B008J4PNHE EBOK Read Free

certain cachet, primarily among B-movie superdorks. (It was telling, Sam felt, that along with their enthusiasm for Booth Dolan, this breed of cinephile could be relied upon to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the monsters that had fought Godzilla, Ed Wood, and women-in-prison films.)
    Booth had parlayed the minor triumph of New Roman Empire and his performance as the charlatan Dr. Law into a career spent mugging and shouting in the lowest category of B-movies. His particular, gassy flair had spiced clunkers from virtually every genre with bathos: horror, western, blaxploitation, sexploitation, sci-fi, fantasy, animation, and any combination thereof. A daylong retrospective could begin with the Nixon-era paranoia of New Roman Empire (1971); continue on to Black Soul Riders (1972), in which Booth played a racist judge named George Washington Cream and adopted a chicken-fried Southern accent to say things like “Wuhl yer an awl-ful buh-lack wan, ain’cha?”; followed by Rat Fiend! (1975), infamous for its utilization of miniature sets in order to make normal rats look gigantic, and featuring Booth’s performance as a grizzled “sewer captain” with a “sword plunger”; going next to Hard Mommies (1976), wherein Booth’s car-wash mafia messes with the wrong group of PTA moms in belly-baring tank tops; and, as the main feature, Devil of the Acropolis (1977), arguably the crowning example of Sam’s father’s artistic offenses, for his portrayal of Plato as an expert in werewolf behavior (as well as a howling example of Hollywood’s regard for historical accuracy: Plato is killed by the werewolf in the second act); then put a bow on the day with the first episode in the Hellhole trilogy (1983), the title of which said everything a person needed to know, except maybe that Booth’s character, Professor Graham Hawking Gould, was a “satanologist.”
    Even such a condensed list of Booth Dolan’s inanities threatened his son with the promise of a crushing migraine. The idea of an expanded two-day retrospective, meanwhile—including such milestones as his father’s voice-over turn as Dog, an all-knowing talking cloud, in what had to be the nadir of druggy cinema, Buffalo Roam, about a Nam vet leading a white buffalo to the Pacific Ocean; as well as Booth’s role as a lovable ass-squeezing brothel owner and leader of cowboy prostitutes in Alamo II: Return to the Alamo—Daughters of Texas —held lethal implications. Sam would rather have killed himself or someone else—Booth, hopefully—than suffer through such a sentence.
    While the old man’s star, such as it ever was, had faded in the late eighties before pretty much winking out completely in the nineties (along with the majority of the B-movie production houses), the earlier films in particular continued to play on cable. To this day, on the highest movie channels, the ones that are all gore and tits and robots, a black-haired Booth can still be found battling evil with a plunger.
     ■ ■ ■ 
    The acorn of Tom Ritts’s mansion was a four-room Sears kit house that dated from the fifties. Since the contractor had purchased it in the eighties, he had expanded it, horizontally and vertically, by a room or two every year, and now it had more rooms than anyone cared to count. Tom’s ability to build, indeed, had outpaced his wherewithal to furnish. Only a potted plant or a single folding chair occupied the newest six or seven rooms. Bats and squirrels had a knack for getting trapped in the less trafficked wings of the mansion, where they expired of thirst or starvation, to be discovered as webby, desiccated corpses months later. From the exterior, the building looked like something that a very intelligent and precise twelve-year-old might have built from LEGOS. It was a grandiose hobby for such a humble-seeming man. (“None of the choices on pay-per-view sound very interesting, and the next thing I know, I’ve got my measuring tape out and some drafting