In the sixties, James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff’s
American International Pictures was best known for pumping out a series of
dopey beach party flicks, Roger Corman’s elegant Poe adaptations, and a gonzo
slew of fab B-grade genre pictures. However, AIP was even more eclectic than
that, distributing prestige foreign films such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and La
Dolce Vita and films by Robert Altman and Orson Welles and trafficking in Mondo-style
documentaries and borderline porno. In all, AIP and its subsidiaries had their
talons in over 800 movies. With his new book American International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography, Rob
Craig attempts to catalog them all. This would be quite the project if Craig
had merely tracked down all the titles and listed them, but he goes way farther
than that with encyclopedia-like entries for each film, some of which fill
entire pages. He covers interesting production details, describes plots, and
offers personal critiques and a good deal of sub-textual analysis.
This is where American
International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography serves its most useful
purpose, since the book mainly functions as a film guide. I can usually get a
pretty good handle on how much a film-guide writer and I see eye-to-eye and how
likely I will be to dig that writer’s recommendations. However, Rob Craig is a
tough call. He’s generally politically astute, writes well, and loves many
oddball movies deserving of love, but he’s too hell bent on iconoclasm, which
is something he signals in an introduction that explicitly challenges notions
that some films are or aren’t objectively good. That’s fine, but I can’t get on
board with some of Craig’s kookier ideas. I agree with him that Peter Sasdy’s The Devil within Her is a lot of fun,
but Craig’s conclusion that it is better than Rosemary’s Baby—a deliberately hilarious film he categorizes as
“humorless”—is crazy (Polanski’s still a horrible person though). He thinks Starcrash
is better than Star Wars (another
movie he dismisses as “humorless) and can’t stand beloved character actor Dick
Miller, yet he finds much to admire in crap such as the tedious Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, the vile Cry of the Banshee, the inept and vile The Last House on the Left, and the shrill, painfully unfunny Comedy of Terrors, which he believes has
“hilarious” dialogue. Who is this guy?
And wait ’til you read his entries on The T.A.M.I. Show and The Big
TNT Show! He is merciless in his castigation of some of the sixties’
greatest acts, dismissing The Beach Boys as a “pathetic” boy band, deeming The
Lovin’ Spoonful “bizarre,” trashing The Rolling Stones and The Byrds, and
having little patience for James Brown, whose performance once inspired an
entire movie theater audience to leap up in the aisles and dance (I was there).
His chastising of the film’s use of some chaste go-go dancers as “perverted” is
way more bizarre than anything the Spoonful ever did. Yet, I agreed with Craig
in enough instances that I still managed to compile a list of films I’d like to
check out on his recommendation. He certainly does a good job of making the movies
he likes sound intriguing. Whether or not I enjoy them may be another matter.
