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Reading Material: VHS: Video Cover Art

Thomas Hodge’s VHS: Video Cover Art is hardly the only book to lovingly collect outré boxes from the dominant home-video format of the 1980s and ’90s, but it’s the first to feature this eyebrow-raiser...

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Reading Material: 5 Books to Dive into This June

Like fellow best-sellers-turned-films Catch-22 and The Stepford Wives, Peyton Place has entered pop culture in a way that its title has become a household term whose definition is known even to those...

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Reading Material: American Neo-Noir: The Movie Never Ends

Authors of more books on film noir than you have pairs of underwear, Alain Silver and James Ursini now turn their attention to American Neo-Noir in their latest trade-paperback collaboration for...

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Reading Material: We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future...

I can think of a few people who may hate reading Caseen Gaines’ history of the Back to the Future trilogy. These people are Eric Stoltz (fired from the lead role of Marty McFly after filming began),...

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Reading Material: 4 Books with Which You Can Declare Your Independence from...

Caseen Gaines’ We Don’t Need Roads isn’t the only current behind-the-scenes book on a hit comedy trilogy born in the 1980s. Jonathan Knight weighs in with The Making of Major League, and you can...

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Reading Material: Trash Cinema: A Celebration of Overlooked Masterpieces

Let’s not kid ourselves: In this age of Netflix algorithms and Amazon recommendations, who in the hell wants to consult a book — ewwwww! — for suggestions on movies to watch? You can’t see it, but my...

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Reading Material: August Means It’s Back to the Books

It’s a good thing that Edinburgh University Press has a paperback of Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom on the schedule, because the hardcover’s list price may put...

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Reading Material: The Best TV Shows That Never Were / Television Fast Forward...

About a decade ago, while folding laundry, I watched a fun primetime special about TV shows that, for one reason or another (but mostly because they were bad), never made it past the pilot stage. What...

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Reading Material: The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood

I thought that Rudolph Grey’s now-classic Nightmare of Ecstasy was the only book one needed to read about Ed Wood. I was wrong. Andrew J. Rausch and Charles E. Pratt have proven as much with The...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 10/11/15

With one of the ’90s’ most iconic television series just a few months away from returning to the tube, now’s the time for The X-Files FAQ. (The jury, however, is still out for that subtitle: All That’s...

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Reading Material: Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction...

Truth is, every hopeless film addict has a story like comedian/actor Patton Oswalt shares in Silver Screen Fiend. The difference is we’re not famous, so who wants to hear it? Okay, okay, so Oswalt’s...

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Reading Material: How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present,...

Think back to the beginning of summer 1999, when Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace was about to hit the American multiplex with the fervor of an Ebola outbreak: In just one of untold marketing...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 11/14/15 — The Accidental All-McFarland Edition

I knew that private dick John Shaft — as immortalized by Richard Roundtree in the 1971 blaxploitation classic — was a multimedia character; what I didn’t know was just how wide his net reached! Shut...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 11/21/15

Without question, the ideal gift book for genre film enthusiasts this holiday season is The Art of Horror: An Illustrated History, a beautiful book depicting ugly things. Edited by Stephen Jones, the...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 1/10/16

Like a less pretentious (and thereby more bearable) Chuck Klosterman, Ryan Britt mines pop culture for freakishly accessible essays — a full 14 of them soaked and sautéed in sci-fi for Luke Skywalker...

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Reading Material: Sharon Tate: A Life

Like its subject, Sharon Tate: A Life debuts with much promise before things go south. In Tate’s case, it wasn’t her fault; in counterculture icon Ed Sanders’ book, the fault is all his. Since the...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 2/7/16

Just a Hair shy of 800 pages, We Can Be Who We Are: Movie Musicals from the 1970’s is a brick. Available in hardback and paperback, the BearManor Media release by Lee Gambin is nothing if not a giant...

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Reading Material: Jaws 2: The Making of the Hollywood Sequel

Fervent fans of their subject, Louis R. Pisano and Michael A. Smith have joined forces to tell the story of Jaws 2: The Making of the Hollywood Sequel, published in both hardcover and paperback by...

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Reading Material: Movie Freak: My Life Watching Movies

For whatever reason, our nation’s finest film critics have been feeling very nostalgic of late, writing books that look back on their entire careers. In 2014, Kenneth Turan gave us Not to Be Missed:...

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Reading Material: Dirty Words and Filthy Pictures: Film and the First Amendment

Sex begins with a kiss, which must be why the 1896 featurette The John C. Rice-May Irwin Kiss — all 47 seconds of it — provoked such a uproar among a puritanical public. Distributed by Thomas Edison’s...

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Reading Material: Here’s to My Sweet Satan: How the Occult Haunted Music,...

One of my favorite books from last year, Spectacular Optical’s Satanic Panic, did a thorough job of looking at one 1980s trend as peculiar today as Jams and parachute pants: the widespread hysteria...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 4/3/16

Maybe it’s just me, but the title of Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! may serve as a warning, i.e. you could get so wrapped up as to lose all sense of time. That’s certainly not a stretch,...

