Adored for its loving restorations of cult movies and
copious supplemental material, Arrow Video is that rare home-video distributer
that has earned a cult of its own. That cult is surely the audience for Cult Cinema: An Arrow Video Companion,
though the most hardcore Arrow acolytes might find a lot of this book’s essays
a little too familiar. That’s because twenty of its thirty pieces were culled
from the booklets of Arrow releases such as House
of Usher, Deep Red, Coffy, and The ’Burbs. For some readers, that might be a somewhat dodgy
premise, especially since Cult Cinema
is not inexpensive. For those who don’t snap up every release, Cult Cinema is actually a pretty cool
book because it doesn’t always follow the expected DVD-booklet essay formula.
That kind of writing is often informative yet dry, cramming the basic history,
synopsis, analysis, and legacy into ten pages or so. Some of the essays in Cult Cinema follow that format, but
others go for a more personal voice, such as Vic Pratt’s essay on Withnail & I in which he relays his
quest to find an overcoat just like the one Richard E. Grant wears in the
inebriated comedy classic. David Hayles paints a vivid first-person portrait of
Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, while Robin Bougie’s piece about pornochanchada (I’m
still not really sure what that is) is written in the adolescent horn-dog voice
of a review in an adult video trade mag.
The essays are divided among five topics—films, directors,
actors, genres, and distributers—but this format is pretty loose considering that
Pratt’s piece on Boris Karloff is more concerned with the slight horror-comedy The Raven in general than the actor’s extremely extensive career
and Graham Rae’s one on Nekromantik
is filed under “distribution” even though there’s nothing about distribution in
it.
Also, because this book is exclusively linked with the select
film’s Arrow distributes, a lot of essential cult films and filmmakers— David
Lynch, John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Richard O’Brien to name a few— barely
get a mention or get shut out of the discussion completely, so don’t throw away
those Danny Peary books yet, kids. However, Cult
Cinema earns serious points for scoring an introductory essay from the
twenty-first century’s most audacious new cult filmmaker, Ben Wheatley. Maybe Cult Cinema Vol. II will include an
essay on the psyche-scarring Kill List.
