La Strage dei Vampiri (a.k.a Curse of the Blood-Ghouls) is a 1962 Italian horror film, starring Walter Brandi, Graziella Granata, Luigi Batzella, and Dieter Eppler.  Written and directed by, Roberto Mauri.

Plot: On their wedding night, a newlywed couple find themselves menaced by a bloodthirsty vampirer.

Stephen Cannell

Stephen Joseph Cannell (born February 5, 1941; rhymes with “channel”) is an American television producer, writer, novelist and occasional actor who is also the founder of Stephen J. Cannell Productions.

He has either written or co-written over 300 television scripts, created or co-created over two dozen television series, formed a successful production company, wrote best-selling police novels and even acted in his own and other producers’ shows. He has won an Emmy, two Writer’s Guild Awards, two Edgar Award Nominations and has a star on the Hollywood Blvd. Walk of Fame. Despite his many accolades, his first love continues to be writing.

Trivia:

Is Dyslexic.

During the early 80s, his office was located on the Paramount Lot while his shows were distributed by Universal Studios.

Three children, Tawnia, Chelsea, and Cody.

The filmed logo for his production company showed him at a typewriter, typing something onto a piece of paper, then throwing the paper in the air. In the background, we see a shelf containing his awards.

Is a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity.

Last name means “cinnamon” in French.

Has a room in his home where he only allows other writers to enter.

Notable Credits:

“Mission: Impossible” (1966)

“It Takes a Thief”

“Adam-12″

“Toma”

“The Rockford Files”

“The Greatest American Hero”

“The A-Team”

“Wiseguy”

“21 Jump Street”

“The Commish”

Dune is a 1984 science fiction film written and directed by David Lynch, based on the 1965 Frank Herbert novel of the same name. The film stars Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides, and includes an ensemble of well-known American and European actors in supporting roles, including Sting, Jose Ferrer, Sean Young, Virginia Madsen, Linda Hunt, Patrick Stewart, Max von Sydow, Siân Phillips and Jürgen Prochnow, among others. It was filmed at the Churubusco Studios in Mexico City and included a soundtrack by the band Toto. As in the novel, the central plot concerns a young man foretold in prophecy as the “Kwisatz Haderach” who will protect the titular desert planet from the malevolent House Harkonnen and save the universe from evil.

After the success of the novel, attempts to adapt Dune for a film began as early as 1971. A lengthy process of development hell followed throughout the 1970s, during which Arthur P. Jacobs, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Ridley Scott, all tried to bring their vision to the screen. In 1981, David Lynch was hired as director by executive producer Dino De Laurentiis.

The film was not well received by critics and performed poorly at the American box office at the time. Upon its release, director David Lynch distanced himself from the project, stating that pressure from both producers and financiers restrained his artistic control and denied him final cut.

Fans of the Dune series are polarized by the movie, although the film has become a cult favorite, and at least three different versions have been released worldwide. In some cuts of the film Lynch’s name is replaced in the credits with the name of a fictional director Alan Smithee, a pseudonym used by directors who wish not to be associated with a film for which they would normally be credited.

Trivia:

