The blockbuster podcast is now an UNMISSABLE NEW BOOK! Will Sloan and Justin Decloux, hosts of The Important Cinema Club podcast, take you on a spine-tingling journey through the darkest recesses of film history to share their twisted cinematic obsessions! You'll GASP at studies of Albert Pyun, Joe D'Amato, William Beaudine, Mabel Normand, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Jackie Chan... SCREAM at primers on the Bruceploitation and Hong Kong Girls-with-Guns genres... SHUDDER at reportage from Hamilton's Trash Cinema and the Laser Blast Film Society... SHRIEK at appreciations of Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, and Steve Oedeker's Kung Pow: Enter the Fist... RAISE AN EYEBROW at interviews on the eccentric cinema of Matt Farley, David DeCoteau, and Gary Graver... and so much more! DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO JOIN THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB?

Hollywood historian and film reviewer Leonard Maltin invites readers to pull up a chair and listen as he tells stories, many of them hilarious, of 50+ years interacting with legendary movie stars, writers, directors, producers, and cartoonists. Maltin grew up in the first decade of television, immersing himself in TV programs and accessing 1930s and '40s movies hitting the small screen. His fan letters to admired performers led to unexpected correspondences, then to interviews and publication of his own fan magazine. Maltin's career as a free-lance writer and New York Times-bestselling author as well as his 30-year run on Entertainment Tonight, gave him access to Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sean Connery, Shirley Temple, and Jimmy Stewart among hundreds of other Golden Age stars, his interviews cutting through the Hollywood veneer and revealing the human behind each legend. Starstruck also offers a fascinating glimpse inside the Disney empire, and Maltin's tenure teaching USC's popular film course reveals insights into moviemaking along with access to past, current, and future stars of film, such as George Lucas, Kevin Feige, Quentin Tarantino, and Guillermo del Toro.

You Don't Know Me, But You Love Me is a biography of beloved American movie actor Dick Miller. Miller's fantastically storied life, the legendary people with whom he has worked and played, the times in which he's lived and the fascinating environments of both Broadway and Hollywood over the past seventy years are all thoroughly and engagingly explored in this first and only biography of the cult legend. The result of both extensive interviews and exhaustive research, You Don't Know Me, But You Love Me is at once story of how an unassuming guy stumbled into acting and became cult royalty, an epic love story of a man and his wife, a parallel story of an actor and his director (Corman), and a secret history of Hollywood. Referred to by Roger Corman as the "best actor in Hollywood" a favourite character actor of Quentin Tarantino, and in the words of Jonathan Demme, "a first-rate actor who makes any scene he's in better," Miller's particular magic continues to work itself on Hollywood elite and movie buffs alike.

Using his unique and personal narrative, Shannon shares his funny, embarrassing, and brutally honest life story, detailing his journey from a monster obsessed Louisiana kid to co-supervising the creation of the iconic alien hunter from the film Predator along with his countless other iconic film creations. A must for any film fan, Rubber, will give fans a behind the scenes look at such classics as House, Star Trek IV, Evil Dead II and much more.

The national cinemas of Czechoslovakia and East Germany were two of the most vital sites of filmmaking in the Eastern Bloc, and over the course of two decades, they contributed to and were shaped by such significant developments as Sovietization, de-Stalinization, and the conservative retrenchment of the late 1950s. This volume comprehensively explores the postwar film cultures of both nations, using a “stereoscopic” approach that traces their similarities and divergences to form a richly contextualized portrait. Ranging from features to children’s cinema to film festivals, the studies gathered here provide new insights into the ideological, political, and economic dimensions of Cold War cultural production.

Best known for directing the Impressionist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet and the first Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac, feminist and pioneer of 1920s French avant-garde cinema, made close to thirty fiction films as well as numerous documentaries and newsreels. Through her filmmaking, writing, and cine-club activism, Dulac’s passionate defense of the cinema as a lyrical art and social practice had a major influence on twentieth century film history and theory. In Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations, Tami Williams makes unprecedented use of the filmmaker's personal papers, production files, and archival film prints to produce the first full-length historical study and critical biography of Dulac. Williams's analysis explores the artistic and sociopolitical currents that shaped Dulac's approach to cinema while interrogating the ground breaking techniques and strategies she used to critique conservative notions of gender and sexuality. Moving beyond the director’s work of the 1920s, Williams examines Dulac's largely ignored 1930s documentaries and newsreels establishing clear links with the more experimental impressionist and abstract works of her early period. This vivid portrait will be of interest to general readers, as well as to scholars of cinema and visual culture, performance, French history, women’s studies, queer cinema, in addition to studies of narrative avant-garde, experimental, and documentary film history and theory.

Albert Pyun is a writer/director best known for THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, Jean-Claude Van Damme's CYBORG and Cannon's infamous CAPTAIN AMERICA...but did you also know he was mentored by Toshirô Mifune? That he secretly made a feature film on the set of CYBORG in a single weekend? And directed three pictures that starred Snoop Dogg and Ice-T in an ex-communist country? And that he was on the frontlines of a studio going bankrupt, the straight-to-video market exploding, and the collapse of an entire industry? In the first book dedicated to Albert Pyun, Justin Decloux reviews all 44 of the auteur's films and interviews key collaborators, taking a critical journey through the life of an artist who was passionate, driven and unstoppable in the face of impossible odds.

At last! The mad geniuses behind such warped masterpieces as Don't Let the Riverbeast Get You!, Freaky Farley, Local Legends, and Slingshot Cops tell their shocking true story! In the first book about the greatest horror/comedy auteurs that Manchester, New Hampshire has ever known, Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh take a film-by-film tour of their eccentric cinematic oeuvre. In a series of wide-ranging interviews with Will Sloan and Justin Decloux (hosts of The Important Cinema Club podcast), the mavericks behind Motern Media tell the epic story of a 20-year collaboration crafting cult classics on the margins of cinema. From wrangling zero-budget productions to tangling with fly-by-night distributors, they never lose the joy of making a backyard movie with friends. In the tradition of Hitchcock/Truffaut, Bergman on Bergman, and This Is Orson Welles, MOTERN ON MOTERN is a story of friendship, community, and the agony and ecstasy of filmmaking. Featuring bonus interviews with Motern cast members and a never-before-seen Farley/Roxburgh screenplay, it's the definitive resource for indecorous deviants everywhere! "Will Sloan and Justin Decloux have created the definitive work on two of cinema's most inspiring artists. Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh make films for all the right reasons, if not always in the precisely right ways, and their output and methodology merit study by any gestating independent filmmaker." - Simon Barrett, writer of The Guest and You're Next

A series of essays on film and philosophy whose authors - philosophers or film studies experts - write on a wide variety of films: classic Hollywood comedies, war films, Eastern European art films, science fiction, showing how film and watching it can not only illuminate philosophy but, in an important sense, be doing philosophy. The book is crowned with an interview with Wittgensteinian philosopher Stanley Cavell, discussing his interests in philosophy and in film and how they can come together.

A comprehensive study of theology and film that explores how the Christian faith is portrayed in film throughout history.