Word: dudman
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...gnarled branches. Later, they are chased through the Forbidden Forest by an army of giant spiders. The Mandrake plants - whose deadly screams require Herbology students to wear earmuffs - have roots resembling ugly, sharp-toothed fetuses. It's a disturbing image, but one that creature designer Nick Dudman calls necessary: "They mustn't have any element of sympathy about them," he says, "because they get chopped up." The U.K. ratings board has slapped Chamber of Secrets with this warning: "Contains mild language and horror, and fantasy spiders." And Warner Bros. even worried that the new film would receive...
...Dudman, 60, and Becker, 31, were experienced reporters who had covered the Indochina war in both Viet Nam and Cambodia for extended periods. Their 1,000-mile trip through eleven of Cambodia's 19 provinces was clearly an attempt by the Cambodian regime to counteract its worldwide image as a merciless, anonymous and genocidal regime. That image has been fed by the accounts of postrevolutionary life given by thousands of refugees in neighboring Thailand and Viet Nam. Caldwell, a lecturer in Southeast Asian economic history at the University of London, accompanied the reporters as a sympathetic student of Cambodia...
Caldwell was murdered on the last night of the trip, when three armed intruders burst into the guest house where the visitors were quartered. Dudman and Becker luckily escaped the gunfire, but Caldwell was caught in his room and died there. Who the assailants were may never be known, but the Cambodians immediately offered their own theory. Said the Westerners' official guide in Phnom-Penh, Thiounn Prasith: "Our enemies know of the importance of your visit and wanted to show the world that Cambodia could not protect her friends...
...sumptuously in a factory canteen was described even by the sympathetic Caldwell as "a charade." On other occasions a searching question by the Americans would elicit a long response in Khmer that would then be interpreted by the accompanying official as "I don't know." Phnom-Penh, said Dudman, had "the eerie quiet of a dead place-a Hiroshima without the destruction, a Pompeii without the ashes ... My first impression was that the total population of the capital could not be more than a very few thousand. The usual estimate of 20,000 seemed high, and the official figure...
Whenever they traveled, wrote Dudman, "we sought an answer to the central question being asked by much of the outside world: What has happened to the middle-and upper-class city dwellers since the Communist takeover? Repeated interrogation produced no clear answer to the question of 'auto-genocide,' the term used by some critics for an alleged methodical execution of much of the entire class of former professionals, tradesmen, civil servants and soldiers. There were indications in both directions. The Cambodian revolution evidently has forced [those city dwellers] to conform to an austere standard of hard manual labor...