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Reading Material: The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture

Shrewdly timed to the theatrical release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Glen Weldon’s The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture takes longer to consume, yet provides far more...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 5/1/2016

You kids have no idea how good you have it! Avengers fighting Avengers in an all-out superhero melee in Captain America: Civil War? The comics-obsessed, grade-schooler me would’ve cut a bitch to see...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 6/18/2016

As recent attacks in Paris have demonstrated, the City of Lights unwillingly can be at odds with its postcard-perfect image propagated by the tourism board. Terrorism aside, Alexandra West examines the...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 7/4/2016

More creatively satisfying than World Gone Wild, his 2014 survey of postapocalyptic films, David J. Moore’s The Good, the Tough & the Deadly: Action Movies & Stars 1960s-Present is in reach of...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 7/30/16

Curiously, two new books are about the idiosyncratic and ill-mannered German cult actor Klaus Kinski. The one to get is Klaus Kinski, Beast of Cinema: Critical Essays and Fellow Filmmaker Interviews,...

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Reading Material: It Came from the 80s!: Interviews with 124 Cult Filmmakers

As any child of the 1980s will tell you, the video store was an essential part of growing up. You discovered movies in a manner Netflix and other streaming services cannot replicate: by browsing boxes....

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Reading Material: Italian Horror Cinema

While regular visitors to this site would join me as disagreement, the very things that make horror films from Italy so distinctive — namely, unflinching violence, oft-excessive gore and heavily linked...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 9/21/16

One-night-only engagements and George Lucas tinkering notwithstanding, nowadays it pretty much takes the death of a beloved celebrity to get old movies back on the big screens of the multiplex; witness...

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Reading Material: Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen

It took one childhood viewing of William Shatner taking on a small town’s Kingdom of the Spiders to make me an instant, lifelong fan of the horror subgenre of animal-attack films. Widening the scope to...

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Reading Material: Die Hard: The Authorized Coloring and Activity Book

Methinks this coloring-book craze for adults has gotten way out of hand, and it was questionable to begin with. Now we have Die Hard: The Authorized Coloring and Activity Book welcoming itself to the...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 11/20/16

In Sinister Urge: The Life and Times of Rob Zombie, metal music bio specialist Joel McIver considers the career of the Renaissance man not content to constrain his talents to just one medium. If the...

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Reading Material: 15 Great Books About Bad Movies

After reading Michael Adams’ yearlong diary of bad-movie-watching, titled Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies, I found that I enjoyed it, but not quite enough to keep it for posterity’s sake. My...

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Reading Material: A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of...

Hands down and no question about it: For me, the entertainment book of 2016 is A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies. Written by Trapped Ashes...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 1/6/17

Now adults, the children of the 1980s clearly are nostalgic, judging from this past fall’s glut of books on that era’s teen movie. Hadley Freeman’s Life Moves Pretty Fast came first, followed closely...

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Reading Material: Mars in the Movies: A History

With movies, as with potential mates, everyone has a type toward which he or she instinctively gravitates. For me, it’s heists or spiders. For Thomas Kent Miller, it’s that angry red planet — a...

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Reading Material: Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page

Blair Davis’ Movie Comics: Page to Screen/Screen to Page was not quite the book to which I had been looking forward for the better part of 2016. Turns out, that’s a good thing — even a great one. While...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 2/5/17

David Thomson is one of our finest living writers, period. He just so happens to work in the field of film criticism, yet his prose sings as marvelously as any acclaimed work of fiction. Each book he...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 2/26/17 — Another Accidental All-McFarland Edition

Does the world need more than one book on the movies of Mamie Van Doren? Hell, no. But I sure do! With Joseph Fusco’s 2010 book already sitting on my shelf, now there’s Atomic Blonde: The Films of...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 3/19/17

Getting a nightly fix of The Twilight Zone in a syndicated run one summer in the 1980s, I was taught a couple of things: Rod Serling was a frickin’ genius, and not all black-and-white TV is boring....

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Reading Material: Short Ends 4/30/17

Jake Paltrow and Noah Baumbach’s 2016 documentary, De Palma, stands among my 10 favorite films of last year, with my only criticism being that it stops after 93 minutes. Anyone else who was left...

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Reading Material: ’80s Action Movies on the Cheap: 284 Low Budget, High...

A word of warning to those interested in the book ’80s Action Movies on the Cheap: 284 Low Budget, High Impact Pictures: “Cheap” is an adjective not used carelessly, so expect neither Stallone nor...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 5/21/17

I suspect I’m not the only one who, upon the death of Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert in 2013, bought his 2006 collection, Awake in the Dark, thinking it to be the definitive summation...

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Reading Material: Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The...

Entire books have been written about the revolutionary wave of American cinema in the 1970s — most notably Peter Biskind’s seminal Easy Riders, Raging Bulls — but New York-based journalist Charles...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 6/21/17

Similar in structure to fellow McFarland & Company releases Now a Terrifying Motion Picture! and Classic Horror Films and the Literature That Inspired Them, yet by a different author, Ron Miller’s...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 7/24/17

Fresh from editing last summer’s Klaus Kinski: Beast of Cinema book, Matthew Edwards follows up with another winner in McFarland & Company’s Twisted Visions: Interviews With Cult Horror Filmmakers....

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Reading Material: Lights, Camera, Game Over!: How Video Game Movies Get Made

As revenue generated from video games rivaled — and eventually eclipsed — that of motion pictures, Hollywood executives have been eager to reclaim some of those plunked quarters by adapting arcade and...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 9/17/17

Bart Beaty’s study of 1960s-era Archie Comics, Twelve-Cent Archie, came out two years ago, but with the squeaky-clean icons turned into the soapy hit TV series Riverdale, Rutgers University Press has...

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Reading Material: Short Ends 11/13/17

Two years ago, editor Stephen Jones delivered a coffee-table book for the ages with The Art of Horror, and now he and his gang of talented writers and artists are back for another go-round, this time...

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