Top 10 Movies That Were Never Made

Top 10 Movies That Were Never Made

It seems like every other week nowadays we see a trailer for a new movie that seems so terrible that we can only roll our eyes and wonder how such a film could have gotten funded in the first place. The answer is simple: Hollywood funds films that they believe will make money. As a result, we now have a second Smurfs movie in production while legitimately good films are stuck in production hell. This is a list mourning the fates of ten of the greatest films that never got to be completed.

They are ranked in alphabetical order by the director’s last name.

Bob Clampett

This film is a bit tricky to explain. It’s true that the Disney adaption of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series entitled John Carter was released last month. However, the film that I want to talk about in this entry was a fully animated version of Burroughs’ novel A Princess of Mars, the first in his Barsoom series, that was envisioned by famous Looney Tunes director Bob Clampett. Clampett actually collaborated with Burroughs and his son John Coleman in 1935 to create raw animated footage to pitch to MGM studios. The footage included rotoscoped drawings of an athlete standing in for John Carter, Green Martians riding “eight-legged thoats,” and a fleet of rocket ships emerging from a Martian volcano. However, the test footage received poor reactions from test audiences. As a result, the entire project was abandoned. If the film had been completed, it would have beaten out Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as the first American feature-length animated film by at least one year.

Francis Ford Coppola

We continue this list with legendary director Francis Ford Coppola, a man who is no stranger to films with unspeakably difficult productions. Having helmed such classic and groundbreaking films as The Godfather series, Apocalypse Now, and the Palme d’Or winning The Conversation, the thought of Coppola directing a massive epic film in the style of Cecil B. DeMille seems like a film-lover’s dream come true. The film, entitled Megalopolis, would have followed the reconstruction of New York City after a “disastrous incident.” Coppola intended to fund his vision independently, using the funds he made from his three studio films from the 90’s (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jack, and The Rainmaker) to finance it. He even filmed a reported 30 hours of second unit footage around New York City. So what happened?

September 11th. In an interview after the attacks, Coppola stated, “It made it really pretty tough… a movie about the aspiration of utopia with New York as a main character and then all of a sudden you couldn’t write about New York without just dealing with what happened and the implications of what happened. The world was attacked and I didn’t know how to try to do with that. I tried.” While he hasn’t ruled out making the film in the far future, it doesn’t look like we will be seeing his vision any time soon. (Image by FaceMePLS – The Sphere, a sculpture by Fritz Koenig, originally stood in a WTC lobby and is now at Battery Park.)

David Fincher

Arthur C. Clarke’s seminal Rendezvous with Rama is one of the most important and influential hard science fiction novels ever written. The story follows a group of astronauts who explore a 31-mile long cylindrical alien starship that drifts into our solar system. As a distinguished piece of science fiction, it only stands to reason that Hollywood would try to cash in on it (just as they would try to do with the book that inspired entry number six on this list). The most promising adaption saw none other than Morgan Freeman vying for producer and David Fincher as director. However, the film has been stuck in development hell. One of the main reasons was that Freeman said that the only way to make the film would be to use the technology from James Cameron’s Avatar to make it 3-D. This has been complicated by the fact that several times in the past Fincher has reportedly abandoned the project. However, movie nerds should rejoice because Fincher has retracted these statements and said that he and Freeman are still planning to make the film in a few years.

Alfred Hitchcock

Considering that Alfred Hitchcock is widely considered one of the greatest directors to ever live, the news that he wasn’t able to finish a film is nothing short of a tragedy. The film that Hitchcock was never able to complete was tentatively entitled Kaleidoscope. As fans of Hitchcock’s work can testify, in his later years he began to depict sex and violence much more graphically than before, the most famous example being the infamous shower scene in Psycho. However, if Hitchcock had been allowed to make Kaleidoscope the way he intended, it would have blown Psycho’s adult content out of the water. The film would follow a “necrophiliac serial killer in New York City.” Let that sink in for a moment. Even more shocking is that the killer would be the main character! Hitchcock was not able to get his film accepted by any studio and he would eventually cannibalize many of the film’s ideas for the 1972 film Frenzy. While Frenzy was in itself a disturbing and graphic film, it was not nearly as shocking and explicit as Hitchcock’s original vision.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Much like the aforementioned Rendezvous with Rama, Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of the true masterpieces of science fiction. Known for its truly epic scale and size, adapting Dune for the screen would be no small feat. But that didn’t stave off director Alejandro Jodorwsky, director of such cult classics as The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre, and El Topo. Jodorowsky’s script for his adaptation would have resulted in a 14-hour movie. But that’s not all. Jodorowsky was planning to cast Orson Welles as the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and Salvador Dalí as the Emperor Saddam Corrino IV. The film’s soundtrack would have been comprised of new material by such artists as Pink Floyd and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Pre-production for the film consisted of a team comprised of such legendary artists as Chris Foss, Jean Giraud (Moebius), and H. G. Giger. If Jodorowsky had been able to complete his film, it literally would have been the likes of which nobody had ever seen or comprehended before. But the production fell through, the rights for filming Dune were sold, and- instead of the olympian space epic that Jodorowsky had in mind- audiences were given a mediocre adaptation by David Lynch.

Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick is one of the very few directors who could make a legitimate claim to having never made a bad film. Kubrick’s legendary perfectionism and craftsmanship led to several films which have since been named the greatest ever made, such as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. His untimely death in 1999 prevented him from completing what could have been the greatest film of his career: a large scale biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte. When he died, Kubrick had done a massive amount of pre-production work, such as scouting locations, writing a script, and enlisting the help of the Romanian army to film the epic battle scenes.

While Kubrick has passed on, his script has survived and can be read online. Considering how another one of his uncompleted projects, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, was completed after his death by other filmmakers, it stands to reason that one day somebody might use Kubrick’s script and create the film that he always dreamed of.

Bruce Lee

Considering his massive influence on the film industry, it is tragic to learn that Bruce Lee died before he could complete what would be his last feature-length film: Game of Death. While working on it, Lee was offered the chance to star in Enter the Dragon, a film that would be the very first kung fu film produced by a Hollywood studio. So, Lee put the production of Game of Death on hold while he completed Enter the Dragon. However, he died before he could return to work on Game of Death. Thankfully, over 100 minutes of footage was completed before Lee died. Some of this precious celluloid was misplaced in the Golden Harvest archives in Hong Kong, but Robert Clouse (director of Enter the Dragon) used the rest, plus some new footage to cobble together a film that was released in 1978. The 1978 film was also entitled Game of Death, but Bruce Lee’s original vision for the film is forever lost.

