A package recently arrived which contained within a wooden box with a message on top to UNLOCK THE GENIUS with the date 4-12-13. What could this be? Why, it must be a Doom Delivery!

Upon opening the box, I found a note inside from the good people at STARZ regarding their new show, Da Vinci’s Demons, which airs tonight at 10pm ET/PT. The eight-part original series is an historical fantasy which tells the untold tale of a young Leonardo da Vinci and reveals his “demons.” It turns out that the contents of the box are actually meant to help me tap into my inner genius! Woo! The kit contained a journal – so I can put my own ingenious thoughts to paper – and a Da Vinci’s Demons t-shirt that reads “ARROGANT, VISIONARY, BASTARD” on the front, with the back displaying the show’s logo.

You can check out a photo of the box and its contents here below, as well as watch a few teaser videos for the series [...]

In early February, a small white box with a yellow ribbon arrived at Geeks of Doom headquarters. Inside was a skeleton key necklace wrapped in yellow tissue paper tied up with a thin black ribbon. There was nothing else with it; no message inside and the sender’s address was unfamiliar with no company name mentioned. Having received mysterious objects like this in the past (see our other Doom Deliveries), I figured it must be a viral campaign for an upcoming film or TV show. We tried searching for clues, but there were none to be found.

Earlier this week, another small white box with a yellow ribbon arrived, this time with sharpened pencils in a black case. We figured it had to do with that first mysterious package, but again, we wondered what it could be related to … until we took the pencils out and noticed a photo of a woman pasted into the bottom. I recognized the woman right away – it was Alice In Wonderland actress Mia Wasikowska, but it took me a while to recall that the image was from the poster for the film Stoker, directed by Chan-wook Park.

You can check out photos here below of the two packages that arrived [...]

Thanks to the holidays it’s a super-slow news week and I’m jetlagged after coming home on a red-eye flight this morning after a week of binge-eating in Arizona with my family and the cats are going crazy and the mail is piled up and whaaaaa… OMG, what is this heavy package that arrived from the offices of DC Comics?

It’s an advanced copy of The Annotated Sandman Volume One!!! [...]

If you’re reading Geeks of Doom, which you should be because it’s great [*shameless plug*], you may have seen an article a couple of weeks back about a wedding cake sent to Doom HQ’s to promote an upcoming show on FX, titled American Horror Story, the first episode of which airs tonight.

In that article, there’s a link to the show’s site where you can sign up to get free stuff and stuff. Well, I did sign up, and while I didn’t get a badass cake sent to me, I did get an email with a couple of pictures, one of which was a recipe for Delicious Dills (subtitled “No Friends like the old!”), so what the hell, it’s perfect for me and my Cooking Corner collection! [...]

On October 5, 2011 at 10pm, a new series will debut on FX called American Horror Story, which revolves around The Harmons, a family of three who move from Boston to Los Angeles as a means to reconcile past anguish. The place they move into is a haunted house occupied by some very unpleasant spirits who terrorize them.

Today, an extremely rare one-of-a-kind artifact was hand-delivered to me that provides a clue as to what’s going on in the house. According to the note attached, this Empress of Doom was one of seven people to receive a full room artifact, which means that an exclusive piece of the story is mine — all the memories, horrors, and unknowns now lie in my hands, waiting to be discovered (whoa, that’s heavy duty!). My room artifact is the Living Room and it’s a Wedding Cake — yes, a totally edible cake!

See a bunch of photos here below of the fully edible wedding cake, which looks beautiful on the outside, but if you look closer, there’s a lot more than meets the eye. If you’re a horror fan, you’re really going to dig what you see.

Go register at youregoingtodieinthere.com, which goes fully interactive on September 9, to gain exclusive access to the horrors and perverse mysteries tied to American Horror Story. Those of you who register through our link will have the chance to receive an actual Living Room-related artifact of your own; you’ll also able to upload artifacts relating to the Living Room to help piece together the mystery of the house [...]

One of the great things about being able to write about entertainment news is that every once in a while studios will send out unique promotional items to help get the word out about an upcoming movie, TV series, video game, and so on.

