Tara > Recent Status Updates

One moment she was carrying her baby, all bundled for the snow, headed back to the lodge. The next moment, mommy was a big red-clotted smear that stretched a good forty or fifty feet through the pines. [...] What was left of her head, which wasn’t much-considering half of her face had been chewed through, sank beneath the white waves of snow, blood bubbling out thick gummy streams of brain and skull.

In one of his few public comments about 3 From Hell, Haig told an Astronomicon 2019 audience that he avoided re-watching House or Rejects prior to shooting Hell. “You don’t want to start imitating yourself,” Haig said. “Besides, I’m always Captain Spaulding.”

“I love the fact that 3 From Hell basically comes down to the poor marksmanship of the Ruggsville Sheriff’s Department.” -Bill Moseley to Rue Morgue

It was also at this meeting that the director asked Moseley to stop shaving at once so that Otis’ beard might return in full. “For me, it took no convincing at all,” the actor told Rue Morgue. “And frankly, I never really left that world. Once a Firefly, always a Firefly… even if I’m a Driftwood!”

Rob further struggled with the daily notes he was receiving from Universal execs, none of whom seemed to “get” the project. One such note requested that he film all violent scenes twice–once with gore and once without–so that there would be multiple coverage options available in post-production. (We’ll leave to your imagination as to whether Rob complied with this request to neuter his own project.)

Picture, if you will, a twelve-year-old Rob Zombie strolling Main Street, USA in a vintage Lon Chaney Wolf Man tee, because that was a thing that happened.

He remembered something Nicky had once told him back in college, about how you could disprove thousands upon thousands of phony haunted-house stories, reports of apparitions, UFO sightings, claims made by psychics and charlatans-but if even a single ghost or spell or saucer could truly be proved to exist, that one example would change everything forever. [...]

Here the tale degenerates into an unsifted collection of items which may or may not be related: pieces of a puzzle for those who fancy themselves puzzle fans, a random swarm of dots, and in the center, a wide unwinking eye.

His last words are unrecorded, which is probably just as well—what are anyone’s last words, after all, except a curse, a cry for help, or a string of nonsense?

His way to the cabinets was blocked by the dilapidated wreck of a bureau and, propped against it, the shell of a medicine chest, its door sagging open, the mirror somehow intact. He avoided looking at his image as he stepped past it: an old fear, resurrected in the faint attic light, to see some other face looking back at him.

But Chuck [Norris] was sympathetic—that’s the kind of guy he is—and found out [JCVD] was sleeping in his car. So Chuck hired him as a gofer, even though we already had one. He kept doing the splits and coming in without his shirt on and did that for a year.

[Starting out, JCVD] was so poor that he ended up sleeping on beaches or in a rental car. He would drive aimlessly around Los Angeles, parking for the night wherever felt right. One time he paid for a star-maps guide to celebrities’ houses, drove to the mansion of Sylvester Stallone, and tried to climb a wall into the garden, in the hope of meeting his hero. The police were called. [...]

The scene was, Christopher is high on heroin and wakes up from his drug-induced stupor and the dog, Cosette, is underneath his butt and the dog is suffocated and dead. I was always amazed at how fans would be, yes, Christopher killed sixteen people. Nobody is really complaining about any of that or batting an eyelash, but you sit on one dog and people will never forgive you for that. […]

There was an episode where they were going to go to Paulie’s apartment, and the set designers and producers were racking their brains to figure out what the apartment would look like. They were going on and on. “What would Paulie’s apartment look like?” Finally, somebody said, “The guy is the guy. Let’s go to Tony Sirico’s apartment.” That’s what wound up being Paulie Walnuts’s apartment. [...]

We have to talk about the wings. Tony [Sirico, the guy who played Paulie] has gray hair. But he would go to a barbershop in Brooklyn called Three Brothers, and they would dye his hair jet black and then put the silver wings in on the sides. If you look in the pilot, the wings are very small. They get bigger as the series goes on. […]

“After they saw the movie, Shaolin vs. Wu Tang, the Wu-Tang style was so fly, anything that was fly was ‘Wu-Tang,’” Rakeem explains. Initially, Ghost started calling Olde English 800, his favorite brand of malt liquor, Wu-Tang, so Rakeem, a Ballantine Ale drinker, called Ballantine Shaolin.