Russ Meyer

Who Killed Bambi was originally envisioned as a punk rock version of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. The film was set to star the British band The Sex Pistols, the direction of nudie-cutie legend Russ Meyer, and a screenplay helmed by none other than Roger Ebert. Yes, THAT Roger Ebert. Roger Ebert would later claim that only a day and a half’s worth of shooting was ever completed before their production company, 20th Century Fox, pulled all of the film’s funding after reading the script. What little footage that survives includes the singer Sting assaulting Sex Pistols’ drummer Paul Cook. In 2010, Ebert posted the complete screenplay of Who Killed Bambi on his blog. Maybe it’s a good thing that the film was never completed. Considering how violently the Sex Pistols’ music rocked society, a Sex Pistols’ film may have signaled the start of the Biblical Apocalypse.

George Sluizer

While most people may be more familiar with the increasingly odd antics of his brother, Joaquin, the legacy of River Phoenix has lived on in the hearts of lovers of independent filmmaking. After establishing himself as one of the most promising young actors of his generation in such films as Stand by Me and My Own Private Idaho, River died of drug-induced heart failure in 1993 at the age of 23. His timing was particularly unfortunate considering that at the time of his death he was working on a film entitled Dark Blood with director George Sluizer. The film was supposed to follow River as a character simply named ‘Boy’ who makes dolls that he believes contains magical powers while living on a nuclear testing site. With only eleven days of shooting left at the time of River’s death, the film was abandoned. At the current time of the writing of this article, Sluizer has announced plans to released the film in 2012 with the aid of Joaquin Phoenix. However, said film reportedly contains many changes from the original film envisioned in the early 90s.

Orson Welles

Orson Welles may very well be the patron saint of uncompleted film projects. While frequently cited by critics and other filmmakers as one of the greatest directors who ever lived, he found great difficulty in finding financiers for his projects. The great challenge in writing about Orson Welles in the context of this list is picking just one of his unfinished projects. I could have easily written about his abandoned productions of Don Quixote, The Merchant of Venice, and The Other Side of the Wind. But I’ve instead chosen his little-heard-of plan to film Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The film would have been Welles’ very first. Welles intended it to be done entirely in long takes from the point of view of Marlow (played by himself, of course) as he sailed down the river. The film was meticulously planned out but ultimately failed to gain funding, as it was impossible to complete on budget. It was because of his failure to finish Heart of Darkness that Welles was forced to begin work on another film…one that would later be entitled Citizen Kane.

Check out our YouTube Playlist for more footage (and other movies, if we add them from your comments):

Top 10 Original Songs by Comedians

Top 10 Original Songs by Comedians

Many comedians dabble in music for fun, and very few are serious musicians.  Often a single on a spoken-word comedy album is all the music you’ll get from a comedian.  This list is the Top 10 (11, really) Original Songs by Comedians, not funny covers or parodies of other specific songs.  Okay, smart apples, quit saying Eddie Murphy’s Party All the Time; that song was funny for all the wrong reasons.

Never one to taste mainstream success, Julie Brown is the ultimate working comedienne.   Probably her best known film role is that of the lead in 1989's Earth Girls are Easy.  Now one of the neighborhood moms on ABC’s The Middle, you have to go all the way back to her 1984 EP Goddess in Progress to dig up this gem.  Actress, director, voice-over artist, Julie has only limited musical output over the past 30 years of her career.

Hard-working comedian Rodney Dangerfield scored a very unlikely hit in 1983, at the age of 62, on the Rap 100 chart.  The song is a play on his stage persona with the “no respect” theme playing throughout.  I think it’s safe to say Rodney was one of the few white, senior citizens ever to place a song on the rap charts.  Known mostly for his comedy films and standup on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, he released a handful of comedy albums throughout his career and labored on his act right up until his death in 2004.

Out on a book tour now, Darrell Hammond is known as the longest-running cast member in Saturday Night Live’s history, appearing from 1994 to 2009 in over 200 episodes.  Known for his dead on impressions, especially of President Bill Clinton, you have to go all the way back into the 80's to find this single.  Hammond does all the voices and nails multiple characters from the Looney Toons universe.

Comediennes Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome are the brains behind the duo Oates and Garfunkel.  This scathingly funny ditty has over a million hits on YouTube.  Even though neither Micucci nor Lindhome are household names, if you have watched any amount of television over the past decade, you have seen them on your favorite network shows, with dozens of supporting roles between them.

People tend to forget that before all of the starring movie roles, Steve Martin was one of the top standup comedians of the 1970's.  In 1978, Martin released the comedy album A Wild and Crazy Guy, which shot up to #2 on the pop charts and went double platinum.  He later donned the ancient Egyptian garb to perform the song King Tut on Saturday Night Live, the show that helped make him famous.

Comedians Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas were anchors on the classic sketch comedy show SCTV in the 1980's.  They created the characters Bob and Doug McKenzie, who went on to record albums, make a movie, become commercial pitchmen and, almost 30 years later, spun off into their own cartoon series.  But it was 1981's Great White North album, which went triple platinum in Canada, which was the peak of their success.  Take Off, featuring Geddy Lee from Rush, shockingly shot up to #16 on the American pop charts.  Strangely, the song charted higher in America than anything Rush had done up to that point and time.

When it comes to comedy, just about everything starts with Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which ran on BBC from 1969 to 1974.  In 1979, executive producer George Harrison and the boys from Monty Python released, arguably, one of the greatest comedy movies of all time: Life of Brian.  As the movie ends, and most of the characters are being crucified, they break out into Eric Idle’s song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.  Not so much a hit single as a cultural phenomenon, this song is also found in the Broadway play Spamalot, is often played at soccer matches, and is very popular at British funerals.

Almost 20 years before Adam Sandler embarrassed himself with a record 10 awards for Jack and Jill at the Razzie Awards, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for his comedy album They’re All Going to Laugh at You in 1993.  The preference here is to remember Sandler singing about the joys of cafeteria meat with the late great Chris Farley, rather than anything he has done in the last 10 years or so.

