"Horror" Review: The Psychotronic Video Guide by Michael J. Weldon (1996, St. Martin's)

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Last year, I wrote a short post devoted to my love for and interest in video movie guide books. While they aren't exactly dead by any stretch of the imagination, the internet has done a decent job of slaughtering the need for physical editions of these types of work. After all, when even the most forgotten movie in the world has its own entries on Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and Wikipedia; when you can find sites devoted to reviewing the most obscure, exploitative, and random celluloid abominations imaginable; when all the reviews of major and minor film critics are archived and searchable; when one out of every six cell phones is contaminated with fecal matter because we take them into the bathroom with us instead of a good book...who needs stuff like this? Maybe @janenightshade, although I suspect she's familiar with it already. Also @blewitt, because that man needs one of everything in his life--that store isn't crowded enough, buddy!

Well, despite what you may believe, the internet still hasn't made print matter entirely obsolete. And let's face it, you gotta recharge that phone some time, so while you're bound to the cord, why not pick up a book instead? And if you're going to pick up a book, you might as well choose something with some heft to it since this is probably the only exercise you're going to get today. That's why I want to talk to you about Michael J. Weldon's The Psychotronic Video Guide, published in 1996 by St. Martin's Griffin.

The Psychotronic Video Guide is 646 pages worth of reviews, commentary, and black-and-white images regarding the weird, mondo, bizarre, cheesy, schlocky, exploitative, and gross in home video. Now, nearly six hundred and fifty pages of madness is one thing, but what's truly impressive to me is this video guide is actually the second part of Weldon's work. The first part, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, was published in 1986 and clocked in at 815 pages. The Video Guide is not a replacement for the Encyclopedia, it's an update/enhancement. Stuff reviewed in the first book doesn't appear in the second, which means that if you combine them both, you're looking at nearly 1,500 pages of deep-dive into everything from post-apocalyptic fare like Mad Max and Neon City, to big-budget pieces like The Terminator and The Abyss, to Mondo pseudo-documentaries like Africa Blood and Guts and Mondo New York, to low-key horror fare from the golden age of Hollywood like 1937's Dick Tracy and 1948's He Walked By Night. There are even entries for films like Jim Carrey's Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Desperately Seeking Susan, which you wouldn't normally associate with a guide that also covers the likes of Zombie Lake and Psycho IV: The Beginning.

So what the hell makes a film "Psychotronic"? Good question. I'll let Weldon answer it himself, as he does in the Forward:

There are alphabetical reviews of more than 3000 features (and select TV shows on video) that are considered Psychotronic(r). That means horror, science fiction, fantasy, and exploitation movies. [. . .]

I've included silent features now available on tape, serials that were previously only available in condensed TV release versions, and features from any time period that have been rediscovered thanks to video. I've included most seventies black action movies, many Italian westerns, women-in-prison movies, jd (juvenile delinquent) and rock and roll movies, select Asian and martial arts titles, mondo documentaries, biblical and historical epics, some WWII propaganda movies, various "underground" features, and many old (pre-porno) "adults only" movies. Roadshow movies covering once-forbidden themes like drugs, prostitution, and even childbirth are here along with nudist-colony features and vintage adult dramas and comedies that featured nudity as the main attraction.

Most movies are reviewed here for obvious reasons. Others are reviewed because of the companies that made or released them, the director, or the casts. You'll find releases by top quality directors of the past (Hitchcock, Lang, Buñuel . . .), the most Psychotronic(r) directors of the past (Corman, Castle, Browning . . .) and the most prolific of recent years (Franco, Ray, Santiago . . .). Anything that Roger Corman had anything to do with fits, as well as nearly anything from the companies he was involved with (AIP, New World, and Concorde). Other companies that have turned out appropriate stuff nonstop are Cannon, Charles Brand's Full Moon (and before that Empire and Wizard), Troma, P.M., and the (unrelated) AIP video company. Name-brand video companies (RCA, Warner, Republic, MCA . . .) usually have little or nothing to do with the old companies of the same names and in no way guarantee any kind of high quality viewing.

So, there you have it: it's not just about the genre, it's also about who made it, who starred in it, and sometimes who released it. "Psychotronic" is, in Weldon's mind, like pornography: he knows it when he sees it, and boy has he seen a lot of it. This is really the only way to explain how a book like this can contain a review of 1961's tame rom-com Gidget Goes Hawaiian (because it starred future AIP regular Deborah Walley in in the title role), then follow it up immediately with a write-up on 1971's G.I. Executioner which is about . . . well, I'll let Weldon explain again:

Tom Keena stars as a Nam-vet nightclub owner hired by mercenaries in Singapore. With Angelique Pettyjohn as a stripper, Janet Wood, and a Chinese villain. This warped James Bond-type adventure includes lots of drugs, gay stuff, nudity, and gore. It's by the director of Bloodsucking Freaks. Troma released it in 1985.

There's really no telling what you'll dig out of this thing without paging through it. And like I said before, this is a sequel/supplement to the original Encyclopedia, so while Aliens and Alien3 get entries here (along with some information about the special LaserDisc version of Aliens that restores some of the deleted scenes), you won't find an entry for the original because Weldon covered it in the first book. You really need both to get the full effect, although I'm still looking to add the Encyclopedia to my library.

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With tons of information, hundreds of screen caps and poster images, and dozens of sidebars relating to everything from directors and filming locations to specific genres and iconic studios, The Psychotronic Video Guide is one of those "gotta have it" pieces for any respectable film snob's library. I guarantee, even the most well-read and low-cultured cinephile will find entries for stuff they never knew existed. And while most of the publishers and businesses listed in the back are no longer around, even that snapshots a time when mail order houses and specialist distributors, not a trip to Amazon, were the best ways to fill in the gaps of your addiction collection. It's one of my bookshelf treasures, something to take down and page through when I don't know what I want to read.

What's even better is the rise of streaming video services means that many of these otherwise-obscure or out-of-print, uh, "treasures", are just a few clicks away. So whether you're looking for a way to kill a Friday night by yourself, or find something the whole gang can laugh and/or cringe at, The Psychotronic Video Guide is a phone book-sized one-stop shop for all the beach movies, killer aliens, rampaging sociopaths, and noir detective stories you could ever want. And come on, Mr. Weldon--it's been two decades and then some...when are we going to see volume three?

Five Psychotronic(r) stars out of five!