We’re like everyone else, I guess. We promise that something is forever, when it is really only as long as it takes for us to tire of it.

I look at other girls that I know, other girls I see, and they all smile, like I do. Inside are they beginning to lose everything they know? Have they stopped trusting themselves and everyone around them too? Please don’t let me find out that I am the only one on earth with this pain.

Sometimes I think there is someone inside me, but it is another, stranger part of me. Sometimes I see her in the mirror.

Dien Bien Phu, like almost all other besieged fortresses, eventually died from its supply deficiencies. This book clearly shows several instances in which successful counterattacks were interrupted because there was no ammunition available to sustain them. In the end, the Elianes, which had weathered every enemy infantry assault, weeks of intensive artillery bombardment, and even underground mining, [...]

It is possible to estimate that about 3,000 men out of a total of 16,544 eventually returned from Dien Bien Phu. Over 3,000 died in the battlefield area and a few hundred others disappeared in Eastern Europe. But the rest, close to 10,000 men, died on the trek or in the prison camps in less than 3 months’ time.

Total exhaustion indeed had become a daily phenomenon, and Dr. Grauwin now began to report cases of men who suddenly died at their post without showing signs of combat-induced wounds. The had died of 55 days of not sleeping, not eating, and not resting.

Certain units simply refused to believe that it was all over, and there was a justified fear among the higher commanders that the battle would end in a general massacre of the garrison. There may have been another, more prosaic, reason for the high morale of the remaining defenders. In view of the progressive lack of replacements for the casualties, many of the men remained on duty for days on end and were [...]

The monsoon rains had transformed the airfield drainage ditch into a veritable canal filled in many places with waist-deep water. Yet, with the Dominique hills on its right and Huguette 1 on its left under enemy control, it was sheer madness to attempt even to raise one’s head above the rim of the ditch. Any man who was wounded had to be propped against the crumbling walls of the drainage ditch and [...]

The faithfulness of the PIM’s at Dien Bien Phu to their captors remains a mystery to this day. Only 30 actually made a deliberate and successful attempt to escape while between the lines collecting dropped supplies. Patrico distinctly recalls the following conversation between a PIM and a Moroccan guard who had panicked under the artillery fire and was running away from his guard detail. [...]

Had the Communist force been made up entirely of infantry, the French garrison, though one third the enemy’s strength, could probably have withstood the assault, thanks to its massive firepower and air support. What really broke the back of the French resistance at Dien Bien Phu was Gen. Vu Hien’s 351st “Heavy Division.” The concept of the Heavy Division was one which the Viet-Minh had inherited from [...]

Dien Bien Phu’s hospital began as a comfortably small affair with 44 beds for seriously wounded, and well-appointed dugouts for the operations, X-ray, and recovery rooms. This was before it became clear that not one wounded man would leave the hell of Dien Bien Phu by air. The hospital with its 44 beds soon cared for perhaps 3,000 wounded and, from a model field installation, it became an apocalyptic charnel house[…]

“The Führer must know what he is doing.” This phrase had been repeated a hundred times over by the German defenders of Stalingrad as they senselessly fought on toward catastrophe. The same rationale now began to prevail among the French senior commanders as they contemplated developments in the faraway valley. Even the small commando reconnaissances confirmed […]

Dien Bien Phu became a momentous gamble for the Viet-Minh as well. General Giáp’s decision was not easy. […]

Navarre’s character came through perhaps more clearly, in a friendly press interview that he gave almost ten years after the battle of Dien Bien Phu, in response to the reporter’s passing allusion to the alleged fact that after the battle a group of French officers in Indochina had sent him a beautifully lacquered box with a loaded pistol inside—a clever reference to the tradition that a senior commander […]