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2 avis
Horror North of the Border
Vatnsdal's work is the definitive study of the history of Canadian Horror cinema. From the glossy and goo splattered later films of David Cronenberg like THE FLY and NAKED LUNCH to, more importantly, those obscure low budget "tax shelter" films like BLACK ROSES which kept the film business in Canada solvent through the 1980s. The author doesn't just rehash information from other sources but interviews hundreds of creative participants in these films to present a truly accurate pictures of the past and present state on Scary films in the GReat White North.Lire l'avis complet...
Tap-Dancing Horse Of Books On Canadian Horror Films
I have always been a big fan of Canadian genre film-making ever since I was a kid, way back in those dim and distant days of the seventies when, as hard as it may be to believe in this all but ubiquitous era of Hollywood North, the trade magazine Cinema Canada was so desperate for news that they actually ran a story when William Shatner showed up at a friend's kid's birthday party and someone brought out their Super 8 home movie camera.
So of course you might well understand how delighted I was when I came across Caelum Vatnsdal's "They Came From Within: A History of Canadian Horror Cinema" and decided I had to have my own copy.
Having read it, can I say that it the definitive tome on Canuck exploitation films? Sadly, no.
An eccentric volume, it does offer a wide-ranging history of genre cinema up here from the silent era and old NFB safety shorts up through the sputtering attempts of the sixties and seventies through the Cronenberg controversies to the Tax Shelter era and beyond, but it is a deeply flawed book.
There are glaring omissions (much mention is made of the obscure 1976 shot-in-Vancouver Christopher Lee flick "The Keeper" but none at all of the same year's much better known West Coast-lensed aboriginal sorcery shocker "Shadow of the Hawk" starring Chief Dan George and Jan-Michael Vincent which still shows up on TV from time to time) and much claiming of films as Canadian that were actually shot in other countries ("The Pit" and Bob Clark's "Deathdream" were shot down in the States while "The Vulture"; was filmed across the pond in jolly old England).
And to make matters even worse, the author has an annoying tendency to cover films under the title he likes rather than the one they were officially released under and to list them by the year they were made rather than the actual release date which, let me tell you, makes them a right devil to track down on the Internet!
Do I still recommend this book though? Well, as long as you go into it with both eyes open, yes.
It's like the tap-dancing horse... it may not be Fred Astaire but it is a major achievement that it exists at all, and it will certainly do until the folks at the highly recommended Canuxploitation website get around to putting out a book of their own.Lire l'avis complet...