Zombie! vs. Mardi Gras. A Boy and His Fetus. Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. Skunk Ape!?. The Turkish Wizard of Oz.
These are just a few of the more eclectic titles that can be found in Phil Hall’s Encyclopedia of Underground Movies (Michael Wiese Productions, 2004; www.mwp.com).
The title is somewhat misleading. As the reader soon learns, an encyclopedic listing of every underground film (or even every “major” underground film) would take up countless volumes, and is a project probably best left to the Internet. Instead, Hall (a contributing editor to Film Threat) offers a crash course in underground filmmaking, with an inside look at the industry, interviews with some of the more notable filmmakers, and suggestions on where to dig up the titles that intrigue you the most.
It’s fairly well known that many, many, many more movies are made every year than show up at the multiplex. It’s also fairly well known that most of them are terrible, and which Hall freely admits. But there’s plenty of great stuff in underground cinema as well, and it’s primarily on these overlooked films that Hall focuses.
The book is organized primarily by genres, from comedies (”Frantic Antics”) to horror and sf (”Rod Serling’s Children”) to documentaries (Real Life/Reel Life). Each chapter contains a brief rundown of the history of the genre and then discusses a few titles, often with input from the filmmakers themselves. Many of the films discussed are fairly recent (from the early nineties onward) for obvious reasons–due to the prohibitive costs of filmmaking (even in today’s digital era), it’s rare for underground filmmakers to have long careers (and those that do often graduate to “mainstream” films).
Each chapter ends with a list of titles (and how to find them, if possible) and an interview with one of the directors, filmmakers, or underground cinema personalities discussed earlier in the chapter. These fairly informal interviews are interesting and insightful (particularly the final interview with Kirsten Tretbar, creator of the intriguing documentary Zenith).
Hall’s style is straightforward and informative. The book is definitely geared toward neophytes, though I suspect underground cinema fans will enjoy it just as much. Hall finds the right balance between celebrating underground cinema and realizing its flaws, where they exist. Throughout the book, one also gets a good sense of just how little innovation and risk goes on in mainstream filmmaking–and also how much of a business “independent cinema” (e.g. the Sundance festival) has become.
One of Hall’s goals, I imagine, is to entice readers to seek out some of the films discussed in the book. Given the broad array of intriguing titles (did you know the Beatles’ Let It Be has never been released on video?) and Hall’s brisk and entertaining style, The Encyclopedia of Underground Movies may be just the kind of PSA underground cinema has been looking for.
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