The most obvious transition between the two volumes is away from horror and towards exploitation. Celeb interviews last time around with Clive Barker, John Waters and David Cronenberg find in here mutant siblings: Lindsay Shonteff, Britain's would-be action-star director (Number One Gun, Licensed to Love and Kill); Django himself, Franco Nero; and Italian horror's femme fatale, star of some of that country's grossest productions, Mariangela Giordano.

Elsewhere it falls as much to the celebrity of the writers as their subjects: David McGillivray contributes the second part of his extremely entertaining autobiography as a veteran of the UK sleaze factory; Kim Newman unearths the career of Jean Yarbrough whose filmography (and "genuine talent"), despite being speckled with Abbott and Costello and Bela Lugosi, is almost universally unknown; the always exotic, occasional film-maker George Kuchar rambling about Barbara Stanwyck and the Loch Ness Monster; and Ramsey Campbell takes time out to dissect the (hysterical) horrors of vanity published SF and, worse, its video equivalent.

Author and journalist Anne Billson attempts to define "insidious little globs", those moments of frisson, not necessarily restricted to genre movies, that make you wince - the throat-cutting in The Wild Bunch, the nose-slice in Polanski's genius Chinatown. Jane Giles, on the other hand, opts to provide a pleasing, essential epitaph to the eccentric history of London's late, lamented Scala cinema. And David Taylor details the career of the late Georges Franju, the Frenchman with a place in cinema history assured by the marvellous, hallucinatory Les Yeux sans Visage.

Not enough sleaze? America's master of the downright bizarre, Jack Stevenson, is on hand to regale us with the strange - and strangely sad - tale of Bodil of Denmark, arguably the world's most famous practitioner of on-screen bestiality, exclusively with her own animal companions - literally an Animal Lover.

Much less successful, however, are two contributions by David Kerekes. One - two films by Frederick R. Friedel - is a pointless exercise in dredging obscure 70s names for the sheer sake of it, while elsewhere he offers a serious examination of hardcore as a valid film genre. A case made for the validity of Cafe Flesh or The Devil in Miss Jones is maybe acceptable, but Kerekes insists on stretching the point: "It's a wonder porn isn't deemed elitist cinema" he barks before debating the slightly better-made fuck-loop Little Girls Blue as though it were Citizen Kane. Fatuous.

Finally, we are spared too many thoughts from chairman Jaworzyn himself, Shock's obviously intelligent but absurdly pompous, arrogant head whose editorial is quite incomprehensible and who insists on labouring most of the well chosen stills (some in colour) with achingly tedious 'humorous' captions. Ignore him and some of the more unearthly theorising, and there is much in here to be treasured.