In my time writing I’ve seen a lot of different sites get sent some very cool things — things you can’t get or buy anywhere on this planet — including our own Empress Eve, who received this amazing Coraline handmade box. I’ve personally never received my own special Doom Delivery but have always badly wanted one, so you can imagine my delight when an unexpected package arrived at my front door recently!

Eagerly opening the package, I found myself looking at a strange, old-looking box accompanied by a letter. The letter was from HBO, and it explained that in preparation for their upcoming series, Game of Thrones, they had put together a unique package promising an exciting “sensory journey.”

Click over to read more about this special delivery and to see many images below! [...]

Satan sent us candy!

Yup, you heard right. And not just any candy, 80′s candy, in our latest installment of Doom Deliveries!

One day, an ominous package was left at the doorstep of Geeks of Doom headquarters. At first, it was unclear what the contents were, but the words “Satan” and “Devil” and “Big League Chew” were all over the items. What in hell is this demonic package?

Turns out, it was DVD, Blu-ray, and VHS — yes, VHS — copies of The House Of The Devil, the new “satanic panic” retro horror film, getting its home release on February 2, 2010. Along with the multiple formats for the movie, there was a pack of buttons — one of which read “Satan Sucks” — and an 80′s grab bag of candy, including the aforementioned Big League Chew as well as Nerds, Pop Rocks, Whistle Pops, and much more.

The back of the worn-looking clamshell-housed VHS cassette was the warning: CAUTION: This film contains satanic references and graphic violence.

HA HA HA HA!

GoD staffer CrueChik was hanging out at the headquarters, going through the package, so check out the brief video here below of her opening up its contents [...]

The good folks over at Paramount Pictures, who probably didn’t even know I existed until I started writing about Star Trek and how much I love it, were good enough to include me when sending out “exclusive” content and goodies for the upcoming film. For this Doom Delivery, I was one of 100 people to receive a limited edition Star Trek USB cards containing exclusive themed wallpapers to share with my readers.

Apparently, this is a 20-card set and I received #17 with the image of baby Spock on it. Inside were Wallpapers 2, 7, and 9, which I was told were exclusive, but as I browse the net, I see #7 and #9 on some other sites. Links to download the wallpapers are here below.

Along with the USB card and wallpaper files, I was given 10 cards from the Star Trek Rittenhouse trading card set! See the crappy picture below of the cards on my kitchen counter. I love getting trading cards, I still have ones from when I was a kid, so getting these were a real treat [...]

The latest Doom Delivery sure does live up to the name, as it’s an invitation to a Valentine’s Day dance which will surely lead me to my doom. It arrived via FedEx (not so doomy) and was very lightweight, so I couldn’t imagine what was in it. I opened it to find an artificial black rose (which I dig) and a small card with a drawn red heart on it that read…

YOU’RE INVITED!

WHAT: THE ANNUAL VALENTINE’S DAY DANCE
WHERE: VALENTINE BLUFFS
HOSTED BY: HARRY WARDEN

Uh-oh! As soon as I saw the name of the host, I knew that this was no innocuous Valentine’s Day dance! I knew this was a test! On the other side of the card was the message “Happy Anti-Valentine’s Day From Lionsgate” with an image of their recently released special edition DVD of the 1981 horror flick My Bloody Valentine.

In My Bloody Valentine, the miner Harry Warden was the sole survivor of a cave-in on Valentine’s Day at the Hanniger Mines in Valentine’s Bluffs [...]

Well, I received a second small manila envelope today. This time there is no mysterious metal briefcase attached but the return address is labeled Armacham Technology Corporation and it’s stamped “Level II Classification.” Obviously this is an invite to the “Fear Lab’ that Mr. or Mrs. ‘R’ warned me about last week.

Inside is a letter from A.T. Harmon, the C.O.O of Gaming and Simulation Division of Armacham. The letter opens with ‘Dear Candidate:” and continues with a request for my attendance in an upcoming “Fear Lab’ at an undisclosed location. Also in the envelope is an eight-page in-depth dossier and a press release from the Psycho-Kenitic Genetic’s division. The dossier concerns the Psychotronic Amplified Neuro-Inductive Cognition project (P.A.N.I.C., very cute). In it, I’m instructed go over all this information to determine my “Psi” abilities or lack thereof, and then fill out the attached questionnaire.

