Celluloid Atrocities | 09.06

Unless you have killed a lot of time reading reviews, movie guides can be a difficult field to navigate.

This time each year finds the new editions of the movies guides coming out. Unless you have killed a lot of time reading reviews in all of them, this can be a difficult field to navigate. Of course, the best method for finding a movie guide that suits your taste is to read the reviews of two or three films that you feel strongly about, and then buy the guide that passes your test as closely as possible.

Of the big, 1,500-plus–page guides that try to cover every major release, the best option is VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever (Thomson Gale, $24.95), which is more a tome than a guide, as it is considerably physically larger than the Leonard Maltin guide (Signet, $8.99) or Mick Martin and Marsha Porter’s DVD & Video Guide (Ballantine Books, $7.99). While the Hound’s reviews are better than Maltin’s or Martin’s, they still leave something to be desired. The real draw here, though, is the nine handy indexes (ranging from fairly thorough filmographies of actors to obscure lists of alternate titles for the films contained therein), which serve as a no-Internet-required Internet Movie Database that is only slightly out of date. Second to VideoHound is the aforementioned Martin, a kind of unassuming and generic guide. The guide to avoid is also one of the best-selling ones, Maltin’s firelog of stupidity and boredom. Aside from Maltin’s irrelevant and poorly argued reviews, you should be able to tell what type of audience the guide caters to by the fact that its entirety is alphabetized incorrectly—as if films had no punctuations or spaces in the titles (for example, Total Recall comes before To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar). If Maltin’s readers have trouble grasping the basic tenets of alphabetization, how are they supposed to appreciate the subtleties of, say, Turkish Delight?

Perhaps better suited to your tastes are the more specific guides, ones that don’t attempt to review every single film. Pretty much everyone in America is a sucker for “best of” lists; personally, I quite like The New York Times Guide to the Greatest 1,000 Movies Ever Made (Three Rivers Press, $25), which reprints the full original Times reviews of all of the films included in the book, as well as the out-of-print Entertainment Weekly–produced guide, The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time (Entertainment Weekly Books). While not list oriented, also handy are the annual Roger Ebert books (Andrews McMeel Publishing, $22.95), which compile all of the films reviews he wrote in the calendar year on the front of the book. With regards to genre, again VideoHound has a nice assortment of guides, my favorite of which is, of course, their Cult Flicks and Trash Pics (Visible Ink Press, $24.95), although I much prefer the first edition to the currently available (and largely rewritten) second edition. But here VideoHound has much more competition than it does in the field of generic, all-encompassing guides; the best guides on the market right now are specific to cult films.

The standard for cult film guides was set high and early by the three volumes of Danny Peary’s Cult Movies (volumes one and two were published by Delta, three was handled by Fireside, and all of them are long out of print), released in 1981, 1983, and 1988, respectively. A guide that nicely blurs the line between a cult film guide and a regular film guide is The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide (Sasquatch Books, $21.95), which debuted two years ago. The guide is an odd smattering of extremely obscure films direct from Scarecrow Video in Seattle, often named as the best video store in America. The reviews contained therein are especially nice when compared to the clinical synopses seen in the more mainstream guides (for an example of the type of opinions on display here, Scarecrow asserts that showing children the live-action, Mike Myers vehicle The Cat in the Hat will do more harm to them than any porn could), and it is useful for its coverage of films that have never been (legally) released on home video in America.

However, the new gold standard for cult movie guides—or movie guides in general, for that matter—comes from DVD Delirium, which just released an update of its previous guide, now called DVD Delirium Volume 1Redux: The International Guide to Weird and Wonderful Films on DVD (Fab Press, $19.95). Whereas the best and most satisfying reviews in any other guide are the full reviews reprinted in the Ebert and New York Times guides, DVD Delirium takes it one step further: Not only do they review the film in a general sense, but they also compare picture and sound quality of nearly all of the world’s releases of a given film—for example, they’ll contrast American VHS, American DVD, British DVD, Italian DVD, and Japan laserdisc releases—so that you know where to go for the best quality transfer. (They also know their stuff when it comes to letterboxing, black levels, and sound mixes.) On top of this, the special features are usually full-on reviewed—for example, they’ll tell you which deleted scenes are worth watching and which aren’t. Even more mind-boggling is that all of this information is presented articulately and concisely, such that it never seems overwhelming. In fact, the whole thing is so incredibly good down to the last detail, I actually found myself looking for flaws, just to prove that it was a human endeavor in the first place. Strangely common typographical errors aside, the only real quibble comes from general confusion about why some things were included while others were not (Cruel Intentions but no Salo? Shrek but no Barbed Wire Dolls? Flesh and Heat but no Trash?), but that’s always a problem that befalls genre guides. Until next year’s wave of guides, that is…