Full disclosure: when I attended Syracuse University in the late 1980s, I knew Steve Puchalski. He worked at the SU library and, as a member of the film board, he helped coordinate the annual all-night cult film festivals. Every month or so he'd leave copies of Slimetime, his green-covered Xeroxed midnight-movie review zine, in the lobbies of various campus buildings underneath the Army recruiting posters. In 1989 Steve was accused of using library equipment to put out Slimetime (in a bizarre footnote, the guy who turned him in would later be charged in an on-campus murder) and he ceased publishing for a while. Eventually Steve returned with an annual zine, Shock Cinema, and within a few years Steve left Syracuse for New York, where as a buyer for Kim's Videos his job is to purchase whatever offbeat videos tickle his fancy.

The best of Slimetime has now been preserved in this highly readable volume, covering over 400 films ranging from The Best of Gumby to the Godzilla canon. Puchalski has also included three well-researched genre essays on biker, blaxploitation and psychedelic films respectively. Low-budget (or, in a few cases, no-budget) horror and science fiction films dominate the book. His favorite film is The Monkees' lone cinematic effort, 1968's Head: "Not just a good film, not just a weird film, this is one of the most cleverly conceived masterworks of the LSD era."

Puchalski is the Hunter S. Thompson of the midnight-movie scene, savaging the incompetent and exalting the best in gloriously profane language (his review of Rabid Grannies begins, "When it comes to Troma Team releases, aren't you getting tired of saying, 'What a great title! What a hilarious ad campaign! And what a shitty movie!'?"). Slimetime is also a poignant elegy to the now long-defunct Times Square movie scene; most of its theaters have closed and most of these films now go directly to video. "[S]itting in your living room, watching a video could never overshadow the pure joy of seeing Fred Williamson kick Whitey's ass on a big screen."

I have only a few complaints with the book: while Puchalski peppers his reviews with many original newspaper ads for these films, Slimetime does cry out for actual movie stills — especially in the genre essay section, with 27 pages of straight text unrelieved by pictures. The worst problem is that there aren't any addresses of the video distributors across America that offer these movies via mail-order, information Puchalski regularly provides in Shock Cinema. Face it, you won't find Bloodsucking Freaks, Invasion of the Bee Girlsor The Wild Women of Wongo at your neighborhood Blockbuster.

On the whole, however, Slimetime is a satisfying, generous look at an underappreciated and often misunderstood slice of American pop culture. Like the films reviewed between its covers, this book may take a little effort to locate but, just like these films, it's more than worth it.

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