Fame is – as the saying goes – a hideous bitch goddess, and one moreover with a very sick sense of humour. If we were in any doubt of this, we need only stop and consider the events of the 6th and 7th of March, 2010, when within a single 24-hour period, Sandra Bullock collected both the Razzie for Worst Actress for All About Steve and the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Blind Side.

It’s the nature of acting that there will be good parts and bad parts, and that if you want to eat, you can’t always afford to be choosy. Nevertheless, this platitude hardly accounts for all those actors – or all those agents – who apparently can’t tell a good script from a stinker. Nor can it explain away the number of actors for whom a major award is the first stop on the road to oblivion. For some, the journey from professional triumph to professional humilation is slow and steady; for others, it happens so fast, it takes your breath away.

So join us as we take a look at the careers of some actors who truly do know what it’s like to go from one extreme to the other.

It’s FALLING STARS – all through February at the B-Masters’ blog!

Some of you may have noticed that twelve years’ worth of domain-name changes, platform shifts, and sheer laziness have rendered the Grand Index substantially less grand than it might be.  I’ve noticed too, and more importantly, I’ve taken it upon myself to do something about it.  For the past month or so, I’ve been methodically going through the Grand Index, one affliated site at a time, making sure that all extant B-Masters reviews are linked under at least one title, and that all the links actually go where they’re supposed to.  So far, I’ve completed index rectification for 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting, And You Call Yourself a Scientist, badmovies.org, Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension, Teleport City, and The Unknown Movies.  Braineater is up next, and then I’ll turn my attention to the sites that are no longer active.  By the time I’m through, all the B-Masters’ reviews will be linked under all commonly used titles.  No promises as to when that’ll be, though…

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Well…I can honestly say there have been few years I’ve been as glad to see the back of as 2011…and I suspect I’m not the only one here to feel that way.

Thank you to all those who stuck by us in what has been a pretty lean stretch. The visits and the comments help more than you can know.

But no more of that! Here we are in those wonderful few days when we can kid ourselves that everything’s going to be different from now on - so let’s enjoy it!

Here’s hoping for a much better 2012; a year filled to the brim with - as opposed to occasionally interrupted by - monsters, maniacs, and mad science, nunchucks and ninjas, killer animals and amateur pilots, and dreadful, dreadful DVD covers…

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I know that you — all of you! — love my occasional entries in the “Gives Me Chills” post series, and wish they could be more frequent. Hey, I’m with you, but there are only so many DVD covers produced without the benefit of design competence.

There’s not such a scarcity in books, though. With the groundswell in self-publishing via Kindle and CreateSpace, there are scads and oodles of authors who think that just because they’re competent to string words together in a sentence (itself often a self-assessed competency), they can design their own book covers. Or hire their friend to do it — a friend who promptly subcontracts the task to his teenage daughter because she’s really better at that there PhotoShop thing.

It is thus with mingled horror and glee that I announce Horrendous Book Covers, a tumblog slapdashedly thrown together by little ol’ me to showcase the underwhelming excesses of DIY cover designers. So far I’ve mostly restrained myself from snide commentary — the covers speak for themselves, really — but my self-control on that front could easily slip in the days ahead.

I leave you with one final thought:

There. Consider yourself warned.

Back in 1994, I started making a zine about the things that interested me at the time — Hong Kong action movies, Japanese scifi, noise music, and gratuitous photos of Joey Wong. Called Kung-Fu Girl, it ran for like five or six issues, all of which were presumed lost after flooding ruined most of my zine collection and moving caused much more of it to vanish into that ether where random boxes go in between apartments.

My sister, however, was mining through a pile of my old junk at my parents’ house and stumbled across issues one and three. She sent them to me, and I’m scanning them in for all to enjoy. I am not responsible for any differences in opinion between 22 year old me and 39 year old me. Anyway, here’s issue one. Issue three I’ll try to scan over the weekend.

Kung-Fu Girl #1

A relatively new Website, Daily Grindhouse, decided to rattle my cage and talk about Forever Evil. Yes, the villain still pursues me.

Fans of Jabootu may know this, but Ken Begg, myself, Sandy “Call of Cthulhu” Petersen and often Chris Holland of Stomp Tokyo get together annually to poke at the unsuspecting with movie-shaped sticks. One such get-together happened a week ago. No one was ever heard from again – until now.

Oh, yeah, incidentally, I’m still alive. How are you guys doing?

Look—we can’t help it, okay?

We’re the B-Masters. That’s just who we are. We yiz who we yiz and that’s all that we yiz. And that’s why, when we set out to do a tribute, it sometimes ends up looking like…something else.

Take this month’s Roundtable, for example. You wouldn’t think it would be hard to do an appropriate tribute to Elizabeth Taylor, now, would you? We didn’t think so either. Until we started dibsing films.

National Velvet? Nuh-uh. Father Of The Bride? Not exactly. A Place In The Sun? ‘Fraid not. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof? Well, I’m pretty sure Tennessee Williams is in there somewhere…

Well, look on the bright side. We always wanted this blog to be educational.

So join us as we investigate THE OTHER ELIZABETH TAYLOR – all through August at the B-Masters’ Blog.

