15 Rapid Facts About “Speed”

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Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 15 Rapid Facts About Speed.  Here are three of my favorites…

4. STEPHEN BALDWIN TURNED DOWN PLAYING JACK.
In addition to that Baldwin brother, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Wesley Snipes, and Woody Harrelson were all approached to play the lead. Director Jan de Bont thought Keanu Reeves was a great fit after seeing him in Point Break.

5. HALLE BERRY TURNED DOWN PLAYING ANNIE.
Berry wasn’t interested, nor were Meryl Streep or Kim Basinger. Yost wanted Ellen DeGeneres for the role (DeGeneres recently claimed she was never officially asked.) Demolition Man star Sandra Bullock won the role, and was paid $200,000.

13. IT TESTED THROUGH THE ROOF.
At a test screening, some audience members walked up the aisles backward so that they would miss as little of the movie as possible before going to the bathroom. It helped convince 20th Century Fox to move up the release date from August to June.

The “400 Days” Trailer is Here!

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The 400 Days  trailer is here!

400 DAYS is a psychological sci-fi film centering on four astronauts who are sent on a simulated mission to a distant planet to test the psychological effects of deep space travel. Locked away for 400 days, the crew’s mental state begins to deteriorate when they lose all communication with the outside world. Forced to exit the ship, they discover that this mission may not have been a simulation after all.

16 Repeatable Facts About “Groundhog Day”

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Roger Cormier and Mental_Floss present 16 Repeatable Facts About Groundhog Day.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. TOM HANKS AND MICHAEL KEATON TURNED DOWN PLAYING PHIL.
Hanks was busy, and figured if he starred in the film audiences would just expect him to become nice because he’s always nice anyway. Keaton didn’t understand the script. He admitted to regretting the decision.

13. NOBODY REALLY KNOWS HOW LONG MURRAY WAS STUCK IN THE SAME DAY.
Ramis refuted an earlier estimate of 10 years, guessing in 2009 it was more like “30 to 40 years.” In Rubin’s original script, Murray was looping for 10,000 years, and he marked the time by reading one page in one of the B&B’s library books every day.

16. MURRAY AND RAMIS’ FRIENDSHIP FELL APART ONCE FILMING ENDED.
Ramis admitted that his old friend and fellow Stripes and Ghostbusters star was “really irrationally mean and unavailable” at times, and often late to set, though he attributed the behavior to a divorce Murray was going through at the time. Outside of a few words at one wake and one bar mitzvah, Murray stopped speaking entirely to Ramis for 20 years, only to finally bury the hatchet on Ramis’ death bed before he passed away from complications due to autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis in 2014.

9 Mournful Facts About Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

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Joy Lanzendorfer and Mental_Floss present 9 Mournful Facts About Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. AS POE WAS WRITING THE POEM, HIS WIFE WAS DEATHLY ILL. 
When Poe was writing “The Raven,” his wife, Virginia, was suffering from tuberculosis. It was a weird marriage—Virginia was Poe’s first cousin and only 13 years old when they married—but there’s no doubt that Poe loved her deeply. Having lost his mother, brother, and foster mother to tuberculosis, he knew the toll the disease would take. “The Raven” is a poem written by a man who’d lost many loved ones, and was soon expecting to lose one more.

6. “THE RAVEN” WAS AN IMMEDIATE HIT.
After Graham’s Magazine rejected the poem, Poe published it in The American Review under the pseudonym “Quarles.” In January 1845, it came out in The New York Mirror under Poe’s real name. Around the country, it was reprinted, reviewed, and otherwise immortalized. It soon became so ubiquitous, it was used in advertising.

And then there were the parodies. Within a month after “The Raven” came out, there was a parody poem, “The Owl,” written by “Sarles.” Others soon followed, including “The Whippoorwill,” “The Turkey,” “The Gazelle,” and “The Parrot.” You can read many of themhere. Abraham Lincoln found one parody, “The Polecat,” so hilarious that he decided to look up “The Raven.” He ended up memorizing the poem.

7. “THE RAVEN” MADE POE INTO A CELEBRITY …
Poe was soon so recognizable that children followed him in the street, flapping their arms and cawing. Then he’d turn around and say, “nevermore!” and they would run away, shrieking. Trying to capitalize off this fame, he gave lectures that included dramatic readings of the poem. They were apparently something to see. His lecture was “a rhapsody of the most intense brilliancy … He kept us entranced for two hours and a half,” said one attendee. Yet another said that Poe would turn down the lamps and recite “those wonderful lines in the most melodious of voice.” Another said, “To hear him repeat ‘The Raven,’ which he does very quietly, is an event in one’s life.”

The 100 Greatest Horror Movies of All Time

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Hitfix polled more than 100 luminaries for the world of horror to come up with their list of The 100 Greatest Horror Movies of All Time. 

Here’s their top ten and my comments on each…

1. “The Exorcist” (1973; d. William Friedkin):  While it’s hard to argue with the popularity of The Exorcist as the greatest horror movie of all time – it is arguably the scariest – I’d put Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in the number one spot.

2. “The Shining” (1980; d. Stanley Kubrick): I like Kubrick’s take on Stephen King’s novel [even if King doesn’t] but it wouldn’t make my top ten.

3. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974; d. Tobe Hooper): Texas Chainsaw Massacre wouldn’t make my top ten… or top 50.

4. “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968; d. Roman Polanski): I’d like to see this one again.  I liked it when I saw it, but the last time was years ago.  I wonder if it would hold up.  The fact that it placed so high on the list indicates it would.

5. “Alien” (1979; d. Ridley Scott): I prefer Aliens.

