Clik here to view.
Reading Material: Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal
It’s hard to remember a time when Steven Seagal was actually cool. It was 1988, when nobody knew who he was, yet here he was, headlining a pretty good B-actioner called Above the Law. It heralded the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Dwarfsploitation
Immediately upon learning that Dwarfsploitation was, indeed, truly a book all about movies featuring midgets — pardon me, I mean “little people” — I thought that it had better discuss the seminal scene...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Reel Terror: The Scary, Bloody, Gory, Hundred-Year History...
One of the books I’ve looked forward to the most this year has been David Konow’s Reel Terror, a paperback original aiming to tell, as its subtitle promises, 100 years of horror-movie history. I cannot...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Do the Movies Have a Future?
Asks venerated critic David Denby in the ’78 Superman-styled title of his new book, Do the Movies Have a Future? (Spoiler alert: Yes. Yes, they certainly do.) Don’t be misled by the title, as this is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: The Music of James Bond
What makes Skyfall, the new James Bond film, all the more terrific is that its theme song is, too. That hasn’t happened in, what, decades? I’ve long thought that the 007 franchise producers have grown...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: If You Like Quentin Tarantino … Here Are Over 200 Films, TV...
Limelight Editions has put out half a dozen If You Like … pop-culture guidebooks over the last year, using everything from The Beatles to The Sopranos as jumping-off points for recommended media, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
I can’t remember the first time I heard of the boys who made a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I do remember thinking, “Cute, but what’s the point? Perhaps there’s more to the story.”...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide...
I’m not sure whether to be proud or ashamed that I’ve seen so many of the movies covered in Brian Albright’s Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990, a state-by-state reference guide to fright flicks made...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: 5001 Nights at the Movies
As it should, reading Brian Kellow’s recent bio of film critic Pauline Kael made me want to read more of her work. Making that conveniently possible is Picador’s reissue of Kael’s 1982 review...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Sexytime: The Post-Porn Rise of the Pornoisseur
Hard as it may be for you to believe from a guy who named a book-review site after an orgasm, I don’t watch porno movies. However, this dared not stop me from picking up Sexytime, which rounds up...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies: The First Wave, 1959-1969
Just because it’s currently cold outside doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy Hollywood Surf and Beach Movies: The First Wave. In fact, since Thomas Lisanti’s book is dedicated to the sunniest of cinematic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Gutter Auteur: The Films of Andy Milligan
Had I not just read Jimmy McDonough’s acclaimed 2001 bad-moviemaker bio, The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan, I would have found Rob Craig’s new book on the same...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Fatal Visions: The Wonder Years 1988-89
This very website serves as an extension for a DIY magazine I produced for a dozen years, beginning in 1993 around the height of zinedom. Titled Hitch: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Best Movie Scenes: 549 Memorable Bank Robberies, Car...
Man, oh, man, how I truly wanted to love — or even just like — Best Movie Scenes, because I find film-related lists a blast to read. One of my favorite parts of my recent Christmas-to-New-Year’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Remaking Horror: Hollywood’s New Reliance on Scares of Old
Somewhere before I’ve stated that I’m not automatically against horror remakes, because without them, we wouldn’t have such modern-day classics as John Carpenter’s The Thing or David Cronenberg’s The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Ticket Stub
Tim Hensley’s Ticket Stub is a collection of the cartoonist’s now-defunct zine, but that zine was really pages from his sketchbook. Don’t let that deter you in any way, however, because it has a theme...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Filmpocalypse!: 52 Cinematic Visions of the End
I know Brock Wilbur intended Filmpocalypse!: 52 Cinematic Visions of the End to be read before that whole Mayan day of doom of Dec. 21, 2012, approached, but to hell with that; I didn’t know the book...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock
My introduction to vaulted film critic André Bazin, co-founder of the influential and revolutionary Cahiers du Cinéma, arrived as yours should: via The Cinema of Cruelty, Arcade Publishing’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Fervid Filmmaking: 66 Cult Pictures of Vision, Verve and No...
To answer your first question: Fervid Filmmaking refers to those movies which author Mike Watt believes to contain everything but the kitchen sink, as if their creators threw in every element...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading Material: Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary...
A fine line exists between European arthouse films and European horror films, argues Ian Olney, and he makes a convincing case for it in Euro Horror, a paperback study for Indiana University Press. Of...
View Article
