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The Video Watchdog Book by Tim Lucas. 392 pages. Video Watchdog, Ohio, $20.
Video Watchdog magazine. Bimonthly Subscriptions: $24 a year. P.O. Box 5283, Cincinnati, Ohio 45205-0283.
The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema edited by Paul Hammond. Polygon, Edinburgh, U.K., app. $19.
Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Bunuel by Jose de la Colina and Tomas Perez Turrent; edited and translated by Paul Lenti. Marsilio, New York, $24.
At first glance, and taken entirely on its own, Tim Lucas' The Video Watchdog Book seems like nothing more than ideal incidental (or bathroom, if you will) reading for the dedicated cineaste-cum-videophile; not as sublimely cranky and enlightening as Herman Weinberg's collected "Coffee, Brandy and Cigars" columns, perhaps, but in its own specialized way highly diverting. As conceived by Lucas in 1985, when he was an editor at the now defunct Video Times, the Watchdog column functioned as just that--a list of caveats to video renters of certain films and their cassette and broadcast counterparts. Initially this seems like a game anyone can play. When the video version of Penelope Spheeris' Wayne's World botched the guitar-stop "Stairway to Heaven" gag by substituting some offkey notes for the song's opening, I wasn't particularly surprised--if the choice is between saving a few bucks and maintaining a film's integrity, a good number of video companies opt for Plan A. And instances like these were, and remain, plentiful enough to provide Lucas and his correspondents profitable mining for the next millennium or so.
But, as this book of Lucas' collected columns shows, the domain of alternative versions is far more labyrinthine. When Video Times folded, Lucas took the Watchdog to Gorezone and concentrated it on his preferred genre, horror--or, as he would have it, "fantastic" cinema. The internationalist bent he applied to his investigations brought to the fore films so egregiouslv tampered with by producers and worldwide distributors that not even a phalanx of preservationists could reconstruct their definitive versions. The three distinctly different video editions of Dario Argento's Profondo rosso that Lucas unearths in his August '87 Fangoria article (his "audition" piece for Gorezone, reprinted in the book) represent only the very tip of a most peculiar iceberg. It was only a matter of time before the...