1st December 2009

"Lunatic farrago that has to be seen to be believed."

I was surprised to find, while browsing through Amazon the other day, that there's no Halliwell's Film Guide coming up this Christmas. I was even more surprised to find that there wasn't one last year. The Guide, pretty well reckoned as the definitive film guide, has apparently ceased publication.

In some ways it's not surprising. Halliwell was legendarily scathing about almost everything made after about 1950, and rarely had a good word to say about any horror films outside of the original Universals. Halloween is dismissed as a "single-minded shocker with virtually no plot, just a succession of bloody attacks in semi-darkness" although it does, astonishingly, get a solitary star and the faintly patronising comment "very well done if you like that sort of thing." The Evil Dead is "semi-professional horror rubbish", A Nightmare On Elm Street is an "unpleasant semi-splatter movie", and George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead (which in my as yet unpublished book is the greatest film ever made) is brushed aside as "occasionally laughable, otherwise sickening or boring". Maybe the film guide-buying public actually recognise that some modern movies are actually worth seeing, buying and keeping, and see no relevance in a guide that once lamented about Cinemascope "what's wrong with four by three anyway?". Well, why stop there? What's wrong with black and white? What's so great about sound?

After Halliwell died, the book was kept on by other hands and some modern movies were acknowledged as rather good (though still not big on the horror genre). But it would have taken a complete rewrite to regain any consistency. And now it appears to have been dropped altogether. This more or less leaves the field to the Radio Times Guide To Films as far as range of titles and snappy one-paragraph write-ups are concerned. Certainly there's the Leonard Maltin film guide, but that one ignores the basic rules of the alphabet, and lists Inferno before In The Line Of Fire for no good reason other than sheer perversity. One I suppose I could upgrade is the Videohound Golden Movie Retriever, which I last bought in 1997 and again goes for breadth rather than depth.

Concentrating on genre movies inevitably leads to the Psychotronic Film and Video Guides by Michael Weldon, which lists a lot of material Leslie Halliwell never bothered with, if he even knew it existed. I could wander through the older of the two books in particular for days at a time: they don't judge the movie, just itemise the weirdness.

The Time Out Guide goes into too much detail about too few films, and many of the ones it does cover aren't widely available. A random leaf through the 2004 edition (the last one I obtained - there's little sense in buying these things every year) yields such delights as Europe After The Rain (described as "an idiosyncratic anthology of Dadaist and Surrealist artifacts and attitudes" - wow) and a Canadian semi-documentary about cottaging called Urinal. On similar but more populist lines is the Virgin Film Guide - a few minutes glancing through it in Waterstones revealed that it lists the original The Omen but neither the remake nor the sequels. A fat lot of good that is when all you want to know is who wrote the script for Bad Boys II or what year The Silence Of The Lambs came out.

A couple of older books adorn my shelves: The Paladin Video Home Entertainment Guide from 1985 and frankly of little use as a reference book, and a very battered First Edition of Elliot's Films On Video. The latter is probably unique in that it lists adult tapes as well as regular titles, and also mentioned BBFC cuts. Sadly, they stopped this one in 1993. But my favourite item, also fairly useless as far as an actual reference work is concerned, is something called Videolog: a massive blue folder full of loose-leaf sheets detailing exactly what was available on UK video somewhere around 1990. I believe this was a trade publication but it found its way onto eBay earlier this year for very little money. At that time, the dealer price for a VHS of Police Academy 6: City Under Siege was a modest £55.00. Excluding VAT.

Sadly, we now have the IMDb and a dozen other film reference sites to tell us the odd little bits of trivia and the Movie Reference Book might have had its day. But I'll miss Halliwell - I'll miss looking a cracking film up only to be told it was "made by a director who does not understand that less can be more". (Zombie Flesh Eaters, in case you were wondering.)

Until the next time.

Richard.

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