian casualties were high. Never before had their faith been more important to the people of Mosta.

At 1640 hours on 9 April 1942, up to 300 of them were gathered in the church to hear Mass when a 500kg Luftwaffe bomb pierced the dome and landed among them. It failed to explode. The shocked parishioners were ushered out of the Church to safety and no-one was hurt.

News of the remarkable escape spread quickly across the Island, and among these deeply religious people it wasn’t long before the event was being described as a miracle. When the siege was over, the Maltese began to rebuild their lives and tried to forget the horrors of the war. But the story of ‘the Miracle of Mosta’ was kept alive, as a symbol of the faith and hope of the Maltese in such troubled times. In due course, a commemorative display was set up in an ante-room, with gift shop.

Inevitably, like many remarkable tales that are told and retold, over the years the tale of Mosta has reached mythical proportions, with the inevitable blurring of truth and fiction. A thorough investigation of all aspects of the event was carried out by the late Anthony Camilleri, published in his 1992 book ‘Il-Hbit mill-Ajru fuq ir-Rotunda tal-Mosta’. However, even he was at the mercy of the effect time has on the memory.


The bomb

The UXB removed from the church on 9 April 1942 was a 500kg German high explosive. Contrary to some recent claims, it was a live bomb; it was not full of sand and did not contain a message of greeting. The bomb on display in the church is not the real one but a similar example.

The removal
The emotional attachment to Malta of many who served there during World War 2 has drawn them to return as holidaymakers in recent decades. They often identify strongly with Mosta, so much so that some believe they were present that day in 1942. According to several sources in Malta, former RAF and Army servicemen from a range of regiments have stated that they shepherded the congregation out to safety, others that they picked up the bomb and carried it out of the church.

Who did it
The disposal of the unexploded bomb at Mosta on 9 April 1942 is logged in the official War Diary of the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Sections. For them, arriving after people had been led out of the church by their priests, there was no sense of a miracle at the time – it was just a routine UXB.

The bomb on display in the church represents something beyond the ‘miracle of Mosta’. It stands for just one of over 7000 unexploded bombs dealt with by the RE Bomb Disposal Sections in two years. 

Popeye Village Malta


On my last trip to Malta we went to Popeye village in Malta it is the actual village set used for the film starring Robin Williams, it was a great day out.



Popeye’s Village in Real Life

Tucked away in the small European country of Malta is a place you’d probably never expect to find in the real world– Popeye’s Village. Also known as Sweethaven Village, it is an ideal family-vacation spot and one of Malta’s major tourist attractions. The fun park is modeled on the theme of the favorite children’s cartoon character, Popeye the Sailor Man. Interestingly, this village was the actual set used by Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Productions to shoot the 1980 film Popeye, based on the comic strips by E. C. Segar.
At Sweethaven, you can expect to see models of all the main characters of the popular children’s cartoon – Popeye the Sailor, Olive Oyl, Bluto, Swee’Pea and Wimpy. You can also go on joy rides and visit play houses, puppet shows, museums, and cinema sessions featuring the film Popeye and the construction of the set. You can even star in your own film, record it and take it home. But that’s not all, there are a host of other things to see and experience, like face painting, balloon modelling, storytelling, open-air barbeques, crafts and Wii games. There’s also a mini golf course and a free wine tasting for adults. The season-specific activities are a huge hit as well, these include water trampolines, play pools and boat rides during the summer, and a Christmas Parade along with Santa’s toy town in December.
Popeye-Village-Malta
Although Popeye was created way back in 1929, the popularity of this character has remained intact through the decades. I remember many happy hours of my childhood spent watching reruns of the old 1960s Popeye cartoons on TV; it was the only way my mother could get me to eat Spinach! The film version was made by Robert Altman starring Robin Williams, and was shot at Sweethaven in 1980. The construction of the set started in 1979 and it took seven months to build with the help of 165 workers. There are 19 real wooden buildings, the materials for which were imported from Holland and Canada, because Malta doesn’t have any forests. The all-wooden village was constructed to give it a 1920s look and feel. 8 tons of nails were used to make the structures stand, and 2000 gallons of paint to make them look cartoony. They also built a huge breakwater in Anchor Bay, to protect the set from high seas.

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Popeye village is well-connected and a short bus-ride away from Mellieha Bay. The Fun Park is accessible all year round, but opening times vary according to the season.
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