"B" MOVIES by Don Miller, with an introduction by Leonard Maltin No one ever paid much attention to the bottom half of double-features in the 1930s and '40s-except movie enthusiast Don Miller, who had a photographic memory. This unique and invaluable book traces the history of Hollywood's cinematic step-children, the low-budget movies that came from fly-by-night producers as well as the major studios. From Bela Lugosi to Charlie Chan, they're all here in this comprehensive and entertaining text-a resource that's been out-of-print for many years. Whether your interest is the early work of directors like Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher or the roots of film noir, you'll find what you're looking for in Don Miller's lively, encyclopedic book.

In the impoverished outskirts of French cities, known as the banlieues, minority communities are turning to American culture, history, and theory to make their own voices, cultures, and histories visible. Filmmakers have followed suit, turning to Hollywood genre conventions to challenge notions of identity, belonging, and marginalization in mainstream French film. French B Movies proposes that French banlieue films, far from being a fringe genre, offer a privileged site from which to understand the current state of the French film industry in an age of globalization. This gritty style appears in popular arthouse films such as Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and Bande de filles (Girlhood) along with the major Netflix hit series Lupin. David Pettersen traces how, in these works and others, directors fuse features of banlieue cinema with genre formulas associated with both Hollywood and Black cultural models, as well as how transnational genre hybridizations, such as B movies, have become part of the ecosystem of the French film industry. By combining film analysis, cultural history, critical theory, and industry studies, French B Movies reveals how featuring banlieues is as much about trying to imagine new identities and production models for French cinema as it is about representation.

Since its inception in 1992, the Sci-Fi Channel (later rebranded as SYFY) has aired more than 500 network-produced or commissioned films. Campy and prolific, the network churned out one low-budget film after another, finally finding its zenith in the 2013 release of Sharknado. With unpretentious charm and a hearty helping of commodified nostalgia, the Sharknado franchise briefly ruled the cultural consciousness and temporarily transformed SYFY's original films from cult fringe to appointment television. Naturally, the network followed up with a steady stream of sequels and spin-offs, including Lavalantula and its sequel, 2 Lava 2 Lantula! This collection of essays is the first to devote critical attention to SYFY's original film canon, both pre- and post-Sharknado. In addition to unpacking the cultural, historical and critical underpinnings of the monsters at the heart of SYFY's classic creature features, the contributors offer a variety of approaches to understanding and interrogating these films within the broader contexts of ecocriticism, monster theory, post-9/11 criticism, and neocolonialism. Providing a further entry point for future scholarship, an appendix details a thorough filmography of SYFY's original films from 1992 to 2022.

Exploding off the page with over 1,000 of the best examples of exploitation, grindhouse, and pulp film poster design comes The Art of the B-Movie Poster, a collection of incredible posters from low-budget films from the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Once relegated to the underground and midnight movie circuit, these films and their bombastic advertisements are experiencing a surge of mainstream popularity driven by fans appreciative of the artistic skill, distinctive aesthetic, and unabashed sensationalism they relied on to make a profit, with the quality of the poster often far surpassing that of the film itself. The book celebrates this tradition with sections divided into "moral panic" films, action, horror, sci-fi, and of course, sex, each introduced with short essays by genre experts such as Kim Newman, Eric Schaffer, Simon Sheridan, Vern, and author Stephen Jones, winner of the Horror Writer's Association 2015 Bram Stoker Award for Non-Fiction. Edited by Adam Newell and featuring an introduction by author and filmmaker Pete Tombs, The Art of the B-Movie Poster is a loving tribute to the artwork and artists that brought biker gangs, jungle girls, James Bond rip-offs and reefer heads to life for audiences around the world.

Leading philosophers reconsider the philosophical destiny of education.

"Reflections Of A 'B' Movie Junkie" is a tribute to the old "B" Movies of the Saturday Matinees of yesteryear. Actually, it is more of a homage to them, or at least (6) genres of those film types, that were so prevalent back in primarily the '40's and '50's. Their research and discussion, however, in some instances, dates all the way back to the beginning of the "talkies" of motion picture content, and can extend in the other direction, into the early '70s. These (6) genres include the popular "B"-Western, The Comedy Teams, The Jungle Adventures, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Horror and the Serial, or Chapter Plays, so popular with the week-end Matinee crowds back then. These film-types filled up our Saturday afternoons (and evenings) with exciting adventure, curious wonder, spine-tingling horror, and non-stop action. Often filmed on a shoe-string budget, and in a limited time-frame, many of these "classics" came to be looked upon by many fans as being so truly bad, that they were good, (in a bad sort of way) ! They are thus categorized, reviewed and discussed, for the most part, in a lovingly personal style, especially when compared to the film types we are subjected to in today's market. They had their place in film history, and that time is long since gone. But, for some of us, they have never been equaled, which, for others, may indeed be a good thing.