He Didn’t Say That, I Did – Noir Goddess: Ida Lupino by Kate Laity

Noir fans know what the rest of the world needs to learn: Ida Lupino rules. The goddess of the genre had an all-purpose muse. She started out acting and then turned to directing, seeking more control over her life and her stories. In the minority of women directors (an absence continuing unaddressed: despite periodic ‘year of the woman’ claims in Hollywood, the boys

I Didn’t Say That, Did I? Bulman the Bulldog.

By Paul D Brazill

One of British television’s great creations, George Bulman first appeared on the small screen in 1976, in Granada Television’s hard edged crime series, The XYY Man, based on the books by Kenneth Royce. The XYY Man in question was a cat burglar called Spider Scott who was trying to go straight but regularly ended up getting caught in the MI5’s grubby web.

BLUE HIGHWAYS: Evening with a Junkie by robinpostell

“What happened to your arm?” I ask. He mutters something indecipherable. I don’t bug him about it. A big bump on his forearm where he missed his mark, too lazy to belt it up, I reckon.

“What’d you do last night?” I ask.

“Methadone,” he says, “And cocaine.”

Abide With Me by Ian Ayris – Review & Interview by Jason Michel

Let me cut straight to the chase.

I am not, nor ever have been a fan of the “beautiful game”. I was never born into a football family. My old man’s thing was religion not sport. So,

I Didn’t Say That, Did I?: Gangsters by Paul Brazill

The seventies was a time when music and film were doing some pretty groundbreaking and experimental stuff and, in the UK at least, so was TV.

Heroes by B.R. Stateham

Heroes.

We all need them. In a world filled with bad guys, bad times, and bad memories, heroes are the one set of safety pins that keep us all from going irretrievably insane.

 

Writers Interview: Julia Madeleine by Paul D. Brazill

On the west side of Toronto there’s a little town of about 600,000 called Mississauga. That’s where Julia Madeleine lives and works and writes nasty little tales of mayhem and suspense.  She’s also a tattoo artist and runs a shop with her husband. You can check out her artwork at www.malefictattoos.com. 

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Taxicab Confessions by Emmett Sudsbury

Driving a cab teaches you to cultivate your inner asshole. Especially at night. I drove a taxi for the Prometheus Cab Co. for four years in Fayetteville. Despite uneven pay it remains one of the best jobs I ever had. I quit when I got engaged to a tall blonde Texan party girl I’d known and chased for years at that point, who was stuck in a halfway house in Tulsa and said she wanted to move to a place where she could kick back and play her guitar. I suggested Eureka Springs and she said yes, so I quit the job and moved.

I Didn’t Say That, Did I? Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke

By Paul D Brazill

Billy Karlsson is a disgruntled hospital porter; an urban Raskolinikov; an existentialist powder keg waiting to explode. An angry young man who has hatched a plan to blow up a hospital in order to vent his revenge on the world. But there are one or two obsticles in his way, the biggest being that he isn’t real. Karlsson is, in fact, a charcter in a long-shelved, unfinished, black novel by writer Declan Burke.

Charlie Sheen, Troll Avenger and Earth Savior, 2027 (An excerpt from a longer work of fiction)

THE FOLLOWING IS FROM THE BOOK CHARLIE SHEEN, TROLL AVENGER, by Matt Dukes Jordan with art by various artists including the author. It will be released as an eBook in June, 2011 (soon). It contains essays on the rise of Trolls, Sheen’s life story, his celebrity, and much more, including a long excerpt from a science-fiction novel about Sheen. Here is a short excerpt.

Talking Smitty! – P D Brazill talks to B R Stateham

B.R. writes like a shadowy back alley. He nails his words to the page with a sledgehammer.
& as for Smitty, well, Smitty damn well smoulders in his stories. Dark eyes & an even darker heart. If your stairs creak at night just hope it ain’t Smitty.

P D B recently chewed the literary fat with him.

PDB: Your character Smitty has really captured people’s dark imagination. How did he come about?

I Didn’t Say That, Did I? – Bite Sized Horror edited by Johnny Mains

By Paul D Brazill.

Fancy a drink? Maybe a snifter or two of Bite Sized Horror, the lethal literary cocktail concocted by Johnny Mains, the man behind the resurrection of The Pan Book Of Horror Stories?

Take a look at these intoxicating ingredients:

Morning 40 Federation, a short film by Kristin Fouquet

For those not in the know, what is generally called a 40 in The States is a 40-ounce malt liquor beverage with high alcohol content. They are usually very inexpensive and consumed for their potency rather than their flavor. 40s are available in nearly all convenience and grocery stores in New Orleans and can be consumed on the street any time of

I Didn’t Say That, Did I ?: Josh Stallings Goes Up To Eleven! He really, really does!

By Paul D Brazill

This what his bio says:

‘Josh Stallings is your average ex-criminal, ex-taxi driver, ex-club bouncer, film making, script writing, movie

Groovy Surrealism in Film, Alternative Films, and the Challenge of Viewer Attention by Matt Dukes Jordan

A LONG PREFACE

The following exploration of surrealism in film and alternative films began with my desire to write about a weirdly appealing film by Alejandro Jodorowsky called Fando y Lis. That film caused a riot when it was first shown at a film festival in Mexico. Jodorwsky claims that he barely escaped the festival alive. The audience was furious. Enraged. VIOLENT!

I love the film. I feel affection for it, and have no desire to attack Jodorowsky.

I LIKE Jodorowsky, who I watched in interviews and other DVD extras. The extras accompanying one film even showed him leading a weekly human-potential seminar/encounter group that he does in Paris. He’s very appealing and charismatic.

Molotov’s for Humpty Dumpty by Aaron Philip Clark

Recently I came across a novel by Marc Blatte entitled, Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed. After hearing the author discuss his book on NPR’s (National Public Radio) Weekend Edition radio show a while back, I decided to investigate the novel for myself. A rather catchy title, Blatte’s novel had been categorized as “Hip-Hop Noir.” Yet, what I imagined “Hip-Hop Noir” to be was not quite Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed, instead I found his novel to be a kind of farce, in which the characters were more like amalgamations of every urban stereotype imaginable. They were like crude drawings, stick figures that lacked depth and soul. Blatte used terms like “ghetto thug” and “punk-ass” in descriptions and dialogue in an effort to add authenticity to the fictional landscape, but it only overpowered the rather middling prose.