The Lonely Island is the comedy team of Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer.  Released in 2005, this Digital Short changed the entertainment game.  Saturday Night Live took a chance here with a slightly different presentation of their comedy and it set the stage for more shorts over the years.  With over 5 million hits on YouTube, NBC yanked the video off the site and moved it to Hulu.  Within weeks, the digital download was at the iTunes store as the traditional rules of the distribution chain were broken.

Easily the best rap song on the list, some critics also cite this song as one of the pillars of Nerdcore.  The first of many hits by The Lonely Island, they later collaborated with such luminaries as T-Pain, Justin Timberlake, and Michael Bolton with great success, even being nominated for a Grammy.  If you’re wondering why this song, as opposed to others by Lonely Island, is on the list, check the end of the article and read the note about Jon LaJoie.

No one blurs the line between comedy and music more than Jack Black.  The first draft of the list didn’t include this song because I always think of Tenacious D as a rock band, not that far removed from GWAR.  But before the band Tenacious D, there was the show of the same name on HBO.  After re-listening to the song Tribute for the tenth time, this has to be number one.  Who else but comedians Jack Black and Kyle Gass could write a great song ABOUT a great song?  Dave Grohl lends a helping hand on the single and also plays the devil in the video.  If the album didn’t have the bad timing of being released 2 weeks after 9/11, it probably would have been a much bigger hit.

My personal favorite in this category, but you can’t print the title here.  You can’t post the video here.  I can’t even print the lyrics here.  But if you use a little bit of investigative reporting, you can find the song fairly easily on Denis Leary’s album No Cure for Cancer.

Note:  same basic abuse of profanity keeps Jon LaJoie off this list also.

Written By Fred Hunt, Author Of American Suicide, Available Now On iTunes

Top 10 Bizarre Foods They Most Likely Serve in Hell

Top 10 Bizarre Foods They Most Likely Serve in Hell

The world is a big ol’ place, populated by billions of people and thousands of cultures.  It’s not anyone’s place to judge them, no matter how strange or disgusting some of them might seem to you.  Yes, some Asian cultures eat dogs and cats.  Get over it.  Yes, in certain parts of Africa people regularly eat snake meat.  Stop judging them!

That being said…I’m almost certain that if I go to Hell (and I probably will), what will await me there are these 10 torture-dishes from around the world (along with, you know, actual torture):

Let me be very clear that I absolutely love spicy food, but I also have this unwritten rule (carved into a huge boulder behind my house) that I will never try anything that can only be described as tasting “like pain.”

Speaking of which – Satan’s Ashes Curry.  Lauded as the world’s most spicy curry mixing the infamous Dorset Naga, Naga Morich and Bhut Jolokia) peppers (the latter clocking in at over 1,000,000 Scoville units of hotness), the dish might very well be renamed The Reverse Volcano Curry, if you catch my drift.  According to a man who actually managed to eat a plate of Satan’s Ashes Curry, the dish burns with the power and hatred of 1000 suns—with whose wives you have slept—from the very first bite with no intention of ever stopping.

It’s little surprise that the same man later confessed to almost passing out from the pain while on the toilet.

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We aren’t done with colon-annihilating dishes yet, but who would have thought that the next contender for the title of hottest food ever would come from INDIANA of all places?  Well, it has.  The St. Elmo Steak House’s shrimp cocktail has been called the spiciest dish in the world, a feat all the more impressive considering that it doesn’t use a single pepper.

Its cause is helped by being made more from horseradish than actual shrimps.  Twenty pounds of fresh grated horseradish to be exact, enough to propel a typical human being to Mach 30 by causing fire to shoot out of every orifice in your body.  I’m hearing that the Pentagon is looking into the possibility of weaponizing the dish, but is meeting opposition from people quoting the Geneva Convention.

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To this day there is no conclusive evidence if monkey brain was ever a real food anywhere in the world but…well, yeah, of course it was.  How hard it would be to kill a monkey and eat its brain?  I can say with 100% certainty that somewhere, at some point in history, someone took a monkey and ate its brain.  Whether that person had black, dead eyes and could only speak in “screams of cursed toddlers” is up for debate, but the point is that the dish definitely does exist.

I should probably just put it out there that, if you are ever offered monkey brain, it would probably be wise to refuse it. Not because it’s gross and wrong, even though it is, but because it might unfortunately lead to Mad Monkey Disease, which to my total surprise is apparently a real thing.

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Ikizukuri comes from Japan.  That’s really all the explanation you need for the horrors that follow:

At its core, Ikizukuri is simply raw fish.  Even the name literally means “prepared alive.”  But unlike sashimi, Ikizukuri requires the chef to cut up the fish and serve you its soft, butchered body parts while the fish is still alive.  On your plate!  No, seriously, the dish is actually an alive, slowly dying fish (with its eyes moving and its gills grasping for air), surrounded by its sliced flesh.  On your plate.  I feel like I can’t emphasize that point enough.

One Japanese restaurant even offers to cut up the fish and serve you its meat in such a way that will leave the fish alive for hours.  And to prove it, they will put it in the tank and let it swim with ONE SIDE OF ITS SKELETON COMPLETELY EXPOSED.

You can watch it in the video in the source but…don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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The Heart Attack Grill restaurant is the only reason aliens will ever need to wipe us off the face of the planet.  A restaurant openly promoting how unhealthy its menu is (and it is, considering that some of their food is fried in pure lard) would be like Toyota rolling out a car named “The Head-on Collision.”

Among HAG’s menu items which give me small chest pains just by looking at them, a single monstrosity stands out: the Quadruple Bypass Burger.  Four thick 0.5 pound patties, bacon and cheese, so tall that even a python would break its jaw on it.  And, in what I assume was a risky but bold promotional stunt, one of the restaurant’s customers decided to prove that the burger’s name isn’t just for show by actually getting a heart attack while eating the damned thing.

Oh sorry, that’s wrong.  The customer who got the heart attack was only eating a TRIPLE Bypass Burger.  Whew, good to know that the Quadruple one is still safe.

