A Few Phone Snaps Of The Abandoned Renaissance Faire In NoVA

Series of photos taken of the first atomic bomb.

SAG-AFTRA approving a no-promotional strike right before SDCC 

Movie Review: Apollo 18 (2011)

Title: Apollo 18

Release Date: September 2, 2011

Director: Gonzalo López-Gallego

Run Time: 86 Minutes

Quick Hits: Two years after the Apollo 17 mission, three astronauts are sent back to the moon under the guise of a satellite launch to place monitoring equipment on its surface.  Upon arriving the astronauts find a Russian lander and evidence of the reason that we never went back.

Review: Apollo 18 is another "found footage" style horror film that is set in 1974 in which a group of astronauts are sent to the moon on a top secret mission to place sensors on its surface during the height of the Cold War.  The mission goes to plan until the astronauts come across a Russian lander that seems to be deserted and covered in blood.  Upon further inspection of the surrounding area they find a dead cosmonaut in a crater with his helmet removed and a rip in his suit.  The astronauts proceed back to their own lander where all hell breaks loose.  One astronaut on an "unplanned" moon walk heads out to pick up a motion camera that has apparently fallen down; while on this walk he complains of something moving in his suit.  Upon returning to the lander we see that he is bleeding; after further inspection of the wound, they pull what appears to simply be a moon rock out of his body.  Over the next several hours the wounded astronaut becomes infected and enters into psychosis. The movie ends with the two astronauts trying to flee the surface of the moon, against the orders of the U.S. government, while being attacked by strange rock spider beings that were apparently there the whole time, which also killed the cosmonaut they found earlier,unsuccessfully.

Well if you aren't a little confused after reading all that I applaud you.  The concept of the entire movie was that this "footage" was leaked to the net and shows a real lunar landing; that much is obvious, along with every jump scare that is in this whole movie.  The great thing about found footage movies is that you never really know why, or sometimes what, the "evil entity" is nor what it actually wants.  Everything in this movie is telegraphed at least five minutes before it is going to happen and that is where it really lacks in substance.  Granted many people say that it seems vaguely "believable" in that it was shot in such a way that you truly feel sorry for those involved (i.e. the little boy who will never see his father again), but that is also where it loses you.  The only redeeming quality that I can take away from this movie was that it had a slight Alien (1979) feel to it. You never saw, clearly that is, just what was attacking the two astronauts while they were on the moon till the very end at which point it is too late to save themselves, or the movies for that matter.  If you have an hour and twenty minutes to kill where you aren't going to pay much attention to it anyway go ahead and put this movie on.

Overall Rating: 2/5 

One of my favorite mysteries. 

In 1994 Gloria Ramirez was admitted to the emergency room suffering the effects of cervical cancer. Ramirez was in a state of confusion and experiencing respiratory and cardiac distress. Going into cardiac arrest, workers attempted to defibrillate her heart.

At that point several people saw an oily sheen covering Ramirez’s body, and some noticed a fruity, garlic-like odor that they thought was coming from her mouth. A registered nurse…attempted to draw blood from Ramirez’s arm, and noticed an ammonia like smell coming from the tube. She passed the syringe to Julie Gorchynski, a medical resident who noticed manila-colored particles floating in the blood.

After drawing blood, three staff members treating Ramirez lost consciousness. The emergency room was then ordered evacuated while a skeleton crew stayed behind to treat Ramirez. 45 minutes later, Ramirez was pronounced dead from kidney failure. California Department of Health and Human Services investigated the incident, interviewing all 34 staff. About 10 workers claimed to have been affected, the most serious of which experienced shortness of breath, muscle spasms, and loss of consciousness. All affected workers produced normal blood tests.

One worker spent two weeks in the intensive care unit due to breathing problems, hepatitis, avascular necrosis of the knees, all of which were developed after the incident.

There are many theories as to confirm what happened ranging from the DMSO theory (a chemical used to treat cancer parents) to something as radical as a meth lab.

You can read more here

This has been a scare-crow appreciation post.

Movie Review: Paranormal Asylum: The Revenge of Typhoid Mary (2013)

Title: Paranormal Asylum: The Revenge of Typhoid Mary

Release Date: September 17,2013

Director: Nimrod Zalmanowitz

Run Time: 88 Minutes

Quick Hits: Two former college roommates, turned best friends, reconnect after sometime to put together a documentary about a local psychiatric hospital which is the supposed last resting place of the infamous Typhoid Mary.  

Review: Before we get into what the movie was about let's look at some facts about the actual "Typhoid Mary."  Mary Mallon (aka Typhoid Mary) was an immigrant to the United States from Northern Ireland in 1884.  Mary worked as a cook for families for the majority of her life, unfortunately wherever she would find work several members of the family would come down with typhoid fever and she would move onto the next household.  Upon her first quarantine Mary was found to be an asymptomatic carrier of the disease, which in lay man's terms means that she had the disease but never showed any sign nor did she suffer from it.  She was released from quarantine only to be brought back in permanently after she was found to be cooking again at a hospital.  It was during this second quarantine that she suffered a stroke which paralyzed her.  Mary died at the age of 69 in November 1938.

