Review of
Catastrophe:
The End of Cinema? by David Annan ISBN 0-517-524201
Four out of five stars
Since the birth
of cinema, the disaster has been a staple of the movies, people love the
tension generated by watching people struggling to survive when things go
horribly wrong. From science fiction to natural disasters to plagues, we love
to watch simulated traumatic events.
This book is
essentially a large collection of stills with some photos of posters from
movies that are embedded within a small amount of explanatory text. The term
catastrophe is subject to a significant amount of poetic license here. For
example, it is hard to see how the “Batman” movie starring Adam West and Burt
Ward could be considered a disaster film.
There is also a
bit of sexploitation in the book. Stills of Linda Lovelace from “Deep Throat”
and Marilyn Chambers in “Beyond the Green Door” are present, adding a bit of
nudity from porn movies that were hardly in the catastrophe genre.
Fundamentally,
this is a book of stills from movies, designed for the individual that
generally just wants to look at pictures. What I liked about it was that it
reminded me of some of the movies I watched in the “Creature Feature” that came
on at 10:30 Saturday evenings when I was a teenager.
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