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Cheese is a wonderful invention when you think about it.  Basically, it’s milk fermented to a degree that causes it to become delicious (more so when sliced and placed on a hamburger), but not enough to make it unfit for human consumption.  The Casu Marzu cheese, on the other hand, laughs at such limitations even though it really, really shouldn’t.

Casu Marzu is a soft, putrid, totally-decomposed-from-where-I-am-standing cheese that is the final product of cheese fly larvae activity.  Yes, the cheese is made by letting a bunch of flies have sex and birth their disgusting babies inside it.  And then people want to eat it.

Unsurprisingly, the cheese is banned almost everywhere in the world, but you have to wonder.  What place on Earth values their and other people’s lives so little to produce a thing like Casu Marzu?  What nation would be this hardcore?  Is it some small village in Siberia populated only be ex-Spetsnaz soldiers, or maybe an entirely new breed of humans which emerged from the volcanic bellows of Hawaii?

What?  It’s from Sardinia?  No, that can’t be right.  Huh…mental note: never, EVER piss off a Sardinian.

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Since we are already on the topic of cheese, it’s good to mention that many other foods acquire a richer taste as they age.  Wine would be a good example.  But very rarely on a list of such foods would you ever find eggs…unless you’re in China.

Say hello to the Chinese century egg, made by preserving it in a husk of clay, ash or lime for several weeks or even months.  This process breaks down some of the compounds of the egg and pickles it from the inside out in a very unique way, also turning it greenish-black.  The process is actually quite sophisticated, as it ferments the eggs but does not spoil it, which is of course akin to praising someone for skillfully learning to drive a car using only their chest hair.

According to some account, the century egg is so pungent that the smell alone could knock out an 18th century dung farmer.

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If you want to see pictures of this abomination (which are sad beyond belief), you’ll have to click the source below.  For the sake of this article’s sanity, however, we’ll stick with fluffy bunny rabbits.

Now then.  We’re still in the domain of weird eggs, this one coming from the Philippines.

The recipe for Balut is as simple as it is cruel and insane.  First, you take a standard fertilized duck egg, then you let the little baby duck inside grow safely in the shell, all tra-la-la-dee without a care in the world.  Then, when the fetus is sorta formed but not completely, you boil the “egg” alive and eat it because to Hell with ducks, that’s why!  What’s this feeling when you want to both cry and throw up in your mouth at the same time?  Someone should really invent a name for it, like “cromit” (cry + vomit) or weerl (weep + hurl).

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Did I say that the recipe for Balut was simple?  Well it has nothing on the traditional Vietnamese dish of Tiet Canh.  Check it out: take duck blood, add duck meat plus spices, then eat.  Alright, alright, the actual process is sometimes more complicated than that but, once your main ingredient is raw blood, all the other stuff about the dish kinda stops being important.  On the other hand, forcing your significant other to sit down to a plateful of Tiet Canh might finally get them a) off that whole Twilight craze, and b) to give you that divorce you wanted.

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As with Balut, TopTenz wishes to save you thousands of dollars on therapy bills by not showing any actual pictures. Instead, you get Batman.

So, apparently some people in Asia, especially in one village in Thailand, like to eat bats.  Guys, really; if you want to commit suicide this much, there are easier ways than trying to make Ol’ Bats up here break his no-killing cardinal rule for you.

The Thai Bat is prepared thusly: first you kill the bats by plunging them into boiling water while alive.  Then the bats are skinned, grilled and chopped up into a fine paste with herbs, though they can very well be eaten whole.  For a more visual and way more traumatizing look at eating bats, check out the video in the source.  Then go find a fun new hobby to fill those late-night hours which you used to pass with wonderful, blissful sleep.

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Written By Rick Raule

Top 10 Public Romantic Disasters

Top 10 Public Romantic Disasters

Imagine being embarrassed or betrayed in your relationship, by the person whom you’ve confided your most intimate self to, to whom you are devoting what is meant to be a meaningful fraction of your life.  It is a prospect so terrifying, that millions of people all over the world don’t dare even approach another person out of the fear it go will go wrong in some way, even though one of the things they want most in the world is the end of their loneliness.

Now imagine that you’ve not only been embarrassed, you were embarrassed in front of the world.  History will record your humiliation and for years, decades, or centuries, people will talk about what happened to you!

Okay, now have some voyeuristic pleasure at these stories of this happening to someone else.

This couple married in 1848, into an era when Ruskin’s rather disastrous issues didn’t come up until way too late.  As Gray would later say of their honeymoon, “he thought a woman was something other than what I was.”  As such, Gray filed for an annulment where her husband’s phobia of female anatomy was dragged into the public eye and, when it was granted, she remarried and had eight children with the artist John Millais.  Millais, it so happened, was doing a portrait of Ruskin when his ex-wife married him.  So Ruskin had the extra humiliation of cutting a large check and sitting silently in front of the man who married the woman who made him an international laughing stock.

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(Editor’s Note: No pictures of these two exist, like anywhere.  So, to compensate, here’s a cover of trashy romance novelist Joan Swan ‘s opus Intimate Enemies.  Read it if you foolishly think books couldn’t possibly get any worse after Twilight.)

In 1378, the marriage of this couple was declared null.  The part Poynant probably would have killed to keep out of the record was how this was due to his impotence.  Joan remarried and John Poynant shacked up with a woman named Isabel Pybbel.  Afterwards, the same church, which had allowed the dissolution of the marriage, decided that John was in fact not impotent.  So they dissolved the new marriage, and restored the original, impotence-inducing marriage.  The thing that changed its mind was the fact John was going to marry Isabel because he had impregnated her.  Given the evidence that Joan had been happy with her new marriage, presumably there wasn’t much call to see if John’s impotence was cured.

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Peter Romanov ascended to the throne as Tsar of Russia when he was ten and, in addition to starting a scientific and cultural revolution, was a huge part of the reason the Russia of today is so huge.  But this story is one of the few anecdotes people bother to tell about him.  In 1724, Peter the Great decided he was sick of the flagrant affair his wife was having with one William Mons and had him executed.  His body was left on the scaffolding for five days.  His head, by contrast, was dunked in a jar of formaldehyde to preserve it and then placed in Catherine’s bed chambers.  It’s hard to condone the actions of anyone here but, if Catherine did manage to have another affair after that, she was truly a goddess.

