SPINEGRINDER by CLIVE DAVIES (2015)

 



First video, and more recently, the internet, with its streaming videos and not strictly legal peer-to-peer capabilities. With so many sources available, today’s fan of horror and exploitation movies isn’t necessarily educated on paths well-trodden, such as Universal and Hammer.  They may not even be born and bred on Dawn of the Dead.  Anyone with a bit of technical savvy (quickly becoming second nature for the born-clicking generation) may be viewing Mystics in Bali and S.S. Experiment Camp long before ever hearing of Bela Lugosi or watching a movie directed by Dario Argento.

Spinegrinder is one man’s ambitious, exhaustive and utterly obsessive (1,100 pages!) attempt to make sense of over a century of exploitation and cult cinema, of a sort that most critics won’t care to write about. One opinion; 8,000 reviews (or thereabouts).

And when you stop and think about it, this compendium is rather astonishing.  In fact, when duly considered, the amount of work that has gone into watching, annotating, and cross-referencing all these films, is a bit mind-blowing, really.  Moreover, the reviews are written from one person's perspective and not by a couple dozen of who's who, and who's not, from the underground demimonde of soi disant trash film scholars and critics.  What this means, in plain English, is that you can weigh your own preferences against the voice of one obsessed, (and, thankfully, thoughtful individual.  Which is what drew us to Michael Weldon and his Psychotronic in the first place.  One man, one man alone, with an absolutely ridiculous, possibly psychotic need (psychotic, psychotronic, what's the dif?) to view and comment upon every exploitation, horror, sci-fi, film noir and cinematic oddity ever lensed!  This need Clive Davies shares.  Whereas the good Mr. Weldon often appeared to be overwhelmed by his mission, and thus his reviews became, over time, little more than a brief summation of the plot and a list of the principal players; Clive Davies appears to be a bit more level-headed in following so hard upon the founder of Psychotronic.   That is to say, he wants to entertain as well as to inform.  You get the gist and the lowdown.  The import and the effectiveness.  Often in just a couple of lines.

So, if you want to watch something likely to change your life, or just give you a few laughs (or jolts), buy the book.   You can pick a page almost at random and find some strange oddity to wile away your time  (Yes, yes, yes, mainstream films are included, psychotronic admits commercial successes.)   And, hey kids, no more laboriously sifting through endless online scene-by-scene narrative rehashes posing as reviews, as Mr. Davies wastes little of your time getting to the meat of the matter (or lack thereof).  


Thanks to Headpress for the two introductory paragraphs and the research of Mr. Prettycrab on Amazon.com

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