6. “The Thing” (1982; d. John Carpenter): Yeah, I love that people are coming around to love this film.  It was ahead of its time.

7. “Halloween” (1978; d. John Carpenter): Love the love that John Carpenter received on this list!

8. “Psycho” (1960; d. Alfred Hitchcock): A classic!

9. “Night of the Living Dead” (1968; d. George A. Romero): You know I love this movie!

10. “Jaws” (1975; d. Steven Spielberg): Jaws is a great film but I always have a bit of trouble placing it in the horror category.

25 “Titanic” Facts You Never Knew

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Hollywood.com presents 25 Titanic Facts You Never Knew.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. The movie features 2 hours and 40 minutes of scenes set in 1912. This is the exact amount of time the Titanic took to sink.

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The film also has 37 seconds between the iceberg warning and the actual collision, which is the same amount of time that transpired in real life.

3. It was the first movie to receive two Academy Award nominations for the same character.

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Both Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart were nominated (Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively) for playing the role of Rose. The next time two actors were nominated for playing the same role was 2001’s Iris, also starring Winslet.

8. And Jack’s ice-fishing story is a Titanic survivor’s quote about the North Atlantic water.

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He was dissuading Rose not to jump off the back of the boat, in the scene where they meet.

40 Fascinating Facts About Your Favorite Horror Movies

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Mental_Floss presents 40 Fascinating Facts About Your Favorite Horror Movies.  Here are three of my favorites…

5. STEPHEN KING WASN’T A FAN OF THE SHINING.
In 1983, Stephen King told Playboy, “I’d admired [Stanley] Kubrick for a long time and had great expectations for the project, but I was deeply disappointed in the end result. Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fell flat.”

King didn’t like the casting of Jack Nicholson either, claiming, “Jack Nicholson, though a fine actor, was all wrong for the part. His last big role had been in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and between that and the manic grin, the audience automatically identified him as a loony from the first scene. But the book is about Jack Torrance’s gradual descent into madness through the malign influence of the Overlook—if the guy is nuts to begin with, then the entire tragedy of his downfall is wasted.”

24. GENE HACKMAN WAS SLATED TO STAR IN—AND DIRECT—THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.
Gene Hackman and Orion Pictures split the $500,000 needed for the movie rights to the book. But Hackman dropped out days after he watched clips of himself at the 1989 Oscars as FBI Agent Alan Parker in the violent Mississippi Burning, deciding not to follow up a dark role with an even more unlikeable character.

38. SISSY SPACEK WAS ADAMANT THAT HER OWN HAND APPEAR INCARRIE’S FINAL SCENE.
Though Brian De Palma wanted to get a stunt person for the final scene, where Sue Snell visits Carrie’s grave, Spacek insisted that it needed to be her hand that was shown, which required her to be buried in the ground. “I laughed about that,” Spacek told NPR. “I do all my own foot and hand work, and always have.”

10 Aquatic Facts About “Creature from the Black Lagoon”

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Mark Mancini and Mental_Floss present 10 Aquatic Facts About Creature from the Black Lagoon.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. THE MOVIE’S CONCEPT WAS CONCEIVED AT A CITIZEN KANE DINNER PARTY.
One night during filming of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles invited one of the movie’s actors, William Alland, over for dinner along with a cinematographer named Gabriel Figueroa. While there, Figueroa shared a story he had heard during his travels of a race of amphibious beasts—half man, half reptile—that stalked the Amazon River. More than a decade later, still intrigued by the concept, Alland dramatized it by producing Creature from the Black Lagoon.

4. A FORMER FRANKENSTEIN ACTOR TURNED DOWN THE MAIN ROLE.
When Boris Karloff retired from playing Mary Shelley’s reanimated monster, Glenn Strange took over. From 1944 to 1948, Strange terrified audiences in Universal’s House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. Years later, the studio tapped him to play their web-footed “Gillman” in Creature from the Black Lagoon, but because swimming wasn’t his forte, Strange declined the part.

9. ITS 1955 SEQUEL WAS CLINT EASTWOOD’S FIRST MOVIE.  
Pleased by the box office success of the original film, Universal rushed a sequel production.  Revenge of the Creature premiered in Denver on March 23, 1955. At one point, audiences got to see future star Clint Eastwood portraying a lab assistant. Though his appearance was uncredited, it hardly went unnoticed when the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed  Revenge of the Creature in a 1997 episode:

For Revenge of the Creature, Arnold resumed directing duties and he didn’t care for the young Eastwood’s bit, telling Alland, “I told you I don’t want to do that ******* scene!” Eventually, he relented and the footage stayed in. Eastwood never forgot the experience. As he told The Telegraph, “It was a hell of a way to start your acting career: walk on a set and you know that the director hates the scene. Therefore you know he hates you.”

31 Things You Didn’t Know About Your Favorite Horror Movies

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Jenna Mullins and E! present 31 Things You Didn’t Know About Your Favorite Horror Movies.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. The Exorcist is the first horror movie to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

9. The blood used in Night of the Living Dead is chocolate syrup.

21. Crewmembers were so creeped out by Tim Curry‘s performance as Pennywise in It that most people avoided him during filming.

Garbriel Hardman Must Have a License to Kill

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James Bond not only has a new movie, Spectre, but 007 also recently made his return to comics with the release of a new comic series written by Warren Ellis with art by Jason Masters and published by Dynamite Entertainment.

To celebrate the release Dynamite Entertainment commissioned several artists to create variant covers for the first issue.  The cover above is by Gabriel Hardman and tops my list.  You can see all of the other covers at Bleeding Cool and they are worth a look.