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Only three months after it was posted to YouTube, this video of a woman running away from her date when he pulled out the ring has been seen 9,500,000 times.  Deeply humiliating, it undoubtedly ruined his relationship and led to dozens of phone calls, texts, harassment and, since it’s only three months in, he probably hasn’t seen the worst of it yet.  Still, maybe it made some ladies out there feel sorry for him…

Many of us have stories of bad wedding experiences, our own or someone else’s.  But we’ll never top what happened at the wedding in this entry, and let’s hope no one ever tries.  On May 30, 1867, their wedding was marked by the deaths of the following people: the palace gatekeeper, the king’s aide, and the bride’s mistress wardrobe.  The person leading the wedding reception collapsed from sunstroke.  And finally, the best man shot himself.  Despite this, Duke Amadeo had the courage to marry someone else after his wife died in 1873.

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Many people have had their infidelities revealed to the public.  Between the television show Cheaters and a bunch of other reality shows, there’s probably footage of someone you know being filmed performing infidelity that might not even have been considered good enough to broadcast.

“Greg” here has the distinction of being tricked and confronted about his through nothing more than a phone call.  A woman identifying herself as Kim gave contact info about a guy she was seeing “on the weekends” named Greg.  This way he could be told he won a prize of a free bouquet to send to the woman of his choice, from a made up contest.  It turned out he wasn’t going to give them to Kim.  The show didn’t even bother to make the story believable with like a “you’ve been randomly chosen!” aspect, but instead told him he’d won some prize for a contest he didn’t really enter, so this Greg guy is probably one of those people Nigerian scams actually work on.

Now we’ve already seen a couple cheaters on this list, but none of them so far has done so competitively.  The second wife of Claudius, Emperor of Rome, was both an intelligent manipulator of her scholarly husband and an extremely lustful person.  Hence, one night, Messalina entered into a competition with a prostitute named Scylla.  Scylla managed twenty-five men, Messalina supposedly kept going long after her competitor had given up.  Claudius later had her executed when he learned of her plotting to have him assassinated, and was apparently content to only have her head cut off once.

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Perhaps, with Casanova’s reputation, this was actually the sort of thing he wouldn’t have minded so much, but it seems safe to imagine at least 99% of us would die from embarrassment if history recorded this happening to us.  In 1761, the guy infamous for getting around decided he’d get married to Leonilda Lucrezia.  She was seventeen at the time, and probably didn’t suspect a thing when she went to her mother Donna to request her blessing… and was greeted with the news that Casanova was, in fact, her father.

This almost certainly ruined holiday dinners for everyone involved, for the rest of their lives.  “pass the gravy, lover ma—I mean, Dad.”

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You probably were never worried what happened between Abe and Ishida would happen in your relationship.  If you were, you might want to seek some help.  The situation was that in 1936, the two were engaged in an affair that became increasingly perverse in its nature.  So much so that asphyxiation was incorporated into it, which was quite the mistake; Abe ended up accidentally strangling Ishida to death.

Then, for reasons no one should ever want to know, she cut his privates off and then sort of wandered around with them for a few days.  She decided to turn herself into the police, and only managed to convince them she was the Abe they were looking for when she showed them the offending organs.

Abe’s story was made into the 1976 sensationalist arthouse hit In the Realm of the Senses which, for obvious reasons, is quite possibly the least “guy” movie ever made.

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We’ll end this list on the most recent incident, and on a comparatively light note.  Hopefully the people involved learned some lessons they’ll be able to carry over into their next relationships.  We’re not spoiling anything in this write up, you’ll just have to click the link below yourself.

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Written By Dustin Koski

Top 10 Evil Actions By Usually Nice Countries

Top 10 Evil Actions By Usually Nice Countries

Some countries like Germany, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Iran just have a bad reputation.  There are, of course, others I won’t get into (I’m looking at you North Korea).  But other countries like Holland, Canada and most of Scandinavia are looked at as the good side of our small, orbiting pile of rock.  Yet these nations aren’t all squeaky-clean and polite.  No, some have some deep, dark, totally evil things they’ve done or are doing right now.

Bhutan is an isolated Buddhist country between China and India that forgoes measuring its progress by GDP in favor of GNH or “Gross National Happiness”.  Until 1999 they didn’t even allow Internet or TV, due to their supposed corrupting influences.  It’s all hippie love and Buddha statues…until you look at their policies towards minority ethnic groups.

In the 1990s the Bhutanese leaders decided that the GNH didn’t apply to one of its large minority groups, the Lhotshampas.  The Lhotshampas are ethnically Nepalese people who have been in Bhutan for generations, and were promptly ethnically cleansed from Bhutan territory.  At the point of a gun, over a hundred thousand people were forced from their homes that they had lived in for hundreds of years into refugee camps and poverty in Nepal and India.

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Think this is just a land of chocolate and weird mountain people playing on giant horns?  No, the Swiss have dark secrets in their closet.  During World War II, while they claimed neutrality and sat back and rode out the war, thousands of people deposited their money into it’s banks.  Thousands of these account holders were killed in the carnage of the Nazi War machine.  Yet when the relatives tried to claim the money, they were denied access to the funds, funds that the banks continued to make interest off.  Not only did the Swiss screw over the Nazi victims but they were also the main bankers of the Nazis, funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars into the German war effort

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Now a pillar of neutrality and bikini swim teams, Sweden once had ambitions of ruling the world.  Starting in the 17th century, power-hungry Sweden started expanding its territory.  Excited to create a vast European Realm, the Swedish King moved his armies South in an effort to conquer Europe.  They were able to defeat Russian and Polish armies during what is called “The Deluge” by Eastern Europeans.  Swedes and their allies swarmed over Europe just as the Mongols did centuries earlier.  They were only stopped after they tried to finish off Russia and, while invading the Motherland, were defeated by Russian Czar Peter the Great and his allies.  Sweden’s dreams of Empire were over.

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During World War II the Republic of Ireland went above and beyond what international law dictated regarding a neutral stance.  While neutral Switzerland was the Nazi Banker, and neutral America kept Britain alive by supplying tons of vital war material, Ireland decided to have absolutely nothing to do with either side.  Even after the existence of Nazi death camps emerged in the closing days of World War II, Ireland refused to go against the Nazi fold.