  We open with one of the main characters, Mark, heading back to New York to meet up with his former college roommate Dan to shoot a documentary that he believes can put them on the fast track to Hollywood.  Dan gives Mark more information on the hospital that they are planning on shooting in by telling about the legend that Typhoid Mary was secretly moved to.  Over the course of the next four days or so we see, through their cameras, a couple of ghostly silhouettes and some odd happenings within the hospital.  Michelle, Dan's Fiance, holds a seance to try and evoke a greater reaction from the spirits still roaming the halls and gets herself possessed by Mary herself.  Fast forward to the end we find out that the one person that seemed like she wanted to help the gang actually led them into the whole thing just to perpetuate her own youth.  

    Right from the get go you can tell that this is a low budget movie which works against itself the entire way.   I am not saying that all low budget films are bad, but this one is awful from start to finish.  As I said this movie works against itself from start to finish between the acting that is not one bit believable nor relate-able to the lighting throughout.  talking more on the lighting, it honestly looks as if the director thought it would be cool to put a gray filter for every shot.  However there are some shots where the gray filter has been taken off only to have pitch black shadows put into shots and around characters.  Getting away from the production flaws in this movie we can try and grab onto something positive in the story right? Wrong.  The back story given for Mary alone is awful, twisting what happened to her and her final days to try and make it conducive to the idea that the movie is trying, so desperately, to portray is atrocious.  One of the tags on this movie is that it is "inspired by true events," well the only true event that is shown is that Mary existed and she had typhoid.  The rest of it is a complete fabrication. Normally I could think of some reason that a movie could be watched, whether for enjoyment or a time kill, but I just have to advise against this one entirely.

Rating: 0/5

Movie Review: Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

Title: Silent Hill: Revelation

Release Date: October 26, 2012

Driector: Michael J Bassett

Run Time: 94 Minutes

Quick Hits:  Set several years after the original Silent Hill (2006), we find that Sharron (now known as Heather) escaped the clutches of Silent Hill and is living with her father.  She is forced to face the terrors of Silent Hill once more to try and save her father from The Order whom only want to be freed from the clutches of Alessa.

Review: Set on the eve of Heather's (aka Sharron) eighteenth birthday, we open in a nightmarish carnival setting in which she is being chased by men in gas masks and many other creepy things that we would expect from the realm of Silent Hill (which I will be referring to from here on out by SH).  Lo and behold that is exactly what this is as Heather wakes from her dream being comforted by her father, Harry, who is then attacked by another SH monster in the same way that Freddy, Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, would do using a dream within a dream scenario; Heather actually wakes up this time and everything seems to be fine.  It is revealed to us that Heather and her father have been on the run because Harry had killed a man in "self-defense."  While at school Heather "falls" back into the SH "reality" without actually returning to SH, as she starts to see the walls rust away along with seeing young children in classrooms teasing a single girl saying "burn the witch," along with another monster coming towards her.  She snaps out of it as a fellow student, Vince, bumps into her.  Feeling as though she is being followed, Heather calls her father to come meet her at the mall; as he attempts to leave the house he is attacked and kidnapped by an unknown group.  Aided by Vince, Heather travels back to SH to try and save her father.  While in SH Heather learns of her origins, being the good portion of Alessa, and the scheme that The Order has developed to free themselves from the hell that they are in.  In the end she thwarts their plan by joining back with Alessa and a little help from everybody's favorite SH monster, Pyramid Head, dispelling the fog that had consumed SH.  The movie closes with Heather and Vince catching a ride with a trucker away from SH as a police convoy transporting prisoners drives into town as the fog and ash begin to rain down once again.

If you like the SH game franchise and have seen the first movie then you pretty much know the main players and the back story leading up to this point.  As a sequel to the first movie this one kind of falls on its face.  The way that Rose, Heather's adoptive mother, is able to get Heather out of SH (if you haven't seen the first movie they are stuck there at the end and not able to leave, sorry for the spoiler) is kind of a cop-out in my opinion and is feels like it was thrown into the script just to clear up confusion haphazardly; "I just happened to find a talisman that can only get one of us out of here so I gave it to her," come on now that is kind of weak.  Speaking of weak, that pretty much sums up the whole of the story for me.  At no point are we really given anything new to pull our attention and say "wow" to like in the first SH movie.  Other than the weak story I can say that the transitions that were used to move from reality to "SH reality" were very well done, they weren't forced and were very subtle.  Whether it was just walking through a doorway or using a cutaway so that a seemingly normal person could be SH-ified.  However this is the only uplifting point of the film that I can point out.  The movie was made during the "re-introduction," if you will, of 3-D movies during the summer/fall season of 2012 and thus is has several 3-D shots that I feel distract and detract from the movie.  I am sure that the effect looks good in 3-D, but in 2-D they just look god awful.  If you want closure on the story of Silent Hill I would suggest watching it, other than that I would can only give you the advice that Harry gave to Heather at the beginning of the movie: "I want you to promise me, no matter what happens, you will never go there."

Overall Rating: 1/5

ok im gonna need every pennsylvanian on tumblr to start charging up your JO crystals NOW. were gonna need a state wide resonance powerful enough to topple GOD if Senator Xehanort is going to stand a chance against Dr Oz in the 2022 pennsylvania senate elections