IT’S ONLY A BOOK!

by Brian Thomas

Some say that the Psychotronic Film Society has gone to the dogs. Well nobody knows it better than me.

Years before I ever got so involved with this piece of trash (to avoid fainting, repeat: It’s only a cheap fanzine!), I began to correspond with Tim Lucas, who was just starting his terrific magazine Video Watchdog. Some say Tim’s mag is way too anal, what with every different version of every video getting timed and measured and compared. I say that somebody’s got to keep an eye on how our culture is handled, handing out cheers and jeers where appropriate – and we all know that "exploitation" and "genre" films are especially vulnerable to getting kicked around by uncaring distributors, producers, censors, etc. I sometimes wonder if Elite’s wonderful restoration of Night of the Living Dead, and all that have come after because of it, would have ever happened if it wasn’t for VW.

If you want to discover the looser side of Tim, or even if your just looking for a good read, then I highly recommend his novel Throat Sprockets, one of the best stories I’ve read in a decade or so. Though roughly written around the Watchdog theme – it’s about how a mysterious and bizarre grindhouse movie comes to radically change society, and one man in particular – Lucas manages to touch on and explore many commingling levels of human existence at once. And he actually managed to jolt me a few times – a difficult feat to accomplish with prose, and one that Dean Koontz couldn’t pull off with a hundred books.

It wasn’t long before I began to contribute reviews, articles, and illustrations to VW, and subsequently Tim asked me to illustrate The Video Watchdog Book. Which in turn helped me to get involved with Visible Ink’s VideoHound series of books. I’m sure I’ve plugged VideoHound’s Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics and Sci-Fi Experience so much in the past that you’ve all got multiple copies on your bookshelves by now nuzzled snugly next to Weldon’s Psychotronic Video Guide and ReSearch’s Incredibly Strange Films… You don’t?!? Stand by for more plugs.

Which leads me to the odd position I’m in now: recently a publicist sent me copies of the two latest VideoHound releases. I just want to make it plain that, though I have the inside scoop on these two books, I had nothing to do with writing them and did not request review copies. Thus I approach them with an informed objectivity. Maybe you think I’m being overly cautious, but Gene and Roger are always defending their integrity because Disney owns the Siskel and Ebert show.

I have a lot of conceptual bones to chew with Mike Mayo’s Video Premieres, which purports to cover over a thousand of "the best and worst in direct-to-video" features. I have no problem with the concept itself – although every other video guide includes straight-to-tape product, it’s not a bad idea to give these films a spotlight. Although there’s nothing all that unique or special about Mayo’s writing, he does a decent job of covering most films, and even points out some hidden treasures here and there. He even includes some good material in the sidebars (when he’s not wasting them with "favorites" lists) profiling different video store stars, and includes quotes from interviews he’s done over the years. What bothers me is his lack of consistency.

To start with, I counted at least 40 entries that I’d seen first in a theater. Mayo tries to give himself an out on this by including "limited releases", those films that only get "extremely brief runs". But who is to judge how "limited" the theatrical run has to be for inclusion? Many films are given a big release in foreign theaters before they even get to the US, but this doesn’t seem to matter either. If you’re going to include limited releases, then you should include absolutely anything from the Something Weird Video catalogue.

Mayo also includes films like Bladerunner, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Wild Bunch because they’ve been released in unrated and/or director’s cut versions on video, but I don’t buy that explanation either. Almost every presentation of a film is altered in some way – dolby stereo is recorded mono, or the image is cropped differently, or footage has been cut. And this kind of thing isn’t limited to video either. For example, try watching the same movie in a state-o’-the-art theater and then catch it again at your neighborhood dollar show a month later. This post-release malleability of the media is what started Video Watchdog – and THx encoding - in the first place.

But okay, let’s say I buy the inclusion of "limited" and "altered" releases – then what explains the entries here for films like Repo Man, The Magic Sword, or When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth? Nothing that I can think of. These are all films that received wide release in the United States and were released on video without any official alteration.

Here’s one theory: I could be wrong, but it may be that Mayo put together this book by simply piling up material from his video column in the Roanoke Times, and a few entries slipped through the cracks. The point is that there are a lot of entries here that probably should have been left out. There are plenty of films out there going direct-to-vid that Mayo could have included, - many of which were made by enterprising newcomers on bare-bones budgets in backyard studios, edited or even shot on video, and self-released or sold through small distribution labels like EI Independent Cinema or Cinema Home Video. You might say that covering these (mostly) mail order tapes doesn’t service the needs of the book’s target "Blockbuster night" audience – but then, I’m all in favor of shaking up things and broadening some horizons.

I can’t level the same criticism at VideoHound’s other new release, which is delightful from cover to cover. Written by J. Gordon Melton (with the assistance of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula), Vampires on Video doesn’t shy away from the obscure and doesn’t try to compromise for the sake of a mainstream audience. The idea behind the VideoHound Guide series is to cover video releases in a particular genre from the given subject’s viewpoint, and Melton, who also wrote Visible Ink’s The Vampire Book, certainly knows his subject well. Here you’ll find virtually everything on video having to do with vampires. Well, actually I didn’t see David the Rock Nelson’s Vampire Woman in there, but there’s a Chinese movie with the same title. Melton also has entries for vampire movies from Romania, Korea, India, Malaysia, the Philippines – and anywhere else they make vampire movies. He doesn’t give a damn whether you can find ‘em in your local rental outlet – the book is about vampires on video and that’s just what it covers. There’s also a rich assortment of sidebars covering everything from Theda Bara to Michelle Bauer to "Vampires for Children". Although some entries can be criticized for presenting little more than the film’s plot, and an occasional error can be found (the entry on Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein says that it shows Dracula dying when he’s "consumed by the first rays of the sun" (?)), most are given a brief but thorough appraisal and justly rated for vampire fans. There are so many books about vampires available in book stores that they should probably get their own section, but if you want to know about the video angle (and more), then this is the one you should get.