Mike McPadden is the author of the new nerd delight Heavy Metal Movies: Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos & Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear- and Eye-Ripping Big-Scream Films Ever! He tells Harry Guerin about his labour of love.
Harry Guerin: Heavy Metal Movies is one of those stop-a-bullet tomes - in the words of Alan Partridge, you know your onions. Do you think you've really been writing this book since you were a kid?
Mike McPadden: For sure. From the time that I could read, I was always immediately drawn to cinema books in general and movie guides in particular. I've been writing movie reviews since I was eight - albeit 95% of them never made it out of my head and onto a page.
From the discovery of Leonard Maltin's TV Movies, and then the Danny Peary books, and Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Film Guide, my dream was always to pump out some kind of compendium that embodied and communicated my world view as reflected through movies and, once the heavy metal piece clicked into place, I had the perfect vehicle.
You dedicate the book - quite rightly - to Danny Peary whose Cult Movies books open new worlds to many of us. What was it about his writing that fired you up so much and have you ever met?
I haven't met Danny in person, but we spoke on the phone once back when I briefly worked at a theatrical trade paper called Show Business. Since Heavy Metal Movies, Danny and I have communicated online, which has been pure joy for me.
Cult Movies came out when I was 13 and it provided access to the world of cinema that I obsessed over and could only wonder about experiencing at that point. From an early age back in Brooklyn, I clipped out exploitation movie ads from the New York Post and the Daily News for scrapbooks, and I maniacally pored over the film section of the Village Voice each week, transfixed by the variety and depth of movies that were playing just over the bridge.
Peary revealed not only the content of many of those exact films, but his personal experience in watching them. The little personal revelations were just the best, like his heading up the Pinocchio Film Society in college or seeing Godzilla as a kid and then having a nightmare where he woke up screaming, "Japanese! Japanese!"
Peary wrote everything with wit, grace, and an irresistibly clear and direct, but never dull, writing style. I studied his books like gospel.
Years later, when I was publishing my zine Happyland in the early '90s, I hooked up with Aaron Lee, who was putting out a zine called Blue Persuasion from Kentucky. We immediately bonded over our passion for and scholarly knowledge of the Danny Peary canon, and Aaron and I have been best friends ever since. He's since become a successful stand-up comic and TV writer/producer, and we still talk about Peary in crazy detail a minimum of once a week.
You have some brilliant recollections in Heavy Metal Movies of your teenage adventures in grindhouse cinemas. Irish people who go to New York now for shopping weekends don't realise how seedy and run-down much of the city was in the early 1980s, so give us a small flavour of your trips to the cinema.
Times Square was a terrifying open cesspool of human (and inhuman) vice, with 42nd Street functioning as its main sewage pipe. The block was dotted with a dozen or so grindhouse theatres. They were old movie palaces that began falling into serious disrepair in the 1960s and they turned to screening double and triple feature trash flick programmes at bargain prices that ran at all hours.
Those theatres showed anything and everything they could jam into a projector, as long as it contained enough sex and/or violence to satisfy the audience of drunks, druggies, freaks and other assorted miscreants who'd wander in, set up camp, and react to what was happening on screen as though they were actually in the movie.
I started slipping off into the theatres when I was 14. I was going to high school in Manhattan, just two subway stops or a 20-minute walk away from 42nd Street or, as the local colour deemed it, "the Deuce". I'd pop in for an afternoon show once classes got out, then go home as though I'd just been hanging out with pals. I kept that up from 1982 to 1986, when I graduated.
In hindsight, it was incredibly dangerous and I sometimes get chills thinking about the risks I didn't even realise I was taking.
If you had to recommend 10 Heavy Metal Movies that everyone should see, what would they be?
Ask me who the two greatest rock bands of all time are and my honest answer is the Beatles and the Stones. I say that as a means of demonstrating that I am inherently attached to canon on most cultural topics, so in assembling my list of 'must-sees', there are few surprises. So here they are:
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988)
Heavy Metal (1980)
Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986)
Conan the Barbarian (1982)
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
The Song Remains the Same (1977)
Trick or Treat (1986)
Iron Maiden: Flight 666 (2009)
Metal: A Headbanger's Journey (2005)
And your own all-time top five?
My favourite movie of all time is Richard Elfman's bizarre-world black-and-white 1980 musical, Forbidden Zone. That's different from what I view as the single greatest film I've ever seen, which is 2001: A Space Odyssey. I love that film just as passionately, but in a different way. Both are in the book.
Filling out the rest of the movies I personally feel the greatest affection for, I'd add Female Trouble, Head, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Billy Jack, the original Planet of the Apes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Showgirls. That's more than five. But there they are.
If you could invite five filmmakers to a dinner celebrating the publication of Heavy Metal Movies who would they be - and why?
We'll stick with the living, because among the dead the answers are too obvious: Welles, Kubrick, and Hitchcock at one end, Russ Meyer and Sergio Leone at another, Ed Wood, Andy Milligan, and multiple generations of exploitation cranker-outers at still another.
John Waters. My idol of idols. The trailblazer that led the way for me and millions of like minds to find a place in this realm of existence.
Paul Verhoeven. I love every stage of his career, from his wild Dutch art films to RoboCop and Total Recall to the aforementioned Showgirls and Starship Troopers to Black Book.
