The B-Masters Cabal » Hoopla

Watch that last step…

lyzard — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:40:46 +0000

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!

Refurbishment and Renovations

El Santo — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:02:14 +0000

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 Braineater is up next, and then I’ll turn my attention to the sites that are no longer active.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…

And not a moment too soon…

lyzard — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 22:42:28 +0000

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…

The Dark Guys of London

KeithA — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 02:34:02 +0000

Cobweb draped secret passages. Shadowy churchyards. Decrepit mansions. Hooded killers. Mod girls in mini-skirts. And most terrifying of all, lurking around every corner and behind every false bookcase…Klaus Kinski. The works of mystery writer Edgar Wallace conjured up a netherworld of insane criminal masterminds being pursued by dogged Scotland Yard inspectors that struck a chord with, well, Germans in the 1920s. Perhaps recognizing something of Weimar-era decadence and doom in the stories, Germany voraciously devoured Wallace’s works up until they were declared verboten by the ascending Nazi party.

Germany produced a couple Wallace adaptations before the war, and the author’s own England made several adaptations during 1930s. Wallace’s stories even made their way to US screens, though admittedly he was better known in the US for some obscure movie about a largish gorilla climbing buildings in New York.

Years later, in 1959, Danish film studio Rialto decided to see if there was bankable nostalgia for the Wallace mysteries of old. Their first production, The Fellowship of the Frog, sparked a trend that resulted in dozens of new Wallace adaptations, as well as plenty of imitators — including companies adapting the work of Edgar’s mimic son, Bryan.

This month, the B-Masters pay tribute the sinister, strange, and often surreal blend of serial adventure, old dark house mysteries, and swingin’ sixties pop-art spy films that became known collectively as “krimi.” Look out! The man walking toward you could be Klaus Kinski in a skull mask!

In case you’re not being given enough chills…

Nathan Shumate — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:40:02 +0000

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.

Your Blast from the Past

KeithA — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:24:51 +0000

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

Ridiculous Self-Aggrandizement

drfreex — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 04:28:33 +0000

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?

The secret life of Liz

lyzard — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:39:44 +0000

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.

Short stories

lyzard — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:14:48 +0000

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!

The Cabal in 140 Characters or Less

KeithA — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 21:05:02 +0000

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!