Sinister Cinema/Armchair Classics

With Kevin's permission, I thought I'd share this with members of the forum. Doubless some of you already know about Sinister Cinema, the distributor of classic and nostalgia VHS and DVD videos of a huge variety of sf, horror, western, and many other genres from yesteryear. I just ordered a pair of films from the sixties/early seventies, "Island of the Damed" with Peter Cushing and "Warning from Space," a Japanese film about a starfish race of beings that try to rescue earth from a cosmic danger. Great stuff to watch while smoking your favorite tobacco with a tumbler of fine whiskey. But in recent years, SC has been publishing a series of great old double novels (with great original covers depicting marauding robots or tentacled monsters--usually with a naked woman stratigically enwrapped in their icky arms--called "Armchair Classics." These great old reprints are priced to sell at $12.95 and I guarantee you won't find them on Kindle, and are great companions for quiet evenings with the pipe. You can write them for their huge catalog at sinistercinema.com. If you're into the classic schlocky titles available way back, you won't be disappointed.

Great film and book. SC may well have it. Trivia note: Fail Safe was delayed from being released because it would have interferred with Dr. Strangelove, and the egotistical Stanley Kubrick, one of the most overblown director of the 20th century, didn't want the film to compete with his. I think it was a bloody shame, because Fail Safe was a genuine cautionary tale, whereas Strangelove was just a satire.

I wish Elvira's program was broadcasted here--I was in love with her. Does anyone remember Sir Graves Ghastly? He had a great show for years until he had to retire, and his fans kept writing him until he passed in his nineties. How I missed those shows! Friday nights used to be reserved for those great shows, keeping me up all night.

I'm waiting for my current order of Warning From Space and Island of the Damed, plus three Armchair Classics. (Island is unusual in that it features a character--Peter Cushing--who has his hand cut off, yet survives the film. There's an unspoken rule, now being disregarded more frequently, that a person who loses a limb dies off at the end. Kate Breckensale loses a couple of fingers to frostbite in Antarctica but survives in the little known film, Whiteout.)