THE HARDEST THING: A Dan Stagg Mystery - James Lear / Book Review

Posted by Frank Collins on Sunday, 25 August 2013 · Leave a Comment

James Lear, the nom de plume of writer Rupert Smith, returns with another helping of his signature gay erotica this month with The Hardest Thing, published by Turnaround.  Smith, a Green Carnation Prize nominee for the superb Man's World and winner of Stonewall Writer of the Year in 2010, gained a reputation as a purveyor of erotica through Lear's adventures of Bostonian detective Mitch Mitchell in a series of Agatha Christie pastiches The Back Passage, The Secret Tunnel and A Sticky End.

Prior to this Lear had already explored historical romance and adventure with The Low Road, a somewhat filthier version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped; a full blown, if you'll pardon the pun, homage to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind in The Hot Valley; and with the Wildean 19th Century theatrical capers of Palace of Varieties.

Subverting period was Lear's thing it seemed and these books were all the more delicious because his erotic reworking of genre was fueled by his abiding love for such authors as Stevenson, Dumas, Dickens, Christie and Galsworthy. These books successfully used period adventure and mystery as a form of transgression, a knowingly camp suggestion of an entirely different world existing behind the boy's own adventures of David Balfour or the stiff-upper lips of the English aristocracy when they discover a body in their libraries. That world was filled with Lear's trademark, highly descriptive use of the sex scene.

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THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER - Digitally Restored Blu-Ray Edition / Review

Posted by Frank Collins on Monday, 19 August 2013 · Leave a Comment

Roger Corman is quite rightly regarded as something of a legend in independent cinema. He is often attributed with creating the horror-comedy genre with A Bucket of Blood (1959) and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), the former made for a thrifty $35,000 and the latter shot in just two days, and is renowned for the cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he directed and produced for American International Pictures throughout the 1960s. Something of a trailblazer, Corman was equally enthusiastic about using cinema as social commentary, to voice counter-culture and civil rights concerns.

He explored these diverse subjects in the first Hell's Angels biker film, The Wild Angels (1966); in an examination of segregation with an early lead role for William Shatner in The Intruder (1960); by depicting the downside of psychedelic drug culture in The Trip (1967) and the death of Hollywood and celebrity in Targets (1968). In 1970, he established his own independent film production and distribution company, New World Pictures and was responsible for a number of cult films, including Boxcar Bertha (1972), Caged Heat (1974), Death Race 2000 (1975), Piranha (1978), Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and Galaxy of Terror (1981). The 'Roger Corman Film School', as it was fondly known, gave early career breaks to the likes of Coppola, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Demme, Hellman and Dante.

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