Rating: 
Summary: The Big Letdown
Review: Very disappointing. This is basically a jumped up filmography, with fairly extensive but prosaic plot synopses, which seems unnecesary in this age of cable/sattelite TV and video tape making just about anything available on video (eventually).Lyons admits most of the films he desribes are awful, so why bother to synopsize them? He should have cherry picked those B films worth seeking out. My biggest complaint concerns Lyon's critical evaluations of the film. They're perfunctory, sometimes running only one sentence, and lack any insight into why we should watch the film. I was hoping for something like Barry Gifford's compulsively readable Out of the Past, which you read for Gifford's sensibility and fresh takes on familiar films. I really didn't need another reference book that tells me how unintentionally funny Shack Out on 101 is (I've never found it funny and the film was already discovered by Film Comment about 15 years ago).
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating, but...
Review: While Lyons has clearly done a mind boggling amount of research, I can't help wishing he'd done a bit more. I caught a couple of big mistakes, and there may well be yet more I'm not aware of. The ones I did get: in the review of The Sign of the Ram, he claims that this was Susan Peters "first and only film." In fact she made several films and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Random Harvest! And in the review of Spectre of the Rose, Lyons misidentifies the leading actor: it's Ivan Kirov, not Michael Chekhov. (Chekhov does also appear in the film.) I found the book very interesting, but it would be a better book if Lyons had taken the time to get his facts straight.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, but...
Review: While Lyons has clearly done a mind boggling amount of research, I can't help wishing he'd done a bit more. I caught a couple of big mistakes, and there may well be yet more I'm not aware of. The ones I did get: in the review of The Sign of the Ram, he claims that this was Susan Peters "first and only film." In fact she made several films and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Random Harvest! And in the review of Spectre of the Rose, Lyons misidentifies the leading actor: it's Ivan Kirov, not Michael Chekhov. (Chekhov does also appear in the film.) I found the book very interesting, but it would be a better book if Lyons had taken the time to get his facts straight.
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