Now the question looms. Do I follow up on this pamphlet or do I heed the warning words of ‘R’ and await the code that will open up the metal briefcase?

Thoughts?

In the relatively short amount of time that Empress Eve and I have been running Geeks of Doom we’ve had a multitude of stuff just show up in our mailbox. Some of these packages have been pretty geeky cool, like the one-of-a-kind props sent to us by the animators of the upcoming stop-motion feature Coraline. Others have been hard to swallow, like the cans of unreleased soda for us to sample (get it? Swallow… I make a pun). So yeah, some downright diverse shit just shows up in our mailbox on the daily, and after a time we started calling these unsolicited mystery packages Doom Deliveries, a moniker that works on multiple levels.

Well, this Tuesday brought one of the more intriguing Doom Deliveries to date. The intrigue began with the circumstances of its arrival, which took place as I was out for a lunch break. When I returned to my office there was a small metal briefcase on my desk, the kind with a numerical tumbler lock. The one thing that immediately tugged at my stomach was that it wasn’t in a parcel that had been mailed to me, but had been seemingly hand delivered — this in disregard to the fact that my office door was locked and I work in a moderately secured building. I had taken notice there was a small manila envelope taped to the top of it with simply “Dave” handwritten on it, but being me, I ignored it and immediately tried to open the lock with one of the old standards. 666 (ala Pulp Fiction), 911, 411, 212, 718, 917… nothing. That’s when internal Dave said, “Okay, genius. How about you open the envelope?“

At the end of October, I was invited by Laika Entertainment to a sneak peek here in NYC of their upcoming 3D stop-motion animated feature Coraline. I got to see 30 minutes of the film, after which writer/director Henry Selick came out for an audience Q&A.

Soon after the screening, I got an email from the Coraline Team out in Portland, OR, telling me to be on the lookout for a package from them specially made for me with me in mind and that I will be one of 50 people slated to receive such an item — each being one of a kind.

This is a big deal for me, because I’m a great fan of the Coraline book, I love stop-motion, and c’mon, it’s Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas. There’s a reason I can’t stop writing about this project! Anyhow, so I couldn’t imagine what they’d be sending, but the other day it arrived — a handcrafted aged box with an oval plate that read “Handmade in Oregon – 14/50.” Inside the box was a weathered letter with a wax seal with a black button just like the ones used in the film. The letter explained why I was getting such a unique gift and a bit about how it was made. From what I can tell, from the few other people online I saw who’ve gotten their own box, most of the message is a standard form letter, but there’s one paragraph that specifically addresses the recipient. My paragraph has some nice things to say about Geeks of Doom (we’re artistic, hilarious, unconventional…), but probably the coolest thing it said was …

THAT’S WHY WE ADMIRE GEEKSOFDOOM – (GREATEST NAME EVER).

The Fall television series is finally upon is, so for the last two or so weeks, I’ve been getting loads of preview material for upcoming shows.

I’ll admit, while I love television I have a major commitment problem. I’ll DVR some stuff, then never get around to watching it; then when it comes on DVD, I’ll feel like it’s too much pressure to bang out a whole season at once. I’m working on these issues, but in the meantime, each season I will try to catch a new series right from the beginning and then watch it in “real time” — this happened for me with NBC’s The Office, SCI FI’s Battlestar Galactica, and NBC’s Heroes. For the 2008 Fall season, the new Fox series Fringe, created by JJ Abrams, is definitely my “real time” show of this season.

I didn’t know too much about Fringe until the other day when a large box and poster tube arrived from Fox’s publicity department. In it were Fringe promo items — lenticular notepad, backpack, t-shirt, poster, and the limited edition 2008 Comic Con comic book — and an envelope from the FBI marked “CONFIDENTIAL.”

Time to get viral! …

In this new feature, the Geeks of Doom will talk about some cool stuff that randomly shows up in the mail, with this first entry about a pack of cans of Mountain Dew’s new limited-edition flavors.