Countdown to Hallowe’en 2017: Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon

And just in time for our traditional Countdown to Hallowe’en…

You may know Kim Newman from his Anno Dracula books, those culturally-dense stories of an alternate history, combining fictional characters with real people and events, as well as his other fictions. I liked them a lot here.

But this book is about one of Kim’s other jobs, as a film critic. He has been writing reviews for magazines since the 1980’s and in Empire Magazine each month since 2000. This is a collection of his film reviews from The Video Dungeon – not the big hitting movies like Stephen King’s IT (2017) but the oft-forgotten horror B-movie ones, the ones that in the good old days you’d rent from the video store on a bad VHS tape as a cheap gamble to watch on a Saturday night. These days they’re probably to be found, if they’re found at all, late at night (or early morning) on the Syfy channel, and shown once in a blue moon before disappearing back to obscurity. In other words, you’re more likely to find Sharknado here than The Shining. (Actually, the first 4 Sharknado movies are here.)

So what we’re doing here is celebrating the cheap and the nasty or the video direct market stall. What Kim does here, in as entertaining a way as possible, is highlight the worthy or eviscerate the dross. For example (I won’t name the movie!):

“Among the shoddiest Dracula movies ever made, this looks and sounds like shot-on-video porn: in fact, it’s less well made than Intercourse with a Vampyre or Muffy the Vampire Layer.”

Ouch. I must admit most of these movies in the book I’d never have heard of, but Kim’s reviews here have made me want to see some of them.

The book has divided the reviews into ten groups, such as ‘Famous Monsters’, ‘Cryptids and Critters’, ‘Wildlife’, ‘Secret Men (and Women)’ and even ‘Weird Hippie Shit’. There is an Index at the back, but I’m not sure that this grouping works for me. If you’re trying to look up a movie you’re going to watch, then you have ten sub-categories to go through before you realise you might find it. Personally, I would have preferred either a full alphabetical order, allowing it to be used for easy reference, or a chronological order, either based on the date of the movie or the date the review was published in Empire.

But this is a minor quibble. What makes this work is the detailed yet pithy reviews Kim gives each movie, combining his considerable movie knowledge with a knowing wink and more than a few grumps. Although admittedly they are in small print, most of the reviews are less than half a page in length, which makes this hefty 500+ page tome a dense read. It’s a great book to pick reviews at random, or read a set together and very good entertainment value. Every time I read a review I felt I came out of it better informed, which is not a bad thing in my opinion. (There were a few that I laughed out loud at, too.)

For genre readers who are already fans of Kim’s reviews, this is a very welcome collection of his work-to-date. I can see this one being dipped into regularly here in Hobbit Towers. For anyone else, it’s like a wonderful delve into the grubbiest parts of a friend’s video/digital download collection. Great fun and highly recommended for choosing those bad movies to watch at Hallowe’en.

Kim Newman’s Video Dungeon: The Collected Reviews by Kim Newman

Published by Titan Books, September 2017

560 pages

ISBN: 978 178 329 9393

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