Those video guides and their tantalizing capsule reviews were the gateway drug that led me to more detailed books like Danny Peary's Cult Movies and J. In this increasingly now-focused, new-focused world of ours, how will marginal motion pictures of the past reach contemporary audiences? I wonder, and I worry. In retrospect, movie review guides and video stores were the basis of my cinematic education, the closest I ever got to attending film school. Nothing by Ed Wood, sorry to say, but that's where I scored my first copies of Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise and George Romero's Martin. I probably still have some VHS tapes and even laserdiscs from those sales. I can remember repeatedly renting Two Thousand Maniacs and Shock Treatment from there. Their annual tent sale, in which they unloaded unwanted inventory, was a major event that would attract film fanatics by the hundreds to the parking lot of the South Flint Plaza, a shopping center that was becoming dangerous by the late 1980s and early 1990s. When I was in high school, we had a great chain of movie rental places in the Flint area called Michigan Video. Personally, I'm sorry that future generations of film geeks won't have the opportunity to spend hours thumbing through these review guides and finding, often by chance, oddball movies that will change the course of their lives.Īlso now judged "obsolete," video stores were good for that, too, in the pre-Internet days. Both, the experts tell us, were doomed by the Internet. Sadly, the Martin/Porter series bit the dust in 2006, and Maltin's seemingly deathless guidebook will go the way of all flesh in 2015. I first spotted Waters' and Wood's names, along with those of outre filmmakers like David Lynch, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and Russ Meyer, in chunky but cheap paperback books like the annually-updated Video Movie Guide (later the DVD & Video Guide) by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter and Leonard Maltin's hearty perennial TV Movies and Video Guide (later just Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide). In fact, I probably found out about Waters at the same time as I found out about Ed Wood and in the same basic manner, too. O ne of the first directors with whom I ever became truly obsessed was Baltimore satirist and provocateur John Waters, creator of Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, Polyester, and more. The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste by Jane and Michael Stern
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