Meet my movie bible
1 comment November 5th, 2008
A while ago, I wrote about some of my favorite movie books — but I forgot to mention the single book that, more than anything else, shaped my tastes in film: Michael J. Weldon’s classic volumne on cult movies, THE PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM.
Thankfully, Rob Gonsalves didn’t forget, and he posted a nice write-up of this seminal volume here. As he says…
“Other movie books handled the mainstream stuff, the Mighty Films of Cinema, the ones you felt duty-bound to watch at least once. Weldon, with the help of Ballantine Books, legitimized the low, the weird, the obscure, the greasers and sluts and punks of celluloid. He made it okay for budding movie buffs to bundle in some Eurotrash sexploitation and teenagers-with-mutations flicks along with our Kurosawa and Bergman.”
I remember buying this one as a college freshman, way back in 1985, and actually felt a bit weird about doing so. Did I really want a volume extolling the virtues of INVASION OF THE BLOOD FARMERS and A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD sitting on my bookshelf, so close to my pure-hearted copy of LEONARD MALTIN’S VIDEO GUIDE?
Yes, it turns out I did. Because without Weldon’s book, I never would’ve heard of most of the great, offbeat movies that frankly, make it worthwhile to be a die-hard movie fan. I never would’ve gone to all those midnight movies in college, and I never would’ve collected hundreds of videotapes (followed, of course, by hundreds of DVDs). I probably never would’ve started writing my own video reviews at his paper back in the mid 1990s, which means I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog right now.
Weldon’s book (and its even-bigger follow-up, THE PSYCHOTRONIC VIDEO GUIDE) embrace all movies, from forgotten silents to modern straight-to-video shockers. Sure, he loves weird movies, but above all, Weldon loves movies — and that’s apparent on every page. If you’ve never seen THE PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM, I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy. It just might change your life.
Heck, it sure changed mine.
