The Edge
- Index
The Video Watchdog Book
Tim Lucas
Video Watchdog, paperback, 391 pages
Review by David Clark (1992)
Since its inception in 1990, Video Watchdog magazine has appeared every two months to catalogue and document the old and the new, the cut and the uncut, and the just plain weird in the world of film on video, specialising in horror but not to the exclusion of anything else that catches the eyes of the editor, Tim
Lucas, and his compatriots.
Back before 1992 Video Watchdog’s Tim Lucas wrote his Video Watchdog column over a period of several years for various venues, finishing up as the best thing in
Gorezone magazine. Not difficult, you may well think, and here’s your chance to be sure.
The Video Watchdog Book includes every column prior to 1990. Lucas’s world is a very individual world, and
it encompasses everything from trash to art house. Lucas devotes whole chapters of this book to the film adaptations of Edgar Wallace, the bonkers Dario Argento, and the prolific Jess Franco (stand back and marvel as Lucas heroically attempts to faithfully document the output of a man who can make six movies a year, incorporating everything from horror to full-blown hardcore).
Along the way Lucas indulges two of his greatest passions. Firstly there’s his faithful recording of alternate versions, cut prints, and generally butchered material. And then comes the bane of the video fan’s life – widescreen. An extremely vocal spokesman for video letterboxing, Lucas explains the assorted projection processes and their transfers to tape and (his preferred format) laserdisc. Read this and discover the true horror of crop-boxing, his name for what happens when the edges of an apparently faithful transfer are allowed to slip off of the edge of the screen.
Of course, Lucas being American a great deal of the information regarding availability is largely irrelevant to British readers, but this is far outweighed by the detailed
cataloguing of the obscure and the short interviews with various directors about the handling of their material.
While we’re talking about cataloguing let’s mention the scrupulous indexing. A reference book needs a good index. To that end
The Video Watchdog Book includes not just one index but three of the things, encompassing over a hundred pages. The first index is a list of retitled movies, listed by their original names and their new; the second covers the book itself; and the third covers the first twelve issues of Video Watchdog magazine.
Like the magazine, The Video Watchdog Book is profusely illustrated with hundreds of rare stills and movie ads, and black and white cartoons by Brian Thomas. If you’re into these films or want to explore them, this book is well worth having, even if you aren’t American.