Let’s face it – we’ve all got our fetishes.

Here at the B-Masters, we do try not to judge. Rather, we try to create an atmosphere where everyone is comfortable ‘fessing up to those little kinks and foibles that the real world just doesn’t understand. So when one of us – never mind which of us – lobbied for a Roundtable featuring the work of the more vertically challenged members of the acting community, the idea was embraced. There was no eyebrow-raising, no exchanging of significant looks. Because we’re all friends here. Because we all sympathise. Because we all want to help.

Because no-one wanted to tick off a man in uniform.

Oh. Ah. ‘Hem.

Anyway…why don’t you all join us over the next month as we take a look at those films in which some little people play a very big role?

It’s THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS…all through May at the B-Masters’ blog!

OK, so we’re not exactly keeping up with the cutting edge, but the Cabal now has a twitter feed. What will be on it? Only time and how much booze we’ve had will tell. But if you’re the kind of person who has a twitter account, follow us OR BE DESTROYED! Or at the very least, be unaware of what one of us has posted to the twitter account, until such time as that information is repeated here.

@B_Masters_Cabal

Enjoy…ish!

At last, the darksome prophecies are nigh at hand! The first issue of Arcane is available — $2.99 in every conceivable ebook format, $7.99 in print! You owe it to yourself, your ancestry, and your progeny to check it out! More details here.

03/14/11 Update: I’m no longer giving away free review copies, but you can still buy your own — CHEAP! — at several outlets and in several formats, all listed here.

At long last! The Kindle version of The Demon Cross is being processed by Amazon as we speak, and should be available for sale in a couple of days; other ereader formats will follow shortly, and the paperback edition will be available in a week or two.

And with as much as you’d enjoy buying The Demon Cross, think how much more you’d enjoy reading it for free! To generate word-of-mouth and reviews, I’d like email you a FREE COPY of the novel. Here’s all you have to do:

1. Send me an email at nshumate@gmail.com with the subject “Free Demon Cross”. Give me your name, the format you prefer (epub, PDF, HTML) and the address of your website or blog if you have one.

2. Agree to post a review — positive, negative or indifferent — on your blog or website, your Goodreads page, your Facebook page, or the Amazon listing for The Demon Cross in the next 60 days. (You don’t have to buy the book on Amazon to review it there, you only need to have an account).

3. Email me a copy of the review or a link to the post.

I’m only going to honor the first 50 requests — gotta leave SOMEBODY out there to buy it, after all — so get your licks in early!

…I need your help.  I plan to self-publish my NaNoWriMo novel, Two Bit Blood, on Kindle and CreateSpace later this spring.  I’ve got mockups of three cover designs at NathanShumate.com; fancy taking a peek at them and giving your opinion?

Sure, eleven years is a long time on the Internet… but when our readers began referring to us as “Great Old Ones”, we really weren’t sure how to take it. Then the chanting began, and we realized they weren’t talking about us at all: they were summoning something terrible from the depths of the cosmos.

Uh-oh.

A quick look at the prophecies on page 22 of the Classic Comics edition of the Necronomicon shewed — excuse me; showed us what we could expect: when the stars were right, it said, it was just remotely possible that a movie could be made from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft that didn’t stink with the noisome foetor of shoggoth poop.

Could such things be? It had happened so few times through the aeons that the very idea strained the bounds of credulity. Yet before long we received an urgent message from Sandy Petersen, master of eldritch lore and legendary creator of the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. From beyond time, the Elder Gods had sent forth a new message: The Whisperer in Darkness was about to be released to the theaters and video screens of an unsuspecting world…

Would this new movie haunt the dreams of mankind, inspiring people all over the world to cast off their slumber and throng in the streets, crying, “Iä! Iä!” Or would it be so bad it cleared the earth of the mass of humanity, paving the way for the return of the Old Ones? And where did it fit among the arcana of Lovecraft adaptations?

Read on, o wanderer in the aetherial darkness, and find out…

It’s AT THE MOVIES OF MADNESS…all throughout February at the B-Masters’ blog.

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On behalf of the B-Masters, I’d like to wish all of our blog visitors, posters and lurkers alike, a very happy New Year. Thank you all for stopping by in 2010, and please don’t be strangers in 2011.

And here’s hoping that this is the year we finally get our flying cars, dammit!

…because Santa has brought them an extra special present. And the B-Masters? Oh, they’re getting lumps of coal. If they’re lucky…

Last year, the B-Masters celebrated [sic.] the ten-year anniversary of Brainathon ’99 by inflicting on themselves and everyone else Stingathon ’09. And now another anniversary is due, possibly the greatest test of friendship ever devised:

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SECRET SANTA’S REVENGE…

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Join us every day from now until Christmas Eve and discover what the B-Masters found in their stockings.

Pull the strings! Pull the strings!

Go here to find out how.

You know you want to.

I’ll be mostly eschewing movie reviews for November (except, of course, for the Roger Corman roundtable — I wouldn’t risk dissing our patron saint!), as I’ll be throwing my efforts into NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month).  You can check my progress in the widget on the sidebar of my blog, NathanShumate.com.