Synopsis:
This massive study on action movies and stars from around the world, from the 1960s to the present, is filled with more than a thousand in-depth movie reviews that cover every action star who’s crossed over from the world of martial arts, sports, professional wrestling, and stunt work. Exploding with beautiful images, exclusive interviews, and a thorough action star index, this one-of-a-kind movie reference book and comprehensive fan guide features reviews by the author, Zack Carlson (Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film), Vern (Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal and Yippie Ki-Yay Moviegoer!), Mike McBeardo McPadden (Heavy Metal Movies and Going All the Way: The Ultimate Guide to Teen Sex Comedies of the VHS Era), and several others. It is a quintessential tribute to the men and women who have left their mark in the action and martial arts film genres.
What We Thought:
The Good, The Tough & The Deadly is an absolute beast of a book. As a fan of action movies, this will get opened, re-read and used as a reference for years to come.
As someone who grew up on Stallone, Arnie, Chuck Norris and the like and as someone who runs a review site that handles a lot of straight-to-video action flicks, this book is pretty spot on. It misses some, but I’ll get to that in a bit. It alphabetized action movies from the 1960’s till the release of this book and gives you a bit about the movie, some pictures and more.
The pictures alone are worth the cost of the book. There’s movie stills, rare posters and more. The author and others involved give you a little bit of what they think about the movies and some even have blurbs from the talent themselves.
Once you pick it up, it’s hard to put down. It would take days to keep track of the films you’ve seen and the ones you haven’t that are listed in the book. I know there will be a lot of movies I’ll start looking for because of this.
You can also tell the people involved genuinely like movies. I find a lot of books about movies come across as pretentious or very biased one way or the other. Sure most of this book is opinion, but the writers seem to enjoy these movies and aren’t just trashing something for the sake of trashing it.
Of course with a book this size, there have to be guidelines and limitations. There are some big named films that don’t make their rules for inclusion that I’d consider action movies. There’s no Indiana Jones films. The Matrix films don’t make the cut or the first four Die Hard movies. Mad Max doesn’t make it either. I don’t know how you pass over Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford movies in a book about action flicks!
Even without those franchises, it’s still hard to not love The Good, The Tough & The Deadly. We here at The Nerds Templar are big supporters of Asian films so we love seeing Donnie Yen, the Ip Man films, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and others get some ink along with Hollywood films. We also love guys like Dolph Lundgren, JCVD and Seagal and they get many words written about their films. Because of all that, the book is…
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, A MUST OWN!
The Nerds Templar 