Our reviews are conducted by a group of industry professionals: People who demonstrate magic, watch magic, and sell magic.
A beautiful travel magazine which is, in fact, the Swiss Army Knife of mentalism effects. Woven into the pages of the magazine are 10 intriguing mentalism and perceptual effects.
Unseen Force Pro is the latest system to improve your thread work, and TCC has done a remarkable job with this gimmick.
A page is freely chosen from a book. A sharp knife stabs the book. The knife is pulled straight down, cutting through every single page, except one!! Impossibly, the page your audience thought of is clearly seen impaled on the knife!
Two cards are fused into one card that is not simply card-shaped, but slightly off-set, as if the cards are in a spread, creating an impossible magic moment.
Rubén Vilagrand’s Unplugged XLR is an excellent take on the Walking Knot premise explored by Pavel and Paul Curry, but using an XLR cord.
The idea of having a piece of rope lasso a selected card has been around for many years, but this is a really nice updated handling and gimmick from Rubén Vilagrand.
This is a classic Scotch and Soda set, but made with keys. There have been many other nesting key effects in the last few years, including some released after Scotch and Whiskey, but Hanson Chien really seems to have produced the most realistic-looking key.
In Henry Harrius’ Refilled, the magician places an empty glass beer bottle into a paper bag and goes through the usual jokes of making it “disappear” and “come back” by turning the bag upside down and holding the bottle through the paper.
Babu is a nest of wallets effect from Ari Phillips, produced by Grum Leather Crafts. The method is basically the same as the early ones, including Nicholas Einhorn’s, but it has Velcro loading from the side, so the spectator can open the wallets freely, which is great.
Rubén Villagrand’s salt pour gimmick brings a great deal of R&D to a classic stage and platform effect.
This is a well-made gag which uses yet another property of the cell phone (zooming into a portion of a photograph) to create a visual surprise on a box of playing cards.
You may well wonder what sort of enhancement to “watch me pull my finger off” is waiting for you inside of the neat red box from Penguin Magic. Or indeed, whether “watch me pull my finger off” has been waiting for $25 of improvement.