by: Giovanni Russonello

Sitting in the audience of “GoreFest IV: Gross Encounters of the Nerd Kind,” it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to see the theater’s managing director Elyse Becker in the middle of the raucous blood bath. ImprovBoston, a self-described “theatrical incubator,” is just that type of casual and comedic setting for such macabre madcap revelry.

“GoreFest” is an annual event that runs for the week leading up to Halloween. This year’s “GoreFest” is a musical satire of the 1950s, poking fun at the obsession with UFOs, certain misogynistic tendencies, a sweeping fear of communism and the affinity for smoking that characterized the era.

During Saturday night’s show, a flying saucer “flew” across the stage, and no effort was made to hide the fact that it was actually a disc being waved around by a cloaked techie. Even with these low-tech effects, ImprovBoston offers a refreshingly homey feel and a fun, interactive show at reasonable prices. When the dinner-and-a-movie routine gets tired, ImprovBoston offers lively entertainment that warrants the brief T ride to Central Square.

The biggest laughs come when the zany Professor Murray, aggressively dissecting a lab rat, spews fake blood from the rat’s anus into the crowd, coating shrieking audience members with the red fluid. It was then that the audience realized why each seat’s occupant had been supplied with two plastic bags: so that they can cover themselves from flying “bodily fluids.” This happens at various opportune moments, such as when the aliens force one boy’s head into a woodcutter, or when a girl’s hand happens into a blender during home economics class.

“It was funny; the blood was really funny,” said audience member Melissa Starkey after Saturday’s show. “I’ve never been here before, but we’ll definitely be back.”

The singing in the show was great, the acting was hysterical, the house band was rocking and Saturday night’s audience enjoyed GoreFest immensely, even if the script was somewhat mild. But after all, ImprovBoston is in the business of improvisation, not stage writing.”GoreFest” is, in fact, one of the year’s only scripted shows at ImprovBoston. “We usually do improv, some standup and a little bit of sketch comedy,” GoreFest director Don Schuerman said.

This year’s final showing of “GoreFest” is tomorrow, Halloween night, at 8 p.m. Though the Halloween showing of “GoreFest” is sold out, there are still plenty of opportunities to check out one of ImprovBoston’s many weekly shows, each put on by a separate comedy troupe. “You’ll see different groups on different nights,” Schuerman said. “Every night has its own night and its own show.”

In addition to being the director of “GoreFest,” Schuerman is a member of Mainstage, the improvisational comedy troupe that is the cornerstone of ImprovBoston’s programming. “The signature group [at ImprovBoston] is Mainstage, which performs on Saturday nights. It’s like ‘Whose Line Is It, Anyway,’ but we go completely off suggestions,” Schuerman said.

A typical Mainstage show will start with an audience member suggesting a situational setting, such as a picnic. From this suggestion, the actors create a scene and take further audience contributions to develop the story.

“Mainstage has been with ImprovBoston since the club’s start in 1982,” said Schuerman. And as the sign reading, “Sold Out for 8 & 10 O’Clock Shows,” indicated last Saturday, this quirky venue is still attracting crowds.

Now featuring the complete works of Stanton T. Friedman in this special two tape collectors set. Includes Flying Saucers Are Real Part 1 & 2. These programs document solid physical evidence of UFO landings, photos and videotaped evidence of UFOs from around the world and reveals the startling story of the government’s ‘Cosmic Watergate’, a massive effort to keep UFO information from the public. U435 • 2 DVD Disks • 168 min • $34.95 • UPC 7 09629 90435 4

1) This Dan Akroyd interview about UFOs and close encounters was broadcasted on June 9, 2006, on CNN with Anderson Cooper:

Click here to view video

2) Video of the interview on the Jon Stewart comedy show with ABC’s Peter Jennings on February 23, 2005, the day before his two hour Primetime broadcast on UFOs: Click Here to View Video

3) Video of Dr. John Mack interviewing young children at the Ariel Primary School in South Africa in 1994. 62 children had a daylight encounter with a UFO and aliens who gave them a message about the future of the environment (if we don’t change):

Click Here to view Video

4) Video of Discovery channel report on Hon. Paul Hellyer’s September 2005 Toronto Exopolitics disclosure that a retired USA Airforce General confirmed to him directly that UFOs are real and the Roswell UFO crash took place: Click here to view video

5) Unexplained Mysteries reports on the UFO waves over Washington in 1952: Click here to view video

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Dan Aykroyd has a new video on the market, but the ex-conehead and one-time ghost-buster says he’s not the star. The UFOs are.

“My recommendation is to skip through me and get to the film footage, the digital images,” he said on Tuesday, talking about the 90-minute “Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs” from Union Station Media.

“This is where the whole thing starts to become more credible,” he said of footage of unidentified flying objects from around the world.

“This is the real stuff. I’m not alone on this. There are many, many people interested in UFOs,” he said.

The DVD, which went on sale Tuesday, is a conversation between Aykroyd and UFO expert David Sereda interspersed with footage of unexplained objects in flight and comments from experts like former astronaut Gordon Cooper. There are no jokes.

Asked if he was worried that a comic actor might not be taken seriously discussing an edgy subject like extra-terrestrial visitors, he said “It’s not a concern.”

“Enough people know I’ve had an interest in this for years,” he said, speaking from New York. “People know I’m interested in the paranormal.”

