“You like movies because you’re one of life’s great watchers.” So says Woody Allen’s irked, soon-to-be-ex-wife in Play It Again, Sam, obviously having had enough of his sedentary lifestyle. Hmm, I think she would have left me, too. But, hey, do a female’s myriad charms really stack up against the corny delights of Cocktail, the vicious cynicism of The Sweet Smell of Success, the dark ferocity of The Thing, the fantastic imagination of Westworld, the perverted milieu of Happiness or the heartbreak of Kes? For these are just some of the films covered in the fifth part of this lewd, politically incorrect guide to the treasures of twentieth century cinema. Author Dave Franklin also throws in a bevy of bitches, the worst-ever holidays and a tribute to old men feasting on teenage flesh.
As Jonathan Lethem put, Steve Erickson's journal of the last 18 months of the Trump Presidency "sears the page." Erickson, one of our finest novelists, has long been an astute political observer, and American Stutter, part political declaration, part humorous account of more personal matters, offers a particularly moving reminder of the democratic ideals that we are currently struggling to preserve. Written with wit, eloquence, and a controlled fury as event unfold, Erickson has left us with an essential record of our recent history, a book to be read with our collective breath held.* Steve Erickson is the author of ten novels and two books about American culture. For 12 years he was founding editor of the national literary journal Black Clock. Currently he is the film/television critic for Los Angeles magazine and a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement award.
In these three novellas of blackly comic crime and creature horror, you'll go slumming with well-endowed dwarf porn stars, killer badgers, redneck mama's boys, morbidly obese nymphomaniacs, dumbass dog-nappers, trailer trash Jesus freaks, diarrheic Jack Russell terriers, not-so-wiseguys, mob-movie memorabilia collectors, junkie blackmailers, and giant man-eating Burmese pythons. OF BADGERS & PORN DWARFS To pay back a gambling debt and avoid being castrated, washed-up dwarf porn star Rummy Rumsfeld (of Snow White spoof Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Up Your Ass We Go) must overcome a geriatric pederast, redneck pornographers, a morbidly obese nymphomaniac with serious personal hygiene issues, the ghost of his religious zealot mother, a dwarf-eating badger, and George Lucas. JESUS IN A DOG'S ASS Dumbass desperadoes Hootie and Poke incur the wrath of a trailer trash church group, not to mention God, when they kidnap a Jack Russell Terrier with the figure of Jesus Christ in its butt. FRANK, THE SNAKE, & THE SNAKE After testifying against notorious mob boss "Snake" Cobretti, embittered ex-wiseguy Frankie "The Tin Man" Piscopo emerges from Witness Protection to embark on a disastrous drug deal that leaves him fighting for his life against a giant Burmese python with a taste for Italian-American. BONUS SHORT STORY THE MAD BUTCHER OF PLAINFIELD'S CHARIOT OF DEATH Washed up carny buys Ed Gein's car hoping to reverse his bad luck. . . but the real horror was just getting revved up . . . "It's almost as if someone smashed Dashiell Hammett's seamless noir patter, Elmore Leonard's pitch-perfect ear for hapless characters, Quentin Tarantino's sardonic sense of irony and Clive Barker's unflinching portrayal of sexual pain/pleasure into a blender, mixing in a heaping helping of Stephen King's pop culture mise-en-scene framing. Howe bobs and weaves, pulling it all together in a denouement that is as satisfying as it is completely unexpected." -Walt Hicks for Hellnotes "Gloriously offensive, fast-paced and funny, only the animals come through with their dignity almost intact, although Howe does betray some affection for his cast of dead-enders in each selection. So if you're tired of all that respectable, snooze-worthy shit with silhouettes on the cover, try something like this, a book best consumed on the subway in a paper bag, or at the zoo." -David James Keaton, author of The Last Projector and Fish Bites Cop! "Utterly compelling, uniquely twisted, and funny as hell, Black Cat Mojo is simply magnificent!" -Adam Millard, author of Vinyl Destination and Hamsterdamned! "Black Cat Mojo makes you feel like you've stumbled across a treasure trove filled with the stories Tarantino was too afraid to tell. Bizarro pulp of high quality, Adam Howe writes like Chandler on mescaline-a mind altering read." -S.R. Mastrantone, Shock Totem, Lamplight, Vignettes from the End of the World "Adam Howe's stories are peopled with characters you might find in a Carl Hiaasen novel: wacky, outrageous, severely down-on-their-luck losers, who go to extreme means to try and improve their lot. You will either be laughing your head off or feeling slightly nauseous." -Jerry Raine, author of Frankie Bosser Comes Home and Slaphead Chameleon. "Raw, punky, and genuinely surprising." -Stephen King, on Jumper (featured in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft) "What would happen if you took the witty dialogue of Miller's Crossing, the humor of early Peter Jackson, the pacing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and flung it all together into a literary miracle that the world needs to read like Right Now? You would have Adam Howe's unforgettable and un-putdownable debut Black Cat Mojo ..." -Elias Siqueiros, Fantastic Horror, Tattered Souls Vol.2, A Hacked Up Holiday Massacre, author of The Heart Of An Animal
