Monster! #3: Volume 4 Paperback – 20 Mar. 2014

Forget SFX. Forget Fangoria.Monster! is a spin-off from its big brother the excellent magazine of exploitation movies, Weng's Chop. It is purely devoted to monster movies. That is MONSTERS pure and simple: monster movies. Got that? No slashers allowed. And this slim 60 page magazine could have been made for me. I loved monsters long before horror. I still remember, age around 9, seeing Ray Harryhausen's giant stop-motion octopus in It Came From Beneath The Sea at a cinema in Scarborough while on holiday. I remember exactly where I was when I saw King Kong (still my favourite all time movie ever) for the first time -in a Liverpool cinema on a double bill with, bizarrely, Don't Lose Your Head (before it gained the Carry On hyphen prefix).Monster! (don't forget the exclamation mark) is a monster movie lovers dream.Despite being a slim little cheaply produced (printed by Amazon, as is WC) paperback with lots of photos, there is also plenty of reading material to enjoy. The content ranges from in depth looks at cruddy black and white creature features from the 50's -this issue opens with Frankenstein's Daughter (1958). There's a special feature about Bigfoot movies. There are ongoing looks at Asian monster cinema with a particular focus on Hong Kong insane excesses -I ordered four reviewed in the previous issue. The reviews section itself ranges from Zaat (aka Blood waters of Dr Z (1971) to last year's kaiju fest Pacific Rim. And at the end it lists the availability or not of movies reviewed, though it isn't completely accurate. I was able to order the four HK movies from HK dealers via a certain well know auction website it would be tactless to name here. The writers are all highly knowledgable people who really do know their stuff and how to put it over.There've been three issues so far this year, all excellent making this modestly priced little zine an absolute bargain.Love monsters? You'll love Monster!