BOOK REVIEW: The All-Night Video Guide- SLASHERS 70's & 80's

The last time a book like this was put out, with the same kind of absolute love for its subject matter, would have to have been John McCarty's The Official Splatter Movie Guide. That iconic tome was published in 1989, right at the death knell of the Splatter Movie craze. McCarty accurately predicted the future of the Splatter film, in that the genre would worm its way into mainstream cinema. It did tenfold, probably beyond what McCarty envisioned back in 1989.

Rob Freese's All-Night Video Guide: Slashers 70's & 80's, grabs that niche time where, just about every week, it seemed that there was a new movie released featuring a killer with a knife, machete, chainsaw, axe, or other implement of death, dispatching young, good-looking, teenagers portrayed by actors in their late 20's (or beyond!)

Where McCarty left off in 1989 with his guide, Freese picks up, backtracks, and gets more in-depth, albeit with forty years of hindsight, into just about every slasher film that made a dent in our psyche during the heady late 1970s and 1980s when the studio system discovered their was significant money to be made by showcasing 90-minute slaughter shows. The studios weren't wrong. Teenagers in the 80s loved watching people their age being murdered, as long as it wasn't them!

What Freese does here with this review guide is add a distinct personal spin to what he watched. This isn't a truncated movie guide looking back on horror films released four decades ago. Rob Freese was there. He went to the theaters, rented the VHS tapes, and devoured every single minute of each film, good or bad, and he writes about them all with a professional admiration for the effort.

Peppered within each review are nuggets of fact on each release that can't be grabbed from some AI application or Google search. You know that Rob Freese has watched each of the films he reviews in this book... multiple times. Your reviewer doesn't possess that same meddle! But the author truly loves his subject matter and takes no shortcuts. Expertly crafted additional research is provided with each release, and it all comes across as information that Freese already knows; he wants you to know it as well, and he executes it all quite brilliantly.

The All-Night Video Guide: SLASHERS 70's & 80's serves as the "heir apparent" to what John McCarty gave birth to with The Splatter Movie Guide in 1989. The book will appeal to all modern-day aficionados of the bygone era of the slasher film. Still, it speaks directly to people of the age who bought tickets to these movies and religiously showed up at their local video store every Friday for the new releases. It is genuinely a movie guide that can bring together generations of slasher movie film buffs while satisfying everyone.

The All-Night Video Guide: Slashers 70's & 80's is now available via

MakeFlix and Amazon.

DISCLOSURE: This book by Rob Freese is not published by It Came From Hollywood, but by a separate publishing company under agreement with the book's author.

This review was written by Paul Mcvay, who created the book cover for The All-Night Video Guide: Slashers 70's & 80's, but who does not share in the profits of the sales of the book. This review was crafted in the spirit of promoting a colleague's work.