Films Ex Libris: Literature in 16 Mm and Video Book

American International Pictures made some of the wildest of all movies - from the black and white juvenile delinquent and monster movies they churned out in the fifties through the grimy biker flicks, stylish Edgar Allen Poe adaptions and goofy beach party movies of the sixties and on through a myriad of genres in the seventies, eighties and beyond. With titles like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Invasion of the Saucer Men, X - The Man With the X-Ray Eyes, The Thing With Two Heads, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, The Mini-Skirt Mob and Blacula, these are films that show you don't need a lot of money to entertain an audience as long as you have imagination and a sense of humour.

Mark Thomas McGee provides an entertaining and informative account of how the magic happened. And the book also contains a useful filmography to aid you when you start obsessively hunting these films down.

I just wish I hadn't lent my copy to a friend. I never got it back, so this review is perhaps tinged with the love we have for that we have lost. McGee did an updated and expanded version Faster and Furiouser: The Revised and Fattened Fable of American International Pictures but that also is out-of-print and very expensive second-hand. Second hand copies of this original version are not so expensive so maybe I'll pick one of those up sometime.