Ireland was one of the last countries to recognize the Third Reich and, when Hitler died, Ireland offered a public condolence to the German regime.  But it didn’t stop after the war; Irish men who had the moral courage to fight the Fascist Nazi regime, under various Allied flags, returned to Irish policy that officially discriminated against them.  Called the “starvation order,” it was Irish government policy to prevent employment, the use of social services, and pensions to any Irishman who fought in the War.  Some were even thrown in jail, while the rest lived under constant fear that they would be the next to be arrested and imprisoned.

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Belgium, that half-French, half-Dutch country sandwiched in between France and Holland, can’t decide whether to smoke or to surrender to that sweet, sweet bowl of home-grown.  Being one of the youngest countries in Europe didn’t stop it from carving out a vast Empire in Africa, one 77 times the size of Belgium itself.  Called the Congo Colony, it was run by King Léopold II who, in almost record-time, started sacrificing his citizens for the Congo’s vast resources.  Eight to ten million, that’s MILLION, were killed by the Belgian Congo colonial rulers as they raped and squeezed the land in order to get more and more profit out of its jungles.

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When Yugoslavia was quickly dismembering itself into smaller and smaller states, Bosnia was always the whipping boy.  Picked on by the bully Serbia and its supposed friend Croatia, Bosnian citizens were quickly forced into a number of enclaves, where they were surrounded by enemy forces hoping a prolonged siege would starve them into submission.

International delegations would visit these enclaves on fact-finding missions.  During a trip to one of the Sarajevo enclave, Bosnian fighters, in an effort to manipulate the opinion of the world press into supporting them, relayed to their starving people that bread would be arriving at a local bakery.  Then, as hundreds lined up hoping to get food, the Bosnians, while international cameras were rolling, staged a mortar attack that killed 17 and wounded dozens more.  It was later revealed that this was only one of many attacks by Bosnian fighters on civilians that were publicly blamed on Serbian forces.

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Poland or, as it is known to the rest of the world, that place that gets the crap kicked out of it every other decade, was re-birthed in 1918 (back in 1795, it had been killed, cut up and divided like a delicious borst pie).  Between 1918 and 1939, it lived in between what would become two of the greatest killing machines in the history of the world, Nazi Germany and Communist USSR.  So while the rest of the world was taking bets on who would eat up Poland next, Poland was doing its best to piss off all of its smaller neighboring countries: small countries, like itself, that it could have allied with and combined forces to counter these two super powers.

In 1938, Hitler wanted Czechoslovakia.  The West decided to compromise and give him a piece, called the Sudetenland, but Hitler instead took the whole damn country.  Hitler was clearly on the war path, demanding living space for the German people.  Poland, instead of helping and offering to protect small Czechoslovakia, stood hand-in-hand with Hitler.  When Hitler started to carve Czechoslovakia up, Poland actually helped the Nazis dismember the state by invading parts of Czechoslovakia with the Nazis and claiming portions of the country for Poland.  But what goes around comes around and, not a year later, the Nazi Blitzkrieg burst across the Polish border.

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Compared to North Korean death camps and mass slaughter of innocent civilians, South Korea always comes out smelling like roses.  However, during the Korean War, it showcased its own dark side.  Even before the war in 1948, on the island of Jeju, the South Korean military brutally suppressed an uprising that broke out after Korean troops fired on unarmed protesters.  During the rebellion, tens of thousands were killed in organized massacres throughout the island.

Just after the island was finally brought under control, North Korean forces stormed over the border and launched the Korean War.  South Korean officials, worried about 5th Column forces attacking from the rear, decided to kill hundreds of thousands of people throughout South Korea that were suspected of being sympathetic toward the advancing communists.  Known as the Bodo League Massacre, it has only recently been declassified by the South Korean government.

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During the spice rush at the dawn of the merchant era, Holland was able to corner the nutmeg market.  In an effort to easily monitor and control the trade of nutmeg, Dutch officials killed all nutmeg trees on neighboring islands, and created vast nutmeg and mace plantations on the small island of Run.

In the process of setting up their very own Nutmeg Island, the Dutch were ruthless with the local population, killing any that got in their way and forcing the survivors to work under horrible conditions and handing out brutal punishments to anyone who traded Nutmeg with ships other than the Dutch.  The island was so valuable that it was exchanged for the island of Manhattan, insuring that New Amsterdam would become New York.

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When asbestos was first discovered, it was the superhero of mined ore.  Its heat tolerance was incredible and people thought, by putting it in their houses, that fires would be a thing of the past.  They didn’t stop at houses and it was installed everywhere, including insulation of schools, and public buildings.  They then discovered one little drawback…it causes cancer, horrible cough-up-your-lungs-while-begging-to-be-shot cancer.

Canada, a bastion of workers’ rights, quickly banned anything containing even the tiniest bit of asbestos, along with the rest of the industrial world.  Yet with large asbestos mines that employed lots of people, Canada couldn’t just stop mining the cancer rocks…you know for the good of mankind.  No, Canada continues to export asbestos to Third World countries, even though they know that each package is basically the Grim Reaper wrapped up in white plastic.  Friendly Ol’ Canada is the only western country to export asbestos, and actually fights international regulations that would prevent it from exporting all that cancer.

When other countries try and add warnings on asbestos packaging, Canada exerts pressure to stop this even though, inside the country, a plethora of regulations not only require asbestos to be clearly marked but also basically require a space suit to handle it.  Canada says that it only exports to customers that take the greatest of safety measures, yet studies show developed countries, the only ones that haven’t yet banned it, have virtually no safety regulations regarding asbestos.  In short, whole generations handling asbestos will grow up with horrible forms of lung cancer.

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During World War II, the German Battleship Admiral Graf Spee spread mayhem in the Atlantic, sinking Allied ships before being destroyed off South America.  The Spee’s support ship, the Altmark, would then pluck lucky survivors out of the ocean.  The Altmark was able to slip through the British ships that cornered the Graf Spee, with 299 Allied prisoners locked away in its belly.

