The B-Masters Cabal
Back from the Grave and Ready to Party!Kidnapping is seldom this fun
Posted onSeptember 29, 2018
The kidnap drama The Betrayed has all the ingredients needed to be given sleeper status.
Cocktails & Capers: The End Result of a Year of Silence
Posted onSeptember 25, 2018
My website has been silent for a long time, but that’s because I was writing this.
Page after page of rambling on everything from: Sweet Smell of Success, Billie Holiday, and old New York bars; Louis Feuillade’s Fantomas and Les Vampires; AJ Raffles and gentleman thieves in film and print; the murky origins of the Martini; Kriminal, Kilink, Diabolik, and fumetti cinema; the origins of masked wrestlers and the birth of the El Santo/Blue Demon team-up; amaro and how Lucky Luciano and Ian Fleming won WWII; and the story of Dean Martin’s Matt Helm films, which became a sprawling epic involving the mob, Mia Farrow, the Kennedys, bodies in 55 gallon drums, the CIA, and Ian Fleming’s plan to defeat communism by stealing Fidel Castro’s beard.
It also contains cocktail recipes!
Parts were previously hosted on Teleport City, Mezzanotte, or Alcohol Professor but have been substantially re-researched and rewritten. And then a whole mess o’ stuff is new.
365 pages, black and white but with an attractive color cover. US$15.99 via Amazon. Buy it here of through whatever your country’s Amazon may be (it should be on all of them). It will eventually filter out to other sites, but that’s out of my control.
If you work at or have a connection to a brick & mortar you think would be interested in stocking it, let me know. Gotta hustle.
And finally, if you are foolish enough to buy it and read it, consider giving it a rating and/or review on Amazon and Goodreads.
-----Keith Allison is the chief Bacchanologist at Teleport City.
Badly conceived
Posted onSeptember 20, 2018
While the Burt Reynolds comedy Paternity is thankfully not irritating like his worst yahoo comedies, the end results are all the same too bland and unsurprising to generate many laughs.
A serving of spirits
Posted onSeptember 9, 2018
Kobayashi Masaki’s first colour film is an anthology of four ghost stories, in which the meetings of humans and spirits have an impact upon both.
Both chilling and sad in its implications, Kwaidan is also a stunning exercise in visual style.
Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
A different kind of monster mayhem
Posted onSeptember 8, 2018
Not your typical hand-to-hand combat movie with aliens, Arena is one of the more enjoyable movies to come from Empire Pictures.