Film critic/author Kim Newman (you know him, he looks as if he’s tumbled through Time from the late 19th century) has been reviewing genre movies in a popular British film magazine (something called Empire if you must know) in his Video Dungeon column since 2000. This chunky, 500-page paperback sweeps up the very best and most eclectic of Newman’s often-brief reviews from right across the cinematic spectrum – found footage movies, serial killers and cops, Frankenstein and Dracula and a category tortuously described as “confinement and dangerous games – tied up in the basement or hunted through the woods.” Gotta love how that one just trips off the tongue…
This collection is most definitely not designed for cover-to-cover digestion; it’s very much one to be taken down from the shelf and flicked through for a few minutes now and again if only because critiques of found footage and confinement movies can’t help but run into one another into a scrappy blur of terribly samey, underfunded, chaotically-acted melodramas with a shelf life which pretty much began and ended in the column they were originally reviewed in. Other chapters are meatier fare; Cryptids and Critters catalogues movies featuring a variety of Yeti, Bigfoots, Mer-creatures and lycanthropes (Mexican Werewolf in Texas, anyone?) and Famous Monsters is endlessly enlightening as it reminds us just how enduringly popular Victor Von Frankenstein’s creation and Bram Stoker’s monstrous bloodsucking Count have been across the decades. But Newman doesn’t sink his fangs into the well-critiqued Universal and Hammer classics; here you’ll find pithy, snappy reviews of the likes of 2000’s Boltneck (sometimes known as Big Monster on Campus), Deafula (1975) and 1998’s tawdry Die Hard Dracula – “amongst the shoddiest Dracula movies ever made…look and sounds like shot-on-video porn.” Hmmm; might be worth checking out…
Elsewhere, in a book boasting over 500 punchy reviews, Newman delves deep into the world of obscure crime, adventure and “weird hippie shit” movies and yet still finds time to cast an eye over more recent titles such as The Shallows, The Love Witch and the risible The Gallows. But the emphasis is, as it probably should be, on forgotten treasures and terrors, obscurities and embarrassments from cinema’s darkest corners and Newman dissects (and occasionally reassembles) them with a matter-of-fact assuredness leavened with some occasionally coruscating putdowns. You might be tempted to track down some of the titles Newman has unearthed here but you’ll almost certainly find yourself warned off the horrors of the increasingly-inane Sharknado series and films boasting titles such as Sasquatch Mountain, Dracula Sucks and Day the Fish Came Out. We can, however, only imagine that Mr Newman was having a bit of a bad day when he took the hatchet to the timeless Chitty Chitty Bang Bang declaring that “it’s a toss-up as to whether Doctor Doolittle is worse.” Shame on you, Mr Newman…
KIM NEWMAN’S VIDEO DUNGEON – THE COLLECTED REVIEWS / AUTHOR: KIM NEWMAN / PUBLISHER: TITAN BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