Aykroyd said he has had two personal encounters with the unknown.

One occurred on Martha’s Vineyard, he said, where he sighted “high altitude, glowing magnesium discs travelling at 20,000 miles (32,190 km) an hour at 100,000 feet (30,480 metres). … wing to wing, edge to edge.”

Four people with him saw the same thing, he said, and while one expert later told him it was probably a meteor formation of some sort “I believe they were visiting the earth, passing by on the way to somewhere else.”

“The second was a telepathic experience,” he said, which happened at a lake retreat in Canada.

“I was asleep with my wife and I woke up about 3 a.m. wanting to go outside into a field and look at the sky,” he said, telling his wife, “They want me to see. They want me to see.” She told him to forget it.

The next morning, he said, newspapers and radio reports from across the region were filled with eyewitness accounts from some of the estimated 12,000 people who saw a pink spiral in the sky.

The military later said it was a Chinese rocket, Aykroyd said, but he believes he was being summoned and regrets ignoring the call.

(c) Reuters 2006. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.

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DVD Review by R.J. CarterPublished: May 15, 2006

Okay, I’ll admit to being the sucker for a good UFO documentary. Much like the slogan plastered across Mulder’s poster: I want to believe. After all, the universe is a very, very big place, and I just can’t imagine God being one for wasted space.

But just exactly what makes Dan Aykroyd the go-to guy for paranormal phenomena? Did someone think his stint in “Ghostbusters” was for real? Do they think he has inside information because he married Kim Basinger in “My Stepmother is an Alien?”

Apparently, the connection is much more personal than that. And while I think Director David Sereda’s parallels to Albert Einstein are a bit laughable, Aykroyd does have his own experiences. Some may recall that he hosted a show on SciFi channel called Out There. Through this, he made quite the list of connections. One day, he apparently made a connection that was a little too hot. He describes an incident that occurred while he was preparing to tape a new episode. He had stepped outside and was taking a phone call to come back for a Saturday Night Live skit. During this conversation, Aykroyd claims he was approached by the notorious Men in Black — not Will Smith or Tommy Lee Jones, either, but the possible real magilla, complete with a large black vehicle. They watched him, he turned away, turned back — and they were gone. Within seconds.

“Two hours later,” says Aykroyd, “we were told we were not to continue taping, and the show was cancelled, and none of them would air. Was that an MIB experience?”

Fortunately for fans of Out There, there’s the possibility of repackaging the show for DVD. But whatever would have become of the information that might have been disclosed that day may now never be revealed.

Would that the rest of this documentary were that interesting. Aykroyd is not the host of this documentary; nor is he the primary subject. Rather, Sereda has placed a couple of cameras around him and Aykroyd to record them talking while Aykroyd smokes. In between the bits of conversation, the viewer is bombarded with photograph after photograph, video after video, of streaky, grainy, or downright hoaxy photographs of unidentified lights and objects — many of them shown over and over again, either for effect or for lack of having enough photos to provide an 80-minute slideshow. We get to hear repeatedly from former astronaut, Gordon Cooper (always introduced as “American Hero”, which all our astronauts are but doesn’t really need to be hammered quite so squarely every single time) and his experiences in the fifties with UFOs. And we also see former Canadian Minister of Defense, Paul Hellyer, speaking out about the politics of alien encounters.

Aykroyd himself is asked about multiple dimensions, multiverses, and time travel, as though Sereda is hoping to channel Heisenberg or Podolski. Aykroyd mentions a handful of movies about alien encounters, such as “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and uses these as a basis for forming a philosophy of what aliens might want.

On the whole, however, there’s nothing neither new nor groundbreaking in this DVD. If you haven’t ever heard of Roswell, New Mexico, if you didn’t see the news stories about the “Phoenix Lights“, or if you simply don’t have an Internet connection to browse through the hundreds of accounts and photographs on the web, then this documentary might grab you. For those who are sceptics, there’s nothing here to convince you. And for those of us in the middle, it’s a great big, ‘meh’, difficult to sit through sequentially, amateurish in cuts, introductions, and the inability of the director to put any kind of linear quality to the topic thread.

Previews on this disc include “Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs” and “Deck Dogz”.

LOS ANGELES - CBS took the unusual step Monday of announcing renewals of the bulk of its prime-time series for next season, an expression of confidence in the network’s successful lineup.

Networks often keep producers and viewers in suspense until schedules are announced in May, although broadcasters have started to jump the gun on that tradition by dribbling out word on some programs’ fates.

The announcement of full-season 2006-07 orders for 14 CBS prime-time shows — representing nearly 13 hours of the 22 hours that make up prime time — reflects CBS’ position as the most-watched network for the season to date.

Most of the renewals are obvious, including the three “CSI” crime shows and fast-growing drama “NCIS.” Newcomers on the list are “Criminal Minds,” “Ghost Whisperer” and “How I Met Your Mother.”

Others set to return next year: “60 Minutes”; “The Amazing Race”; “Cold Case”; “Numb3rs”: “Survivor”; “Two and a Half Men” and “Without a Trace.”

Series left under a cloud of uncertainty include freshman drama “Threshold” and the comedies “King of Queens,” “Out of Practice,” “Still Standing” and “Yes, Dear.”