It made it all the way to neutral Norway in February 16, 1940.  British contacts alerted the Norwegian Navy that it was hiding in Norway’s water and the British demanded that it be searched for POWs.  The Navy searched the German ship three separate times and lied that they didn’t find anyone on the ship, even though it was jam-packed with Allied POWs.  The British finally had enough and stormed the ship, killing several German Navy personnel but, more importantly, freeing the Allied POWs.  An embarrassed Norway sulked away and pretended the whole thing never happened.

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Yosomono writes for multiple sites including GaijinAss.com.

Top 10 Awesomely Pimped Out iPads

Top 10 Awesomely Pimped Out iPads

The iPad is one of the single most popular consumer products in the history of civilization.  As of the end of 2011, it sold over 55 million units between the iPad 1 and the iPad 2.  The release of the iPad 3 last month overwhelmed the tech world, with three million copies sold in the first three days of release.  Never has a chunk of aluminum, silicon, and glass been more influential.

It’s also not cheap, starting at $500, and that’s before you choose a 3G plan to go with it, choose to have more on-board memory, or both.  But even that’s not enough for some of us: we have to give it our own distinctive stamp, especially since so many people own so many of them across the world.  Here are the ten most awesome iPad decals that express the owner’s individuality (or at least taste in consumer entertainment products)…with a bonus three awful pimped-out iPads.

If you’re going to express some individuality, you should do it with a touch of class, referencing a classic surrealist painting, Rene Magritte’s “The Son of Man”.  Of course most people will think you stole it from an ad, since the painting has turned up everywhere from “The Thomas Crown Affair” (the Pierce Brosnan one, not the Steve McQueen one) to a Michael Jackson music video, but that’s life.  Hey, Magritte himself might find it funny.

Everybody is always concerned about Apple stealing our privacy or somehow invading our minds.  Why not put that fear, front and center, for all to see, with the single biggest symbol of dreaded computer authority, the glowing red eye of HAL?  Of course, this ignores that HAL was originally intended to rip on IBM, a computer company we all thought was going to take over the world until Microsoft came along, then we thought it was going to take over the world, and then Apple came along.  Also has the bonus of possibly getting yourself on the secret Apple watch list for when they invade our mi-

THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE.  READ THE NEXT HUMOROUS ENTRY.

So, here’s our question: if Mario snags an Apple power-up, what does it do?  Make him good at selling overpriced computers?  Give him exquisite taste in design?  Give him the power to sell a phone everyone wants on one carrier for way too long?  Or maybe just allow him to ship all the iOS games to Nintendo?  We think that last one is the most likely.  Nintendo’s known for its whimsy, and also its wishful thinking.

Well, considering how eating the actual fruit turned out for her, maybe it makes more sense for Snow White to avoid the actual fruit and stick with computers.  At least with computers, she’s a lot less likely to catch any viruses herself.  Maybe we could make her one with a poison tester?

Being that Apple products are owned by nerds, and nerds are required by law to be massive fans of “The Simpsons“, a decal like this was all but inevitable.  In fact, you’ll find dozens of them online, ranging from the clever to the, uh, gross (we didn’t need a naked Homer on our iPad, even if it is just his butt).  But we like this one because, realistically, we’re pretty sure than when confronted with an iPad, Homer will think it’s an interactive plate.  And possibly an edible one.

So, uh…the Joker.  He has control of your iPad.  He’s just hangin’ out on there, touching your logo, enjoying himself, big old smile on his face.  Have you checked your house for Smilex bombs recently, or just bombs in general?  Maybe some chattering teeth?  Large gifts wrapped in garish paper?  Joy buzzers that somehow give off way more electricity than they should?  Things like that.

You might be thinking “Yeah, OK, Iron Man.  This is pretty neat.  Nerdy.  Looks cool.  Don’t really see what the big deal is, though.”

Remember what happens when you turn on an iPad?  The Apple logo on the back glows.  Now you see why this is so awesome.  Sadly, Marvel will never agree to installing iOS into a suit of armor made by a crazy billionaire.  But we can dream.

There’s only one thing stronger than Apple products with nerds: Legos.  So by combining the two, this will pretty much completely take over the world.  We’re pretty sure this is what Apple’s secret robot soldiers will look li-

READ NEXT HUMOROUS ENTRY.  NOW.

We really like the image of Apple using glowing ninja stars with their logo in the center.  Somehow it dovetails perfectly with how we imagine Microsoft and Apple duking it out for supremacy, and possibly during job interviews.

This is actually a reference to a famous piece of film shot at high speed, showing exactly what happens to an apple after it’s been shot.  It’s so famous it even gets referenced in ads for rival products:

If you’re wondering what happens to an Apple product after it’s been shot, there’s a video of that, too.

Meanwhile, leave it to some people with more money than sense to make a $500 tablet cost even more, sometimes millions.

Behold, an iPad 2 with a gold back, the Apple logo filled with diamonds, and the screen ringed by what the designer of this tacky monstrosity claims are dinosaur bones.  It’s nice to know a valuable paleological specimen was destroyed so this $8 million iPad 2 could be rendered an obsolete piece of junk in a month or so.

Meanwhile, this iPad costs a mere $20,000.  Yes, that’s what a trifling 11.43 carats worth of diamonds glued around the edge of an iPad will run you.

But if even that’s too rich for your blood, and you’re absolutely determined to look fabulous while holding a tablet computer, a company called CrystalRoc will be more than happy to indulge.

Written By Dan Seitz

Top 10 Movies You Didn’t Know Were Comic Books First

While a lot of you have heard about Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Spiderman, Captain America, and Wolverine, they are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to adaptable characters.  There is a vast and deep chasm of other licensed characters that are ready for movie adaptation right now.  Some of these other franchises have been adapted to the big screen, with mixed success.

A movie now known for the accidental death of Brandon Lee, The Crow made over 50 million dollars back in 1994.  The movie is about revenge: Eric Draven and his wife were murdered, and he is resurrected by the titular Crow with enough power to get revenge on the people that killed them.

Ironically enough, the comic book itself was also spawned from tragedy.  James O’ Barr wrote the comic book series in 1989 as a way to cope with his then-girlfriend’s death at the hands of a drunk driver.  The comic book is a lot more depressing than the movie, with the comic book Draven spending his down time between murders wallowing in self-pity.

