Carlo Rambaldi, the three-time Academy Award-winning Italian-born visual effects artist responsible for creating the alien E.T. in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, died today in Lamezia Terme, Italy after a long illness, according to the Washington Post. He was 86 years old.

Born on September 15, 1925 in Vigarano Mainarda, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, Rambaldi got his start in the Italian film industry providing visual effects for films such as Bloody Pit of Horror and Mario Bava’s highly influential sci-fi chiller Planet of the Vampires. He would later reunite with Bava to execute the gory murder sequences for one of the acclaimed filmmaker’s finest films, Twitch of the Death Nerve (a.k.a. A Bay of Blood). In 1971, Rambaldi’s mutilated dog effects for Lucio Fulci’s psychedelic giallo Lizard in a Woman’s Skin were deemed so realistic that the director was prosecuted in Italian court on charges of animal cruelty. Only after Rambaldi presented the fake dog effects in court was Fulci exonerated.

November 10, 2010 saw the passing of 91-year-old film producer Dino De Laurentiis.

A force behind successful and acclaimed films such as Serpico and Three Days Of The Condor as well as box office duds such as Orca and Halloween III, there is much of the De Laurentiis film canon to love… and love it we do, here at Geeks of Doom.

To honor and remember the memory of producer and distributor, we present the 10 De Laurentiis films nearest and dearest to our hearts.

“My philosophy is very simple. To feel young, you must work as long as you can.”

Today is a sad day for film fans everywhere. Dino De Laurentiis, the legendary Italian movie producer who brought the world a wildly diverse and unique library of cinema and was considered to be one of cinema’s most daring and controversial figures in his six decades in the film industry, died Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 10PM at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was 91 years old. No cause of death has been given at the present time.

Although De Laurentiis had not produced a feature since 2007, the legendary Italian movie producer who brought the world a wildly diverse and unique library of cinema of over 160 films, credited and not, and was considered to be one of cinema’s most daring and controversial figures in his six decades in the industry.

At the age of 17 De Laurentiis left home to enroll in film school and supported himself for the next three years with a series of industry jobs until he earned his first producer credit at the age of twenty. He then left the movie business to serve in the Italian army during World War II but soon returned to film production after his service was up. From 1941 until the mid-1950’s he produced films in his native Italy with varying degrees of success, but in the wake of the war and the fall of dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime the producer was widely credited with helping to restore the country’s film industry.