• Ridley Scott worked on bringing the film to the screen, but was unsuccessful. H.R. Giger (who worked with Scott on Alien (1979)) was hired as a production designer.
• The inspiration for the design of the stillsuits was the medical textbook “Gray’s Anatomy”.
• Two hundred workers spent two months hand-clearing three square miles of Mexican desert for location shooting.
• One scene called for Duke Leto (Jürgen Prochnow) to be strapped to a black stretcher and drugged. During one take, a high-powered bulb positioned above Prochnow exploded due to heat, raining down molten glass. Remarkably, Prochnow was able to free himself from the stretcher, moments before glass fused itself to the place he had been strapped. During the filming of the dream sequence, the Baron (Kenneth McMillan) approached Leto, who had special apparatus attached to his face so that green smoke would emerge from his cheek when the Baron scratched it. Although thoroughly tested, the smoke gave Prochnow first and second degree burns on his cheek. This sequence appears on film in the released version.
• The tendons visible when Paul hooks the worm were made from condoms.
• Some special effects scenes were filmed with over a million watts of lighting, drawing 11,000 amps.
• Some scenes were filmed in the same location and at the same time as scenes from Conan the Destroyer (1984).
• Number of production crew came to a total of 1,700. Dune required 80 sets built upon 16 sound stages. More than 6 years in the making, it required David Lynch’s work for three and a half years.
• David Lynch disowned the television cut.
• Director David Lynch and producer Raffaella De Laurentiis arranged a screen test in New York with Sean Young for the role of Chani. Young’s agent never told Young about the meeting, and she was in fact booked on a flight that evening to Los Angeles. Lynch and De Laurentiis missed their flight back to Los Angeles, and ended up catching the same plane as Young. During the flight, De Laurentiis noticed Young and told Lynch, “I bet that girl’s an actress.” A stewardess told the pair that her name was “Sean Young”, and De Laurentiis confronted Young about standing him and Lynch up. The misunderstanding sorted out, the three ended up drinking champagne and reading the script together upon returning to Los Angeles.
• John Hurt was offered the part of Dr Yueh.
• The name “Judas Booth” that appears as the screenwriter in the extended TV cut, is a combination of Judas, the apostle that betrayed Jesus Christ, and John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s killer. With this in-joke, David Lynch meant that the studio betrayed him and killed the film. The director’s credit is the usual in these cases Alan Smithee.
• Patrick Stewart replaced Aldo Ray.
• It took two weeks to film Max von Sydow’s role.
• During the film’s original release, “cheatsheets” explaining much of the movie’s setting and its more obscure vocabulary were handed out to moviegoers at some theatres.
• The first movie to feature a computer-generated human form, for the bodyshields.
• The theatrical version of this film is the only version of Dune, including the novel and the miniseries, where Thufir Hawat survives. A scene of Thufir’s death was filmed, but was cut.
• Original director Ridley Scott left the production after his older brother suddenly passed away. Scott wanted to start working as soon as possible, but Dune would take far to long to reach production. Scott decided to leave the project in favor of Blade Runner (1982), which was ready to start production immediately.
• Feyd-Rautha and The Beast Rabban are men of very few words: as the latter, Paul L. Smith speaks only 34 of them during the entire movie; as the former, ‘Sting’ says a mere 90. And that’s in the three-hour version of the film.
• Glenn Close turned down the role of Lady Jessica, not wanting to play “the girl who is always running and falling down behind the men”.
• David Lynch was originally signed to do two sequels to this film. The box office failure insured that the plans never came to fruition.
• Patrick Stewart said the stillsuit was the most uncomfortable costume he had ever worn.
• David Lynch has said he considers this film the only real failure of his career. To this day, he refuses to talk about the production in great detail, and has refused numerous offers to work on a special edition DVD. Lynch claims revisiting the film would be too painful an experience to endure.
• Cameo: [Michael Bolton] One of the drummers shown during Paul and Feyd’s duel.
• David Lynch turned down the chance to direct Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983) to direct Dune (1984).