During the following 10 years, there were several attempts to bring back the Crow, with the longest running series spanning 10-issues by Image Comics in the late 90s.  In 2011, James O’Barr released a collector’s edition of the original series with new material written for it.

2002's Road to Perdition is a good movie and marks one of the few times that Tom Hanks tried the action hero role.  Hanks plays Michael O’ Sullivan, an enforcer for a Chicago gang.  After Michael’s oldest son witnessed something he was not supposed to, the gang tried to kill Sullivan’s family, accidentally leaving Sullivan and the older kid alive.  The movie was a huge success, doubling its money worldwide.

Max Allen Collins wrote the graphic novel in 1998 as a loose adaptation of Lone Wolf and Cub, a long running manga series. Collins also included some real life gangsters from prohibition-era Chicago.  The movie follows the comic book with a few differences.  The most notable difference is the inclusion of MacGuire in the movie.  He is a hitman who uses photojournalism as his cover.  He takes photographs of his crime scenes.  The comic book mostly had nameless thugs going after Sullivan and his boy.

Thanks to the success of the movie, the graphic novel spawned two sequel series, On the Road to Perdition, which is a companion piece to the original one, and Return to Perdition, which continues the story with Michael’s grandson.

Wanted is a 2008 film about a group of assassins who base their killings on divine providence.  They analyze a giant a tapestry and it tells them who to kill.  Wesley Gibson discovers that he is destined to be a part of that world because he has some superhuman abilities.  After some brutal and intense training, he is inducted into this world of assassins and goes on to kill for them.

The 2004 six-issue series, however, is nothing like the movie it was based on.  The comic book William Gibson has a chip on his shoulder because life did not exactly go his way.  While at a local coffee shop one day, a woman casually guns down everyone inside before having a chat with Gibson.  He discovers that he is the son of a supervillain called The Killer and, when given a chance to join his father’s world, he jumps at the opportunity.  There has not been another series using these characters, as Millar avoids coming back to his creations unless he really likes the world he created.

This 1998 flop is more well-known than the comic book series that spawned it.  It stars William H. Macy, Ben Stiller, and Hank Azaria as three also-ran superheroes who have to save their city from the evil Casanova Frankenstein.

The comic books series that Mystery Men came from is one of the oldest independent comic books series, going all the way back to 1979.  Having nothing to do with the movie that spawned it, Flaming Carrot Comics is known for being a surrealist take of the superhero genre.  The star of the comic book became what he is when he read 3000 comic books in one night to win a bet and it unhinged his mind.

Over the last 15 years, collections of the Flaming Carrot Comics have been collected and sold through Image Comics.  Bob Burden still maintains the rights to his creation and has published with a lot of companies.  His last comic book appearance was in 2008 and he has not appeared in a comic book since.

Tank Girl is a 1995 movie that is known for being offensive to a lot of viewers.  It is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where water is the most precious commodity and the W&P corporation controls most of it.  Tank Girl and her band of rebels are outlaws because they own a well inside their house.

Before the movie, Tank Girl was a regular feature in Deadline, a British underground magazine.  Nothing like the movie it spawned, Tank Girl is known more a scathing take on British pop culture and politics at the time.  Until very recently, the creators of Tank Girl have not really done a lot with her.  Their Hollywood treatment left a lingering bad taste in their mouth and they wanted as much distance from her as possible.  After 2008, she has been in continuous publication, with a new series released every few months.

In 1998, the Men In Black movie helped cement Will Smith’s place in the A-list.  It is a light-hearted action/comedy about two protectors of the Earth trying to protect it and all of its resident aliens from all sorts of intergalactic threats.

In 1990, the now-defunct Malibu Comics published Men In Black as something of an intergalactic and inter-dimensional ICE.  There were two 6-issue series made with the MiB.  There was also a one-shot special that Marvel made soon after purchasing the rights to the characters.  Apart from the movies and a cartoon, there really has not been a lot done with the characters since 1997.

The Surrogates was released in 2009 and it starred Bruce Willis as an FBI agent  trying to find out who killed Dr. Canker, the man that created the Surrogate technology.  After coming close to finding out who the killer was, Bruce is forced out of his robotic doppelganger and he is forced to continue the investigation as a flesh-and-blood person.

In 2005, IDW published The Surrogates as a 6-issue comic book series to mixed reviews and moderate success.  The movie is a mostly faithful adaptation of the source material, with a few logical changes that work better for a big screen format.  The movie also had a more positive ending than the comic book.  After the initial series, a 6-issue prequel series was made around the time the movie was released.

An early starring role for Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz, this 1994 movie was also known for early CGI effects and a light-hearted, kid-friendly tone.  Carrey plays Stanley Ipkiss, a down-on-his-luck bank teller that finds the Mask, which allows his inner id uncontrolled access to the real world. Of the three movies that Jim Carrey made that year, this was the most successful and the most critically acclaimed.

The comic book is known for being nothing like the movie; it kills off its main characters and is extremely ultra violent.  The Mask did not scare off people with comedic asides.  No, it downright murders anyone that gets in its way.  Over the course of 5 series, The Mask had only 16 total issues.

Monkey Bone is a 2001 movie starring Brendon Frasier as Stu Miley, a comic book artist who is on the verge of making a successful media blitz when he falls into a coma.  He wakes up in Dark Town where he runs into Monkeybone, his own personal id.

The comic book that Monkey Bone spawned from is called Dark Town, written by Kaja Blackley, an independent comic book writer.  Released in 1995, the main character suffers a similar fate that Stu Miley suffered.  Jacques De Bergerac falls into a coma and wakes up inside Dark Town, where Death tells him that he’s only got 12 hours to live.  Death tells him where to go so he can get back to his body, and the series just ends right there.  It did not have a second issue.

30 Days of Night is an 2007 horror movie that is a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawn Of The Dead.  In that universe, vampires found out that the town of Barrow, Alaska gives them an ideal scenario: 30 days where they do not have to hide their themselves from sunlight and can feed without inhibitions.

The 3-issue comic book series this movie was based on was released in 2004 by IDW.  The movie follows the comic book exactly.  The reason for this is because the comic book started life as a failed movie pitch.  The comic book also spawned a dozen or so spin-off series that fleshed out this unique universe.  In total, there has been 30 issues that has some affiliation to the 30 Days of Night franchise.