This is no way is meant to be an insult of BOO! A MADEA HALLOWEEN.
But its victory at the Halloween weekend box office clearly showcases a vacuum of scary at this week’s box office – a week that should be housing horror films and festivals of darkness. It’s Halloween weekend for God’s sake..
The film is in its second week.. it dropped more than 40% from the opening.. but it still ended up in first place with $16 mil..
INFERNO fell short of all expectations this weekend.. Tom Hanks flopped.. $15 mil for over 3,500 theaters!
But BOO! A MADEA HALLOWEEN? Number 1? And with an awfully low count in dollars.
Why did the big studios lump all the horror flicks into the spring and summer? This season could have used some scary movies. Instead people were stuck NETFLIXING old ones or finding the hits from yesterday in the DVD five buck bin at Walmart.
This should have been a big weekend for something. Sadly we were offered nothing.
A New Podcast Featuring Appearances by Horror Bestseller Joe Hill and MTV VJ Martha Quinn Makes its Frightening October Debut.
The premier episode features appearances from bestselling horror novelist Joe Hill and former MTV VJ Martha Quinn cast as survivors of the flaming apocalypse depicted in Joe Hill’s New York Times Bestselling novel, The Fireman. Billed as a mix of paranormal shows such as In Search Of with short-form narrative journalism (each episode explores a different mystery), the show comes across the This American Life of the supernatural world. In the episode, Joe Hill is interviewed as one of the newly infected arriving at what will soon become Camp Wyndham.
Set in early May, before the events of the novel get rolling, it offers a look at what the world may have looked like just as civilization begins to break down into chaos. Martha Quinn became involved in the podcast after she was surprised to discover she was a character in Joe Hill’s new novel The Fireman.
“And all of a sudden I was like ‘What is going on? Somebody on Twitter said that you’re a character in Joe Hill’s book and I look up Joe Hill and saw that he is Stephen King’s son and he wrote this book and I’m a character in it and I’m like, ‘Oh my God. I am. That is so cool!’"
The pilot episode "The Fireman,” featuring Joe Hill and Martha Quinn, plus a bonus episode with their full interviews and the season one trailer are available now on iTunes and the show’s website, www.PointMystic.org.
Season one, episode one: “White Rabbit” debuts on Halloween, this October 31st.
Ronald Clark O’Bryan is remembered as the man who killed Halloween … a nicknamed along with the “CANDY MAN.”
His actions also began decades of parents ferociously searching their kids’ candy bowls after trick or treating ended each year.. something that continues until even today…
Every time you see local or state police offering up free X-Ray scans of candy on Halloween, think of O’Bryan…
He killed his own child Timothy, who was aged 8, with cyanide-laced sugar sticks..
O’Bryan was 30 when he did it.. the town of Pasadena Texas was rocked..
One house along the route was dark, but the children still rang the doorbell. There was no answer, so they moved on.
O’Bryan lagged behind and then, moments later, came running to catch up. He was waving five giant Pixy Stix, 22-inch straws filled with flavored sugar.
He told the kids it was their lucky day, because “rich neighbors” were distributing “expensive treats.”
Each of the three children on the walk got one Pixy Stix. Later, O’Bryan gave the fourth to Bates’ other child, a 5-year-old daughter. The final Pixy Stix went to a trick-or-treat visitor who rang the doorbell at the Bates house.
Timothy ate only a bit of the Pixy Stick when he said the taste was bitter.. moments later he was in pain and he was screaming and crying for his Daddy–the same daddy who was killing him..
Police interviewing the Candy Man become suspicious of his story – a story involving a neighbor giving the poison candy.. The man who was actually accused of the candy kill was not even there, and have 200 people take his side. On the other hand, O’Bryan, an optician who worked for Texas State Optical, was about $100,000 in debt, had lost his house, and was on the verge of losing his car.He was also about to lose his job because his bosses had discovered that he was stealing. In the decade before the crime, he had been booted from 21 other positions… And he had just taken out a $60,000 in life insurance on his children.
Detectives were never able to pin down the source of the cyanide, but several witnesses at O’Bryan’s trial, which started in May 1975, told of his interest in obtaining the poison and how much it would take to kill. His sister-in-law also said that at the boy’s funeral the grieving dad mused about using the insurance money to take a long vacation.
“The only inescapable conclusion is that this man killed his own flesh and blood for money,” Prosecutor Mike Hinton told the court. “Think how easy it would be for him to kill a stranger for money.”
The jury took 46 minutes to find O’Bryan guilty and worthy of the death penalty.
Appeals dragged on for nearly 10 years, and O’Bryan maintained he was innocent to the end.
On March 31, 1984, “The Candy Man” had a last supper of steak, French fries, peas and Boston cream pie before his execution by lethal injection. As the sentence was carried out, demonstrators in Halloween masks stood outside the prison, yelling “Trick or Treat!”
The long term effects of this story are obvious. People got an idea that candy in general was unsafe.. that parents should be ensuring the security of their children.. Halloween, a season that is meant to be scary in a sense anyway, got even scarier. Until this time in the 1970s, Halloween had a quaint and mostly pleasant appeal across the United States. It was tamed highly from the early onset of the holiday during the beginning part of the 20th century. The CANDY MAN ruined the safety net that existed.. kids did not venture out alone anymore.. there were time limits put onto trick or treating by towns, usually a two-hour limit where you have to walk as fast as possible to hit up as many houses as you can while parents safely watch from a close distance. The arrival back home usually consists of candy being emptied onto a big table and each article of sweets being examined by a careful mom or dad.. And then, perhaps, you’ll be able to eat some after the questionable pieces have been properly disposed of..
All of this brewed from the mania and evil of one horrible father, who choose money over his own son’s life and murdered him. Destroying not only a life but also the entire season of the witch for good.
“I think what’s beautiful and hard and interesting about cancer is that it tears you down and builds you, and tears you down and builds you,” Doherty says.
“It remakes you so many different times. The person I thought I was supposed to be or was going to be or who I thought I was six months ago is now somebody completely different. I realize ‘Wow, I really thought that I was so brave and so gracious this entire time and really I was just hiding.’”
Doherty has been having a very public and brave battle dealing with cancer .. Her interview shows the emotional strife that has overtaken her as she deals with the horrid condition.. Prayers as always to her..
Brooker wrote ABOUT revision as a critic.. then he wrote television.. and then he went to NETFLIX. From the article linked:
“I haven’t seen a satanic side. They’ve been brilliant,” he told Business Insider. “They’ve been very collaborative, they’ve not been like cigar chomping American execs who say: ‘Put some titties and some kids in it.’ None of that.”He added: “They’re very thoughtful and when they have notes on the script, it’s always very useful, annoyingly useful. I haven’t seen a down side. But then I would say that.”
It did not take much for them to come up with.. it is just click bait especially around this time of year. But to showcase how inept they were at choosing some, look no further than the pick for the year 2001:
With no disrespect meant for SNOOP DOG or his bones, this was not the best film of 2001.. recall: This was also the year that the OTHERS came out.. and the best film of the year, without question (and back in the annals of HORROR REPORT history, I chose it as my movie of the year that year) was JEEPERS CREEPERS. Even though Victor Salva made it..
So that is that. A flawed list.. And a list that gave 2009 to JENNIFER’S BODY (even though I liked it it was NOT the top movie of 09) .. and gave 2016 to GHOSTBUSTERS–in a year when horror in cinema made a comeback and kicked rear at box offices.
