Bill Montana Penguin Live Lecture

I knew of Bill Montana from the bizarre forums I frequent, I knew him to be a stand up guy, he's just given away so much good information there. His Dark History and Pitch Book Posts are must reads. And he gave me a copy of his spirit bell book for free just because I was curious. So I was surprised to see all the negative reviews on his lecture. I checked on the cafe for reviews and found it to be a bit more balanced, definitely seems a polarizing lecture, people either loved it or hated it. So with that in mind plus my personal knowledge of the man I decided to get this lecture.

After viewing I can see why so many people hated it, but in my opinion those people are idiots. I think the biggest problem for penguin's audience is the lack of a line of standard easy to reproduce effects. Not everything he does works perfectly but seeing as he aims to be real, that's the sort of thing you have to expect from real life. A lot of what he teaches lacks the ta-da moment of the sort of stuff we normally see from penguin. What it does have is the potential for a deeper connection and impact. Take his Pulse effect, where two or more peoples heartbeats synchronize. What's more personal than your heartbeat. Take the effect away from traditional performance venue and over into say a private reading. You do enough readings on readings and you'll see the idea of doing a little something before the reading to help get on the same mental page as the sitter and in less esoteric books it's often some simple mentalism trick. Instead use pulse and at the start tell them that you need to get lined up with them then after say "Two hearts beating in unison and where the body goes the mind follows."

The lecture also came with two PDF's, The Lotus Flower and Psychokinetic Plastic. Both are wonderful ideas that we get to see in use in the video.

Slate Killers by Bob Cassidy

I'll come right out and say that I don't think this was worth $20. I think you can tell Penguin thinks so too otherwise why tie on some unrelated info to the end, more on that later.

It opens with a performance, pretty strait forward. Bob opens on the history of the items as legit tools. Then he has a participant hold the slates while another person picks a word out of the dictionary. That takes the first 10 minutes out of 50.

Then cut to Bob alone at a table. He start by explaining how to justify the use of slates. Then he shows several ways to prove the slates blank and a few sample routines including how to to properly Hindu force. Here and there he sort of mentions other idea and methods without to much detail. Then he says his good byes and the screen goes black. This is at about thirty minutes. The last twenty minutes are about a threaded dictionary and a peek wallet.

It's good info but it could have been more rather easily. I think penguin realized that it was a little on the light side info wise for the price point or why add the threaded dictionary and wallet part. The threaded dictionary is a dictionary that lets you open it to the same place a participant did. Which in this context is kind of useless. Slates are not really a find out what the participant picked and mark it up that way kind of tool. It can be done and how to do it is sort of mentioned offhandedly but they definitely couldn't say they taught how to mark the slates after you know what spectator chose.

I think I would have appreciated him showing us how to make the slates, he just says to cut them out of DVD cases about playing card size. So making nice slates takes trial and error. His look really nice, the one's I've made so far are no where near as nice or as uniform. And so far I've ruined three cases. Just finding case that I could use was a pain. Most had that recycle symbol punched into them. I also would have like more info on handlings I thought of a few obvious options watching it that could have been added. I would also have like to see some info on presenting them as spirit contact tool seance style. You know actually delivering a message. The video really just shows them a reveal for standard mentalism.

If you found this review helpful or thought it sucked let me know in the comments.