• Alejandro Jodorowsky had originally planned on filming Dune in the early-’70s, and had enlisted the help of Jean Giraud and H.R. Giger to create the movie’s visual style. Salvador Dalí was enlisted to play the part of the Emperor, and Jodorowsky also intended to cast his own son Brontis Jodorowsky as Paul, David Carradine as Duke Leto, Orson Welles as the Baron, and Gloria Swanson as the Benne Geserit Reverend Mother. The soundtrack was to be done by Pink Floyd. According to Jodorowsky, “The project was sabotaged in Hollywood. It was French and not American. Their message was ‘not Hollywood enough’. There was intrigue, plunder. The storyboard was circulated among all the big studios. Later, the visual aspect of Star Wars (1977) strangely resembled our style. To make Alien (1979), they called Moebius [Giraud], Foss, Giger, O’Bannon, etc. The project signaled to Americans the possibility of making a big show of science-fiction films, outside of the scientific rigor of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The project of Dune changed our lives.” Jodorowsky also planned on making numerous changes to the source material, including making Duke Leto a eunuch and the spice a blue sponge. Author Frank Herbert openly despised these concepts.
• Director Cameo: [David Lynch] A radio operator on the mining ship that Paul and Duke Leto Atreides rescue from a sandworm.
• The musical instrument played by Patrick Stewart, the “baliset”, is actually a Chapman Stick, an electric guitar and bass created in the ’70s by ‘Emmett Chapman’, who plays the music we hear.
• While shooting on location in Mexico, filming came to a near-halt when most of the cast and crew came down with “Montezuma’s Revenge.” The studio had to build a full cafeteria large enough to accommodate the entire cast and crew for every meal, as well as import all the food from the United States to keep the film on schedule.
• Virginia Madsen replaced Anne-Louise Lambert.
• According to the biography ‘Five Easy Decades’, Jack Nicholson at one point in the late 1970s considered directing Dune, but decided that it would be too much of an undertaking.
• It was first intended to the shoot all the studio material in the UK. But all of the three big studios were totally full.
• Patrick Stewart played Claudius in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1980) (TV), a role that Kyle MacLachlan played in Hamlet (2000). Francesca Annis played Hamlet’s mother Gertrude in a theatrical production. Appropriately, she was cast as Jessica in this film when the role was declined by Glenn Close, who played Gertrude in Hamlet (1990/I).
• Gurney Halleck gives two quotations that are from the Old Testament of the Bible- Job 24:5 and Habbakkuk 1:9 – The first “Behold, as a wild ass in the desert go I forth to my work” – which he says as they arrive on Arrakis, Job 24:5. And “They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup as the east wind. And they shall gather the captivity of the sand.” – Habbakkuk 1:9.
• The movie alludes strongly to bible stories; such as, most strongly, the story of Moses.
• Jodie Foster auditioned for the role of Princess Irulan.
• Kim Basinger, Melanie Griffith, Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kristy McNichol, Tatum O’Neal, Bridget Fonda and Sarah Jessica Parker all were considered to play Princess Irulan.
• Brooke Shields tested for the role of Princess Irulan but failed the audition.
• Christopher Reeve auditioned for the role of Paul Atreides.
• Jack Nicholson was offered the role of Gurney Halleck, but turned it down.
• Dexter Fletcher was very seriously considered for Paul .
• The cast of this film includes many connections to Star Trek. Dean Stockwell has appeared on “Enterprise” (2001), Brad Dourif on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (1987), and of course Patrick Stewart played Cpt. Jean-Luc Picard. José Ferrer’s son Miguel Ferrer played a helmsman in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984). Star Trek: First Contact (1996) also featured Alice Krige, who played Jessica in “Children of Dune” (2003).
• Patrick Stewart has said in interviews that every cast member lost two scenes to cut made in editing.
• David Lynch (13 January 2006) : “Dune I didn’t have final cut on. It’s the only film I’ve made where I didn’t have, I didn’t technically have final cut on The Elephant Man (1980) but Mel Brooks gave it to me, and on Dune the film, I started selling out even in the script phase knowing I didn’t have final cut, and I sold out, so it was a slow dying- the-death and a terrible terrible experience. I don’t know how it happened, I trusted that it would work out but it was very naive and, the wrong move. In those days the maximum length they figured I could have is two hours and seventeen minutes, and that’s what the film is, so they wouldn’t lose a screening a day, so once again it’s money talking and not for the film at all and so it was like compacted and it hurt it, it hurt it. There is no other version. There’s more stuff, but even that is putrefied.”

