Shrinker

Andrew Mayne is one of those magicians that either gives you a brilliant effect, or gives you one so bad it makes you cringe. Unfortunately, "Shrinker" is the latter. To say that this effect is not "real world" would be an understatement.

Let me put it this way: there is no way on Earth to do this effect in any environment other than stage, and it would have to be the only effect you did before walking off. I'm not saying it's your closer, I'm saying this effect can't be preceded or followed by anything.

I can't reveal why without giving away the secret behind it, but suffice it to say the things you wear are crucial to making this work. Unfortunately, the things you are wearing will look as unnatural as humanly possible. Even rappers don't have that much slack in their droopy pants. Add to that the "thing" that makes the effect possible and you now lose the ability to bend forward more than a few inches. This is not something you'd keep on for your whole act.

The only nice part of this effect is a part where he comes out of a small cardboard box and proceeds to grow. That looks good. Everything else in here is great in theory, but pretty much useless in practice. The angles are so wide on this you almost have to be dead-on to the person you're performing it for. He puts together a routine where you use an umbrella to cover the angles and says you can do it surrounded. You can't. People behind the umbrella wouldn't know what they were seeing, and it's not hard to figure out what's going on.

For the price, this is a horrible effect. I could see possibly $50 (and even then it's overpriced), but $149 is far too much for what you end up with. Even though he's throwing in an "impromptu" shrinking you can do as you walk away from a person (it wouldn't fool a first-grader, by the way), it's over-priced.

Andrew puts together some great stuff, and I'll be reviewing a lot of it in the future, but this is just not a good effect.