ScreenAnarchy Likes To Read! DESTROY ALL MOVIES Book Review

Consider this a warning. If you fail to immediately purchase a copy of Destroy All Movies a swarm of post-apocalyptic punk rock bikers will kick your door down and ram their fists down your throat. If you fail to read it a minimum of three times from cover to cover within the first week of bringing it home a swarm of post-apocalyptic punk rock bikers will kick your door down and ram their fists down your throat. And if you fail to make all of your friends do the same a swarm of post-apocalyptic punk rock bikers will kick your door down and ram something down your throat but it probably won't be a fist. Now you know what you have to do.

Written and assembled with just as much style and energy as the films it celebrates, Destroy All Movies claims to be the complete guide to punks on film. And with more than one thousand entries contained between its covers, I'd say that boast is correct. If there's a mohawk to be found on screen, that film is in this book. Leather pants and studded bracelets? It's in here. From serious documentaries to bad Star Trek gags, they're all in here. From Hollywood blockbusters to Japanese indies, they're all in here. Capsule reviews of every film ever to include a punk rock characters - plus some New Wavers and the occasional Goth - ever made anywhere in the world that editors Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly and their intrepid team of writers - including familiar faces like Kier-La Janisse and Ant Timpson - were able to track down in a years-long obsessive quest for punk rock supremacy make up the bulk of the book, each of them written from a perspective not so much of scholarly research but of just how punk the punks and the films which contained them were. And adding a bit of perspective are a brace of interviews from the film makers and actual punks involved - names like Richard Hell, Ian MacKaye and many, many more - are scattered throughout.

Reference books are notoriously dull affairs, as a general rule, but Destroy All Movies reads as the literary response to Mark Hartley's work in films like Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed. This is an exhaustive reference work that is every bit as brash and entertaining as its subject matter. It's well written, exhaustively researched and laid out in a gorgeous, colorful package that'll make it a coffee table discussion piece in geek homes around the globe. Or at least it should. Because if there isn't one on your table ... well, you know. Post-apocalyptic biker punks and all that.