Last week, the church of heavy metal lost a god. Ronnie James Dio is dead. He didn’t die fighting wizards, knights, demons, dragons or any other mythical beast he wrote about. No, he left this mortal world on a hospital bed in Houston after a six-month battle with stomach cancer. There were rumors of his death spreading around the Internet as early as last Saturday night, however it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that his wife and manager, Wendy Dio, posted this announcement on her late husband’s official website:

As this year’s Cannes Film Festival winds down, news has been coming in consistently about movies being picked up for distribution in various territories, and a pair of genre features have been secured to play in the U.S.

FANGORIA has been DEAD central all week, as we have been presenting exclusive video chats with horror great George A. Romero (see yesterday’s installment here). In part three (of three) of our meaty interview, which you can watch after the jump, Romero tells Fango’s Tony Timpone about his future plans (two more DEAD films?!) and how he doesn’t want to make a first-person-shooter movie.

Though we only worked together for maybe five weeks or so, former ’80s FANGORIA editor David Everitt, who passed away May 7 at age 57 from Lou Gehrig’s disease (see item here), affected my life in so many profound and wonderful ways. Fresh out of college, he showed faith in me that not even I had in myself when I started at FANGORIA as a lowly editorial assistant in July 1985.

Are you sick and tired of lifeless, synthetic CGI monsters filling the multiplexes? Do you long for the glory days of Japanese monster movies? Own all the Godzilla movies at home? Want to kick back with Rodan and Mothra?

It’s a mild Saturday night, the evening before Mother’s Day. I should be home with the mother of my three kids, but I’m standing on a line in front of New York City’s Cinema Village at 9:30 p.m. Why? At 11:30 p.m., I’m going to see a free FANGORIA-sponsored screening of the new sci-fi/horror film SPLICE, starring PREDATORS’ Adrien Brody and DAWN OF THE DEAD’s Sarah Polley. Attending will be none other than the film’s director, Vincenzo Natali (the man behind CUBE and CYPHER). So I am really pumped.

We just posted the trailer for the Australian chiller THE OUTBACK yesterday. Today, we have the poster, along with some grisly photos of people possessed by an evil supernatural force (and one more pleasant pic…).

Special FX artist and creature designer Patrick Tatopoulos (pictured) directed his first feature film last year with UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS. Since then, he’s been attached to helm a number of features, and now he’s in negotiations to take on Participant Media’s eco-horror tale THE COLONY.

BEST WORST MOVIE—the award-winning documentary on the making of TROLL 2 and its growing cult phenomenon—is continuing its theatrical assault on theaters across the U.S. this Friday, May 21 on the West Coast. While in NYC, BEST WORST MOVIE director/TROLL 2 child actor Michael Paul Stephenson and leading man Dr. George Hardy spoke with Fango’s Tony Timpone about both films.

While FANGORIA RADIO currently remains on hiatus, the folks at Sirius XM Radio have been running some of our best and bloodiest shows every Friday night (heard 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. EST, with a second broadcast right after), hosted by Dee Snider, Debbie Rochon and Tony Timpone. Tonight’s show highlights:

The ale flows like there’s no tomorrow at Cologne, Germany’s All Bar One, a popular watering hole for hip city folk. Stephen Manuel (pictured left), director of the new horror film IRON DOORS, eyes the Jameson whiskey, no doubt inspired by his background—he was born in Ireland and raised bilingually in Germany. He and Fango are raising glasses over the success of IRON DOORS (see exclusive pics past the jump), which premiered recently at Estonia’s Haapsalu Horror Film Festival and is currently being sold internationally by Julian Richards’ Jinga Films distribution house.