• nukes, was: What Did You Watch? 2025-08-13 (Wednesday)

    From danny burstein@21:1/5 to [email protected] on Thu Aug 14 17:31:11 2025
    In <107l5n2$k1fc$[email protected]> BTR1701 <[email protected]> writes:

    [snip]

    THE CONQUEROR WORM!

    Just kidding. It was the Cinemascope technicolor classic starring John
    Wayne and Susan Hayward THE CONQUEROR, the radioactive film that killed
    damn everybody in its cast. Not that they wouldn’t have died of humiliation
    anyway. I enjoy John Wayne, but boy Howdy whoever thought this was a good >>> fit for him, probably ended up hiding in a hotel room, saving his
    fingernail clippings.

    Sheesh.. I had no idea it was that bad. From the Wikipedia:

    Of the 220 crew members, 91 (comprising 41% of the crew) developed
    cancer by 1980, while 46 (or 21%) died from it. When this was learned,
    many suspected that filming in Utah and surrounding locations, near
    nuclear test sites, was to blame.

    91 people developing cancer out of 220 after just 24 years. Yeah,
    that's pretty damning evidence of a connection to the film sites.

    Not as bad as my grandfather, who was one of the troops they sent out to >Nevada after the war to develop battlefield strategies incorporating nukes. >They'd set off a nuke, have the troops hunker down in trenches until the blast >wave and the firestorm passed over them, then tell them to charge toward the >'enemy', which meant charging toward the mushroom cloud. Grandpa who never >smoked a day in his life, died of a particularly aggressive form of lung >cancer.

    obRAT: A pretty decent, and all too realistic, tv movie
    treatment of this horror:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightbreaker_(film)

    (hmm, had forgotten Lea Thompson was in it)



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