Flash Gordon is a 1980 science fiction film, based on the eponymous comic strip character Flash Gordon. The film was directed by Mike Hodges and produced by Dino De Laurentiis. It stars Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Chaim Topol, Max von Sydow, Timothy Dalton, Brian Blessed and Ornella Muti. The screenplay was written by Michael Allin and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. It intentionally uses a camp style similar to the 1960s TV series Batman (for which Semple had written many episodes) in an attempt to appeal to fans of the original comics and serial films. The film is notable for its soundtrack composed by rock band Queen.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh8KVG8j68I]

Melody Anderson

Trivia:

• There is a rumor that the monitor behind Hans Zarkov (Topol) as he is having his memory dumped shows scenes from Topol’s previous movies.
• Dino De Laurentiis originally hoped that Federico Fellini would direct this film. The director had actually contributed to the original Flash strip cartoon during WWII.
• Kurt Russell auditioned to play Flash Gordon.
• Sam J. Jones was cast in the role after being spotted by the mother-in-law of Dino De Laurentiis on an episode of “The Dating Game” (1965)
• At one point Ming the Merciless says when he destroys a planet, he calls upon “the great god Daizan”. Daizan is Japanese for “great cruelty”.
• Max von Sydow’s Ming costume weighed over 70 pounds and he could only stand in it for a few minutes at a time.
• The psychedelic color effects throughout the Ming universe were accomplished by swirling multicolored dyes through creatively-lit tanks of water.
• One of the feast items in the Hawkmen’s Kingdom was Twinkies colored with food dye.
• Nicolas Roeg was originally going to direct, but didn’t due to creative difference. One of his proposals was to excise the trademark cliffhangers and melodrama, seeing Flash as more of “a metaphysical messiah.”
• Dennis Hopper was considered for the role of Dr Zarkov.
• Leon Greene was re-voiced by David de Keyser.
• John Osborne only has two lines.
• Mike Hodges was the eighth director chosen.
• Director Mike Hodges, referring to the numerous production problems that plagued the film, once called it “the only improvised $27-million movie ever made”.
• The insignia on Klytus’s uniform is based on Masonic symbols.
• Princess Aura’s “pet” is named Fellini. Production Designer Danilo Donati worked on a number of Federico Fellini films.
• George Lucas had hoped to remake the original Flash Gordon (1936/I), but when he learned that Dino De Laurentiis had already bought the rights, he wrote Star Wars (1977) instead.
• Mike Hodges considered commissioning Pink Floyd to compose the music.
• First film of Jim Carter.
• The backstory of Flash’s T-shirt was that it was a gift from an anonymous female fan. Flash wore it a lot in the hopes that he would eventually meet the woman.
• In the original script, when Flash is sentenced to death by Ming, Dale bursts out that Ming is “absolutely merciless”. Ming is enthralled with the description, and immediately starts calling himself “Ming the Merciless”.
• According to the original storyline, when Dale is entranced by Ming’s hypnotic ring, she is having a vision of being on an erotic picnic with Ming in a 1920′s setting.
• Klytus and Kala, Ming’s two chief henchmen, were competitors for their ruler’s favor. Ming played them off against each other to keep them from teaming up against him. This was downplayed in the film to keep the storyline fluid.
• In the original script, Flash and Dale first meet at a Canadian resort called Dark Harbor. Although they flirt with each other, they don’t become acquainted until they’re sharing the ill-fated plane ride to New York City. Dale later talks briefly about Dark Harbor during her tear-filled meeting with Flash before his execution.
• Dr. Zarkov’s backstory was that he was a NASA scientist who was fired for his paranoid fantasies that Earth was going to be attacked from outer space. Sixty Minutes derided him as “A Poor Man’s Billy Mitchell”.
• Ming’s attack on Earth was accomplished by bombarding the moon with force beams, knocking it out of orbit. The meteors which disrupt Flash’s airplane flight were burning chunks of lunar debris.
• Sam J. Jones’ dark hair was bleached blonde for this role, and Melody Anderson’s blonde hair was dyed brown. Flash was also supposed to have blue eyes, but Sam could not wear the contact lenses.
• Ming’s symbol (which Klytus also wears on his gauntlets) is borrowed from the Freemason’s square and compass. Ming also makes a Masonic gesture during the course of the movie.
• The wristwatch Flash is wearing in the early scenes of the film is a Seiko automatic chronograph, model 6139-6002. The watch disappears when Flash gets to Mongo.
• All the main actors were signed for multiple films but the sequels were never made since the first movie didn’t do as well as expected.

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The Ghost Galleon (El Buque maldito) (1974) is a Spanish horror film written and directed by Amando de Ossorio and stars Jack Taylor. It is also known as Horror of the Zombies.

The film is the third in Ossorio’s Blind Dead series and, being set aboard a ship, is the only film in the series to not feature the Templars’ trademark undead horses.

THE BLIND DEAD RETURN TO HUNT TENDER FLESH ON THE HIGH SEA!

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In what many fans consider the most surprising of the four films in the series, Maria Perschy (CASTLE OF FU MANCHU) and Jack Taylor (EUGENIE) star in writer/director Amando de Ossorio’s chilling tale about a boatload of stranded swimsuit models who discover a mysterious ghost ship. But this phantom galleon carries the coffins of the satanic Templar, eyeless zombies who hunt humans by sound. Even if these frightened lovelies can survive their own forbidden desires, will they escape the insatiable hunger of the BLIND DEAD?

This Definitive Edition of THE GHOST GALLEON – released in America as HORROR OF THE ZOMBIES – has been restored and remastered in High Definition and includes both the original English and Spanish language tracks, plus vintage trailers, TV spots and more, now available for the first time ever on DVD!

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