Title : Every ’70s Book Review: Weirdumentary
link : Every ’70s Book Review: Weirdumentary
Every ’70s Book Review: Weirdumentary
Welcome to what I believe is the first-ever book review on Every ’70s Movie, occasioned by the discovery of a volume dedicated to one of my fave ’70s-cinema subsets. Published last year by Feral House, Weirdumentary: Ancient Aliens, Fallacious Prophecies, and Mysterious Monsters from 1970s Documentaries is author Gary D. Rhodes’s affectionate survey of movies and TV shows centering pseudoscience, shameless projects that present speculation about sensationalistic topics as nonfiction or a close approximation thereof. Longtime readers of this blog may recall my fondness for shlockumentaries from Sunn Classics (and various other production companies) about the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, and their ilk. Seemingly all of these projects are catalogued and critiqued in Weirdumentary, a heavily illustrated paperback with, appropriately enough, a big footprint (it’s nearly 8.5 by 11 inches and it sprawls past 300 pages). If you’ve ever longed for a directory explaining the difference between Beyond Belief (1976), World Beyond Death (1976), Journey into the Beyond (1977), and Beyond and Back (1978), then Weirdumentary deserves real estate on your bookshelf.
A media professor, occasional filmmaker, and PhD, Rhodes fell in love with pseudoscience movies and TV shows as a kid in the ’70s, so Weirdumentary is partly a nostalgia trip, partly a semi-scholarly exercise, and partly a quest to reach the top of an obsessive-compulsive mountain. (It’s not lost on me that the same descriptors could be applied to Every ’70s Movie.) Weirdumentary comprises reviews of movies and TV shows that were, for the most part, dismissed upon their original release as slop pandering to the public’s Me Decade preoccupation with all things paranormal. Outliers such as Oscar winner The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971) gained cultural legitimacy, but more typical of the fad is Aliens from Spaceship Earth (1977), an obscure doc hosted by Scottish singer Donovan. Hence the utility of Rhodes opining why viewers should skip Aliens from Spaceship Earth and check out Mysteries from Beyond Earth (1975) instead. The latter doc was hosted by William Shatner with characteristic vigor, and Shatner’s frequent costar Leonard Nimoy is well-represented in Weirdumentary because of several chapters about the 1976-1982 series In Search Of . . . One of the pleasures of Weirdumentary is discovering how many notable figures from that era hosted pseudoscience programs—not just usual suspects Rod Serling and Orson Welles, but also Robert Conrad, Samantha Eggar, Jack Palance, Omar Sharif, and more.
Although the book’s scope is more impressive than its style, I’m empathetic to the challenges Rhodes faced while conceiving and researching this book. Firstly, because so many of the projects he covers were created half a century ago as quick cash grabs, tracking down participants and production records would have been a years-long endeavor rife with disappointment and frustration. Secondly, in the spirt of the author’s predilection for goofy puns, Rhodes faced a cross-Rhodes when deciding how to approach the text. Silly or sober? He chose the former, delivering breezy remarks full of asides, jokes, and what can generously be described as wordplay. Snark aside, this was a legitimate conundrum. Had Rhodes strived to create a rigorous film-history document, an academic approach might have clashed with the frivolous nature of his subject matter. Nonetheless, flippancy is a weak foundation for a tome of this size—the deep scholarship of Stephen R. Bissette’s excellent introduction is largely absent from the main text, and whenever Rhodes weaves in background about how a particular project got made, his lighthearted style benefits from the counterweight of solid data.
At its worst, Weirdumentary is disposable comment-board banality. At its best, Weirdumentary is a blissed-out viewing journal created by a superfan, with enthusiasm compensating for a lack of heft (and for frequent lapses into juvenile prose). Either way, it’s an undemanding book, better suited to occasional perusal than a straight-through read—which might be just the ticket for a casual fan of this only-in-the-’70s genre. Whatever its shortcomings, I’m glad Weirdumentary exists, and I’m hard-pressed to argue the point that its subject matter deserved weightier treatment.
thus Article Every ’70s Book Review: Weirdumentary
that is all articles Every ’70s Book Review: Weirdumentary This time, hopefully can provide benefits to all of you. Okay, see you in another article posting.
You now read the article Every ’70s Book Review: Weirdumentary with the link address https://allfilmthere.blogspot.com/2026/07/every-70s-book-review-weirdumentary.html
0 Response to "Every ’70s Book Review: Weirdumentary"
Post a Comment