Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide: An A to Z Encyclopedia to the Cinema of the Fantastic, or, Is There a Mad Doctor in the House?

by John Stanley

Book by Stanley, John

420 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

John Stanley (b. 1940)

Reviews

[Glen Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of many A-Z film guides to come out in the 1980s and probably one of the best for science fiction, fantasy and horror films. What sets this guide apart from similar ones is the tone of the reviews. Stanley and his team strike the right balance between information, opinion and humor. In pre-internet days I used to dip into this one a lot and it still has value. The reviews are tight and to the point. Many B-grade movies were making their way to video and Revenge more often than not had an entry on some of these rarities when Maltin's book didn't. The introduction to this book explains that it is an updated version of the Creature Feature Movie Guide and how it was spawned from a cable TV show called Creature Features that the author hosted. It's an interesting bit of background and shows the obvious love Stanley has for the genre. One of the better old guides and worth considering, but only if you collect old guides.

[Muzzlehatch · Rating 3 out of 5]

My edition of this video guide is from 1988. It's hard to say how useful this book is now; certainly the listing of what is or is not available on video is long outdated, and an awful lot of the titles mentioned are extraordinarily obscure and hard to find. So this is definitely a book for the specialist in the byways of genre films. The reviews are generally a lot of fun, though the author's opinions are a lot more mainstream and forgiving of big-budget dross than I'd like; better are his rants about the terrible films that make up an expectedly large chunk of the book. Lots of black and white photos.