Blame the Book!

In order to cleanse my palate of the vile s. Darko, let's switch to more pleasant subjects.

One of the questions I get more often than anything else is "where the hell do you find these movies?"

The answer is in this book:


I may do a boatload of internet surfing in order to locate the new, obscure, or bizarre, but without Mick Martin and Marsha Porter's Video Movie Guide, I would never have begun the journey into cinphelia. I'm pretty sure I just made that word up, and it still sounds kind of pervy. Oh well, back to business.

The Cap'n decided it would be okay to share his trade secret with you, as having one of these bad boys in your house is guaranteed to help a young movie fan expand their knowledge of all kinds of movies. What I loved about these books (and at one time my family had every one of them from 1984-1993) was the way you could flip to any page and find at least one movie you'd never heard of. For example:


Within the guide was everything you needed to know about the title, from length, why it merited its rating, and that handy reviewing fashion: Five Stars to Turkey. And it didn't just say "Turkey", you got this:


Here are some more actual reviews, including one I excerpted a few weeks ago, but in order to prove the movie really existed in a published book:




I scanned a few of the titles so that you could get an idea of how the book operates, and while I would have loved to include more (like Quest for Fire, Polyester, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, Munchies, The Hills Have Eyes) that caught my attention as a youngster, the size of the book makes it difficult. Click on the photo below for two pages worth of quality obscura, including The Driller Killer, Equinox, Eaten Alive, Drive-In Massacre, Eegah, Duel, and Eraserhead.


Also handy is that for much of the run of these books (and they're about as thick as paperbacks of The Stand at 1580 pages) included cross listings of Every movie a particular star was in or a director's filmography so you could go looking for more titles. They also have an index of every single movie in the back with the corresponding page.

I'd forgotten about this but even though the book is a steal at 7.95, the particular copy I have came free with a membership to Carbonated Video, a long gone and much missed local video store from my youth. Without the guide, I might have overlooked movies based on lackluster VHS covers or simply not knowing where to find them in the store. It continues to be useful, even 19 years out of date.

Shilling isn't often my forte, but this book is essential for any cinephile's library. I can't imagine these books are hard to find, and while Martin and Porter continue to publish them (as Video and DVD Guide I believe), I highly recommend scouring used book stores for the tomes from the 1980s. In the early days of VHS, they had less titles to include, so the reviews were longer. After 1990, they began editing down some of the "Turkey" reviews, including many of the Friday the 13th sequels. It's not to say they aren't still good, but you can get more quality and more obscurity the earlier you go.

Blogorium readers, if you want to get an inside track on how the Cap'n explores the dark, dusty corners of cinema, this is a good start.