Saturday, September 28, 2013

BOOK REVIEW: Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema by Jamie Russell (2005 Fab Press / 319pgs.)


Review by Scott Lefebvre

     I was given a couple of Fab Press books to read by a friend of mine from college.
     For those of you that don’t know yet, Fab Press pretty much is and has been THE premiere publisher and distributor of well-researched, well-written genre-specific books about film.
     In addition to publishing over-arching genre readers, they publish books on the body of work of specific directors and actors.
     I’ve read many of their books and none of them have been a disappointment and Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema is no exception.
     Let’s get the minor issues out of the way first.
     As with any book that claims to be “complete” or “comprehensive”, it’s not.   Unless you’re writing about a genre or actor or director that is deceased you can only do your best job to represent the topic to the best of one’s ability and it is understandably difficult when attempting to write a comprehensive guide to a genre as proliferate as the genre of “Zombie Cinema”.
     So the book isn’t “complete” or “comprehensive” but it’s damn close, and you can see “complete” or “comprehensive” from where it’s standing if you look real close and squint real hard which is good enough for me.   As a frequent reader of this type of book I can attest that part of the secret pleasure in reading these books for genre film fans is to notice omissions.   As an author I have to say to anyone that has a problem with a few minor omissions to go out and try to write a better book and see how many omissions you make.
     Now that we’ve got that minor complaint out of the way…
     The book begins with an introduction/overview of the history of and the evolution of the concept of the zombie.   The introduction is thoroughly if not over-researched and if you ever wanted to know about the history of where the idea of the zombie came from, the introduction alone is worth the price of admission.
     The rest of the book is structured loosely chronologically with subchapters focusing on different sub-classifications such as directors or national movements in zombie cinema.   As one would expect there’s extensive coverage of the zombie films of George Romero and Lucio Fulci and the other Italian zombie movie makers, but the real interest for enthusiasts of zombie cinema are the comprehensive write-ups of the relatively obscure areas of zombie cinema like the early black & white “Poverty Row” features and the loose minutia of Asian zombie movie knock-offs.   Although I was sort of surprised there wasn’t any mention of the “Romero Re-kill Squad” in Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies despite the author mentioning the “Bruce Campbell’s Right Hand” commercial.   But remember what I said about omissions?
     One of my favorite features of a book of this type is the Filmography at the end of the book.   I know that in these modern times of the internet it’s all too easy to search the Internet Move Database and search for “Zombie Movies” and be served up a dozen lists of recommendations, but if you think that this book was subjective and prone to omissions, then wait till you’ve checked out a few IMDB lists.
     What I like to do with these back-of-the-book filmographies is to use them as a checklist and in these modern times of global connectivity and rampant digital media sharing it’s easier than ever for fans of any given genre to be able to watch every film from that given genre if they have the internet, the time, the intestinal fortitude, and the determination to do so.
     So although there are plenty of websites and books that may offer what is, in their opinion, a definitive list of zombie-films worth watching, this book, obviously up until its publication date in 2005, is the real deal.   I don’t usually do a number scale recommendation but if I did, this would be a solid 8 out of 10 and definitely a must-have for the bookshelf of any zombie film enthusiast both entry-level and hardcore fans.

     You can find this book and many other Quality Cinema Publications, DVDs, Blu-rays, Soundtracks and T-Shirts at: http://www.fabpress.com/

No comments:

Post a Comment