Limelight Editions has put out half a dozen If You Like … pop-culture guidebooks over the last year, using everything from The Beatles to The Sopranos as jumping-off points for recommended media, but Katherine Rife’s If You Like Quentin Tarantino … is the most logical of them yet.
Why? Because Tarantino is the perfect subject for such as series, for what are his movies but built-in recommendation lists? They wear their influences on their sleeves, right out in the open. Thus, Rife can feel safe in recommending, say, an Ennio Morricone album, because QT has drawn from that well many a time already.
A filmmaker herself, the Chicago-based Rife has structured the paperback into eight chapters, one for each of his directed features, from Reservoir Dogs 20 years ago (feel old yet?) to next month’s hotly anticipated Django Unchained. Moving chronologically through them, she delivers mini-essays and reviews on flicks and other media that directly match each; thus, she covers crime, noir, blaxploitation, martial arts, Italian horror, biker pics, war epics and spaghetti Westerns at large, with many subgenres peppered about.
She doesn’t always pick the obvious, too; although those are there — say, Sonny Chiba’s Street Fighter trilogy, the first part of which is practically a plot point of True Romance — she also digs down to the obscure, or obscure enough that you’ll curse her when you can’t find the film in print. The lady knows her stuff; depending on what her feet look like, she could be QT’s idea of a perfect woman.
Personally, I love her ain’t-screwin’-’round writing voice, as witnessed by such lines as “Dicks don’t get more dickish than Mike Hammer” or for pegging Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha as “hobosploitation.” That’s new.
Generously but not overly illustrated, the book swims in sidebars, too, in order to suggest some pulp fiction (as in novels, mind you), count down the seminal blaxploitation soundtrack albums, or sludge through the high (low?) points of rape-revenge movies. These shortened bits also serve as quick-fix 101s as such important topics as Wu-Tang Clan, Brian De Palma or Goblin. We all should be as schooled. —Rod Lott
This poorly dubbed (and, therefore, highly entertaining) slice of Bruceploitation tells the true story of Bruce Lee straight up, with no BS — except that the character is never called Bruce, he looks like nothing like Bruce (who didn’t wear a beard) and skirts all the details. In true Hong Kong fashion, the film remains reverent to the legend via distorted facts and wacky-ass sound effects!
The plot of 
You know, when I watch crappy movies that went straight to video and hear ridiculous lines like “I’ll give you a lead enema!” and “I think table 3 could use some nachos,” I often wonder if the screenwriter had illusions his work was headed for the $100-million-budget treatment instead of one just above your average rental fee.
I couldn’t make heads or tails of Jess Franco’s 