Producer Michael Bay, who in addition to Pearl Harbor has brought us intentionally frightening fare such as remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror, now is setting his sights on resurrecting Jason Voorhees in a Friday the 13th redo. Alas, with no director or stars attached yet, insiders tell the Hollywood Reporter that it's unlikely the slasher pic will be ready in time for Friday, Oct. 13 — which is OK. This has more of a Christmas-release, feel-good vibe to it.
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Question: My boyfriend and I were watching a Night Court rerun the other night and ended up having an argument about Harry Anderson. I think he was a magician before he had that show, but my boyfriend said that he made a living as a con man. Who's right? And don't make fun of us. We fight about everything.
Answer: Me, make fun of my loyal readers? Perish the thought, dear woman, for it is you whose page hits help generate my paycheck, thus keeping me fat and happy (but mostly fat).
The answer to your question is a little of both, but I must say the magician part is easier to prove due to Anderson's appearances on Saturday Night Live and Cheers, where he played a hustler named, appropriately enough, Harry. He's on record saying he used to run shell games in various cities before going straight, but Anderson was notorious for making up en
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Question: In the remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they showed what looked to be real footage of a man doing a walk through the basement of the house. At the end he gets killed; I was told this was a real-life shot but I wanted to know if it was or not.
Answer: It's not clear to me whether you're asking whether the footage itself is real or whether it re-creates something that actually happened, but in any event the answer is no. The real-life basis for both The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and the 2003 remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the case of Wisconsin necrophile Ed Gein, who murdered two women and dug up a whole lot of others from various cemeteries, making macabre artifacts from their body parts. He was arrested in 1958. Since two murders is pathetically low by the standards of horror stories, the va
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Question: I would really like to know if what happened in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre movies is true or not. A lot of people I've asked are convinced that the movies document real events, but I've read that while real-life killer Ed Gein inspired the movies, there was no massacre at all. Can you clear this up for me please?
Answer: No to Texas, the chainsaw and the massacre. Yes to dug-up corpses, an isolated farmhouse of horrors, bone furniture and accessories. Utterly deranged Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein killed two women, but became notorious for his bizarre doodling with body parts, including human-skull soup bowls and a "woman suit" stitched together from corpse skin, the direct inspiration for Jamie Gumb's shenanigans in The Silence of the Lambs, and a centerpiece of the underrated 2000 movie Ed Gein. Gein inspired
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