The most dazzlingly insane film reference book of all time, DESTROY ALL MOVIES!!! is an informative, hilarious and impossibly complete guide to every goddamn appearance of a punk (or new waver!) to hit the screen in the 20th Century. This wildly comprehensive eyeball-slammer features A-to-Z coverage of over 1100 feature films from around the world, as well as dozens of exclusive interviews with the cast/creators of crucial titles like Repo Man, Return of the Living Dead and The Decline of Western Civilization. Also examined are countless prime examples of straight-to-VHS slasher trash, Brooklyn junkie masterpieces, Filipino breakdancing fairytales, no-budget post-apocalyptic epics and movies that shouldn’t even have been released (many of which have never been written about online or in print!). In defiance of standard film guide formality, this book is recklessly infused with high quality, full-color reproductions of theatrical posters, film stills, production designs, international advertising art and candid shots from an era in confrontational cinema that will never be equaled or forgotten.
Everyone from Richard Hell to Penelope Spheeris to Ian MacKaye contribute their uncensored reminiscences from the front lines of a revolution, plus conversations with punk legends like Lee Ving of Fear, X’s Exene Cervenka & John Doe and Keith Morris of Black Flag and The Circle Jerks. You’ll also read harrowing first-person tales from the punk filmmaking trenches courtesy directors Allan Arkush (Rock ‘n’ Roll High School), Mark Lester (Class of 1984), Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl), Amos Poe & Ivan Kral (Blank Generation), Susan Seidelman (Smithereens), Brian Trenchard-Smith (Dead End Drive-In), Wolfgang Buld (Punk in London) and many, many more “low culture” luminaries. (see INTERVIEWS for a complete list)
In the late ‘70s, Punk Rock and its followers ambushed the world with nuclear force. It was an unprecedented phenomenon that infested radios, print and culture as a whole. Of all its shell-shocked witnesses, the least prepared was Hollywood, who viewed the movement as a walking epidemic of self-abusive, garbage-eating, candy-colored manimals ripe for marketable stereotyping. The results were hilarious, as lowbrow cinema was forever altered in the shadows of 20-inch mohawks and steel-spiked wardrobes. Meanwhile, punk participants like Spheeris and Alex Cox managed to document the emerging outbreak in a more humanistic light, creating enduring visions of a new breed of youth through blazing music documentaries and innovative narrative assaults.
DESTROY ALL MOVIES!!! nails down both sides of the spectrum with superhuman research, vicious precision and electrically charged stills and images, and is the first and final definitive armchair roadmap to punk and new wave on celluloid. Five years in the making, this pulse-bursting monument to lowbrow cultural obsession is a must for all film fanatics, music maniacs, anti-fashion mutants, ’80s nostalgists, sleazoids, cop-killers and spazzmatics!!
