Customer Reviews

Land of a Thousand Balconies: Discoveries and Confessions of a B-Movie Archaeologist

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Jack Stevenson has devoted a good part of his life to the pursuit of eccentric screen oddities, and this book is a very personal look at his journey. Most books on the subject are general guides to the genre and read like a "top ten list" of the worst movies divided by categories, but this is more of a true B-movie biography. He is candid in talking about the relative obscurity and squalor he has endured for the love of the genre, and his concluding chapter is probably the best piece ever written on the psychology of celluloid collectors.

Stevenson chronicles his life in the underground movie "business" (which is never truly lucrative) from San Francisco to Copenhagen (which has a bustling underground movie fan base, going all the way back to the production of "Reptilicus" in Denmark) and along the way details his contacts with eccentrics, involvement in film "happenings," and most amusingly for me, recounts the film festivals he has been involved with, my favorite of which is his participation on the jury of the First Annual Freak Zone Festival in Lille, France, in which the grand prize was a one-armed garden gnome. Later as a jurist for the No-Budget Film Festival in Hamburg, Germany, he had the opportunity to fling a fish into an enraptured audience as a "Political Act" (his capital letters, not mine.) The decadence of these festivals (a showing of "The Hypnotic Eye" was celebrated by excess consumption of Bloody Marys and pork rinds) is irreverently covered, and gives readers a hint of the mindset required of hardcore B-movie aficionados.

This book is unique in the genre of cinema literature, and I recommend it to true lovers of supremely bad movies everywhere.

If you go the TLA video in Philadelphia on Spruce Street, you will see a wonderful display of movie schdules from the days when the TLA video chain was an actual theater. On pages 82 and 83 of this book, Jack Stevenson reproduces some of these great schdules from days gone by. Once upon a time you had to actually go to a movie theater to see cool movies. They hardly ever showed up on TV and if they did it was at 3 AM. I've had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Stevenson for well on twenty years and I can attest to his love for obscure movies. It shines through in the pages of this book.
Most of the book's chapters are essays on B-movie collecting and presentation. Chapter five, "A Secret History of Cult Movies," may be the best article ever written on the subject. The final chapter, "Confessions of a Film Collector," is the best chapter in the book. Here, Mr. Stevenson shows you the world of fellow film collectors.
It's a shame this book hasn't received the attention it deserves. It may be one of the best ones ever written on film collecting.