Thirteen shameless defenders wallow in the cheese of 14 shameless films, including The Tingler, Dune and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Film history, director interviews and volumes of insider film facts help weave these amusing tales of cinema’s classic clinkers. Maniac, in which a madman eats out the eye of a cat, is defended as “a satisfying reprieve from the carefully paced, well behaved, overscripted mainstream pictures that dominate the history of the cinema.” Voodoo Man “succeeds in creating a fun world that weds the ridiculous with a genuinely important scene in the Lugosi canon.” Dino DeLaurentiis’ King Kong is called “movie magic at its thrilling best.” On Indestructible Man, Lon Chaney’s drunken tour de force, well, “you just have to love this film.” And Rodan is proved to rank “with Godzilla and The Mysterians as one of Toho’s top three science fiction films.“ Consider the film’s moving “Eulogy for Two Dying Monsters,” dubbed in by Key Luke as the monsters are brought down by a volcano: “As Kyo turned to weep on my shoulder, I realized that the Rodans were doomed. The heat, the gases, the bombardment added to their bewilderment. Like moths in those rivers of fire, they seemed to almost welcome the agonies of death. And when, still calling to each other, one of them fell at last into the molten lava stream, the other still refused to save itself. The last of their kind, masters of the air and Earth, the strongest, swiftest creatures that ever breathed—now they sank against the Earth like weary children. Each had refused to live without the other, and so they were dying together. I wondered whether I, a 20th-century man, could ever hope to die as well.”
GR
Publisher: Midnight Marquee
Paperback: 251 pages
Illustrated