Werner Herzog. One of precious few filmmakers whose every effort is a must-see. An entirely fascinating individual, as well, with a take on life that defines the concept of unique.
Ralph Bakshi. My fellow Brooklyn boy and the inventor of his very own movie genre, and it's one I cherish and mourn for above all others: gritty, artful, down-and-dirty animated films for adults. He's got a crowdfunded short coming out in a few months about Coney Island, and it's the one movie I'm genuinely excited to see this year. Of course, knowing Ralph, it may not ever reach completion, but I'd even love to talk to him about that.
I'm going to count Slavoj Zizek, although he's not a movie director per se. As with Danny Peary, I want to know his opinion on everything - and certainly that includes the movies in my book, my book itself, and, above all (as usual), me.
Do you think in the pre-Internet glory days of VHS that watching movies was more fun because you had to hunt all the harder for treasure and didn't know everything about everything before it was released?
I'm all for this VHS revival and I'm pleasantly thrilled that kids who are literally less than half my age are hunting down and putting out the very films with which I amused myself in high school.
Back in the '80s, though, VHS was very much a double-edged sword for me, and one of those edges cut very bitterly. For sure, I was thrilled to be able to see all those older films about which I had only read and obsessed over and which otherwise would have been lost to the ages. However, that convenience came at a supremely steep price: it destroyed the theatrical exploitation movie market, and that was essentially what I lived for.
I loved every aspect of going to the movies, beginning with the newspaper ads and the posters, on up to the trailers and theatre atmosphere and, of course, the audience experience. VHS killed that.
Once the home video market dug in, exploitation movies bypassed theatres altogether and, since audiences had the fast-forward option and didn't need to be pinned to their seats, the films got cheaper and dumber and more boring.
The same thing happened to cinema's other outlaw market - art films - which devolved into 'indie' pablum in the '90s before drying up more or less altogether.
Now as a result, theatres are dumping ground where 40-year-old toddlers play superhero video games and then go to see $300 million superhero video games passed off as movies.
Ron Bennington, a satellite radio host of whom I am an enormous fan, recently said, "Every movie theatre should now just change its name to Dave and Buster's."
Has your love of movies - good, bad and bonkers - ever cost you romantically?
The short answer is no. Movie fanaticism is such a core part of who I am that it's on the table immediately, so anyone who's been interested in me has, I suppose, been attracted to that or at least tolerant of it.
Now if you ask if my love of some particular movies has put off some of my partners, that answer is closer to yes. The 2007 French horror masterpiece Martyrs, in particular, really traumatised my wife - which, of the two of us, was the rational reaction to have.
Which are you more excited about: Star Wars: The Force Awakens or Mad Max: Fury Road?
Sorry to be Old Man Grumpus here, but the thought of sitting through either of them sounds like an unbearable chore. CGI and online editing have ruined Hollywood movies for me, so I'll likely pass on the former altogether unless I have to review it, and I'll only catch the latter if it plays at our local drive-in in West Chicago and then I'll hope against hope for the best. Either way, I always love going to the drive-in.
Aside from the inanity and exhaustion of sequels and reboots, it comes down to my dislike of the way modern blockbusters look and feel. The charge of 'video game demo reels' really does stick.
I also can't stand how the technology best serves the most infantilised aspects of modern culture, resulting in nonsense like the Academy Awards expanding their Best Picture nominations from five to 10 after alleged adults bellyached online about a superhero movie getting quote-unquote "snubbed". David Cronenberg addressed that best by saying that no matter how much fans enjoyed The Dark Knight, "it's still Batman running around in his stupid ****** cape".
To more directly answer the question, though: I am definitely not a Star Wars guy, although I really did love what JJ Abrams - who is helming The Force Awakens - did with the 2009 Star Trek movie. My feeling on Star Wars is that once upon a time I loved it like it was my religion - but then I turned 10.
Once I reached double digits in age, I was fully obsessed with the world of adults and the trappings of adulthood, one enviable feature of which very much involved being able to see movies like Mad Max. I haven't looked back since then, nor can I relate to these now multiple generations of grown men who still keep up the light sabre fetish. And I do recognise that there are a few hundred million of them.
As for Fury Road, that trailer comes off to me as limp and bloodless, just a whole lot of shaky-cam digital tumult but - hey, it's branded Mad Max! I found the universal flip-outs of enthusiasm over it a bit hard to take. But, you know, that's me.
Be honest: Do you ever prop yourself up on an elbow in bed, look over lovingly at a copy of Heavy Metal Movies and say, 'I made you'?
Good question. My best answer: "Sort of." I love Heavy Metal Movies, in no small part for the miraculous editing and design work done by Ian Christe, head honcho at [publisher] Bazillion Points, along with the magnificent cover painting by Andrei Bouzikov. Plus I feel enormous gratitude for everyone who helped me along the way.
Even more than that, I live in terror of not working on something new, so I keep my sights set pretty much forward. At present, I am scalp-deep in research for my next Bazillion Points tome, Going All the Way: The Ultimate Guide to Teen Sex Comedies of the VHS Era. So maybe check back with me again in spring 2016, when that book will be next to me in bed - along with other people, I hope.
Heavy Metal Movies is published by Bazillion Points.
