Customer Reviews

Bad Mags Volume 1: The Strangest, Sleaziest, and Most Unusual Periodicals Ever Published!

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If, like me, you like the sleazy underbelly of culture, then you'll like Bad Mags. It's a collection and reference tome of those bad taste sleazy news-stand magazines from the 60's and 70's which contained lurid covers of such delights as topless girls being forced into giant cooking pots, naked hippies or scantily clad Satanists taking part in some Satanic ritual in front of a suburban home's fireplace. With such titles as, Biker Orgy, Torrid Film Reviews, Cropped Crotches, Sluts & Slobs and Outerspace Sex Orgy, these magazines fulfilled the masturbatory fantasies of the males of those times.

Some publishing houses would bring out a series of titles while others only printed one-offs. The author, Tom Brinkmann, really knows his stuff and can navigate his way around these many titles and publishers; pointing out when photos and articles were re-used or magazines were re-printed with new titles. The book consists of each magazine cover followed by a capsular review.

The book is broken down into three main parts: Mondo Adult Slicks, which encompasses everything from SM magazines through to candid exposés of the widening hippie culture; Sexploitation Film Slicks, 1963 -1973, which covers film related magazines specializing in the adult grind-house cinema of the times; and the 1%ers: Outaw Rider, Sixties Style, which looks at the magazines which begun to cash-in on the surge and fear of the Hell's Angels and other biker gangs.

The book also looks at a few key personalities behind these publications and focuses on Titus Moody, who was a low-grade Hollywood actor, producer, photographer, biker and who also appears regularly in the many photo-shoots, either romping in a hippie pad with a naked girl or straddling his motorbike.

There's a large section also devoted to `worst movie director of all-time', Edward D.Wood, who in his later years was a prolific writer for these magazines - his awkward style of writing being impossible to miss as well as his love for angora sweaters.

There's also a brief look at a few of the girls who frequently bared all for these magazines, notably Lynn Harris and Rene Bond.

My only complaint with the book is the format could have been larger because a lot of the excellent magazine covers have been relegated to the side-bar of each page rendering them too small to be really appreciated. This is why I have only given it four stars as opposed to five.

Apart from that it's a great book which will surely contribute to a rise in prices of the original magazines as more people begin to discover these warped period pieces which dealt in the fantasies, taboos and fears of those times.

I'm looking forward to Volume Two which promises Devil worshipping and monster magazines, Sharon Tate, Charles Manson, Myron Fass, violent crime magazines and punksploitation.