Now Blood Moon Productions has given us a third volume, Hollywood Babylon - It’s Back! by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince. And they tantalisingly threaten further books as this one is labelled ‘Volume #1’. The edition has been slammed by critics for its mistakes – the authors state they were told Nick Adams was giving Elvis a blow job as he watched the moon landings – only if Elvis was into necrophilia as Nick had died the year before. And speaking of necrophilia, the authors tell a wonderfully bizarre story about a group of gay necrophiliacs ‘kidnapping’ the body of Judy Garland to pay their respects by masturbating over her corpse. There are also a few mistakes in editing, there’s repetition (it’s like the chapters were written over time by different people with scant regard for what has been said previously), and a couple of captions are wrong. Who cares! Critics of the books are now treating the original HB books as if they were great literature instead of the lurid error-ridden trash they were.

Okay, this book has miniscule reproduction of the dick shots and is preoccupied with celebrity cock size to the extent that even I wished they’d move on. Its lay-out is irritating although I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they wanted the pages to be as jumbled and erratic as old scandal sheets such as Confidential. But in the end it’s the salacious revelations that appeal. In this technological age a lot of the material is available on the net but if you want that material collated for you with the added appeal of some first-hand ‘beanspilling’ from co-author Darwin Porter, who seems to have been Johnny-on-the-spot in a lucky number of occasions, then this book is for you!

It’s the more outrageous ‘accusations’ that linger in the mind: that James Dean was having it off with a 12-year-old boy, Cary Grant was fucking his step-son, Bette Davis killed her second husband when she caught him in bed with Ann Sheridan, Nick Adams was murdered because he was writing a tell-all autobiography, Errol Flynn raped his son Sean, Marcello Mastroianni was regularly blown by Pope Paul VI, Elvis not only was bisexual but was also screwing his mom, Lucille Ball was a hooker, and (sadly) Tony Randall was a self-loathing ‘faggot’. I particularly like the tongue-firmly-in-cheek chapters on Tom Cruise and the implied relationship between Mathew McConnaughey and Tour de France cyclist Lance Armstrong.

Some of the chapters are puerile. The one about Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe’s nude appearance on stage in Equus, and the story of Ivor Novello and Winston Churchill has been regurgitated so many times it’s old news. But, as the book’s cover trumpets: Hot, Unauthorized, and Unapologetic! All Those Celebrities! All Those Scandals! All That Nudity! … and All That Sin!

I can hardly wait for Volume #2.

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