Ryan teaches English to foreigners at a small school in Cardiff. He's not perfect but tries his best for his students. Nora, the boss' daughter, is his icily distant, ball-busting superior. Apart, they are nothing, two completely unremarkable and harmless individuals. But together... Welcome to Wales, Girls - Come study at the ESL school from hell.
Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna, is an autobiographical account of renowned ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna's childhood, his relationship with his brother, and the author's experiences with and reflections on psychedelics, philosophy, and scientific innovation. Chronicling the McKenna brothers' childhood in western Colorado during the 1950s and 1960s, Dennis writes of his adolescent adventures including his first encounters with alcohol and drugs (many of which were facilitated by Terence), and the people and ideas that shaped them both. Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss weaves personal narrative through philosophical ideas and tales of psychedelic experimentation. In this book, Dennis describes these inquiries with the wisdom of perspective. In his account of what has become known as "The Experiment at La Chorrera"-- which Terence documented in his own 1989 book, True Hallucinations -- Dennis describes how he had visions of merging mushroom and human DNA, the brothers' predictions for the future, and their evolving ideas about society and consciousness. He also offers an intellectual understanding of the hallucinogenic effects of high-dose psychedelic mushrooms and other psychedelic substances. Dennis, now world-renowned for this ethnobotanical work, describes in Brotherhood his early interests in cosmology and astrology, his sometimes rocky relationship with his older brother and how their paths diverged later in their lives. Dennis describes his academic career in between touching accounts of both his mother's and Terence's battles with cancer. In the 10th Anniversary edition of Brotherhood, Dennis reflects on scientific revelations, climate change, and the social and political crises of our time. The new edition also features both the original foreword by Luis Eduardo Luna and a new foreword by Dr. Bruce Damer. Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss is a story about brotherhood, psychedelic experimentation, and the intertwining nature of science and myth.
The advent of color, big musicals, the studio system, and the beginning of institutionalized censorship made the thirties the defining decade for Hollywood. The year 1939, celebrated as "Hollywood's greatest year," saw the release of such memorable films as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Stagecoach. It was a time when the studios exercised nearly absolute control over their product as well as over such stars as Bette Davis, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart. In this fifth volume of the award-winning series History of the American Cinema, Tino Balio examines every aspect of the filmmaking and film exhibition system as it matured during the Depression era.
Pre-Code Hollywood explores the fascinating period in American motion picture history from 1930 to 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films—a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. Though more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, the films of the period do indeed have the look of Hollywood cinema—but the moral terrain is so off-kilter that they seem imported from a parallel universe. In a sense, Doherty avers, the films of pre-Code Hollywood are from another universe. They lay bare what Hollywood under the Production Code attempted to cover up and push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded—in sum, pretty much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled. No other book has yet sought to interpret the films and film-related meanings of the pre-Code era—what defined the period, why it ended, and what its relationship was to the country as a whole during the darkest years of the Great Depression... and afterward.
In the wake of the remarkable success of Film Noir Reader, this new collection further explores a genre of limitless fascination -- and one that continues to inspire and galvanise the latest generation of film-makers. Again heavily illustrated, with close to 150 stills, Film Noir Reader 2 is organised much like the earlier volume.
