Heads up, manly movie lovers! Put down those barbells, snap open a brewsky, and crack the cover of The Manly Movie Guide! You won't be sorry. David Everitt and Harold Schechter point out the best, steer you away from the worst, and watch for the steamiest and most gratuitously gory films in every genre imaginable. You'll find chapters devoted to Westerns, science fiction movies, war pictures, action-adventure flicks, and martial-arts extravaganzas, not to mention foreign films, dramas, and even musicals and romances! The best thing about this book is the bold sense of humor with which the authors champion their cause, rejecting "allegations of sexism and xenophobia as the vicious propaganda of godless feminists and pseudo-intellectual foreigners." In Everitt and Schechter's lights, Moby Dick is "about one man's dream--to turn an awesome white whale into a vat of lamp oil." Dracula is "a take-charge guy and natural leader who commands the respect of everyone he meets, mainly by robbing them of their will and transforming them into soulless vampiric slaves. The chicks really dig him too." And leave it to authors of this book to classify Martin Scorsese's gangster epic GoodFellas as a comedy! Gentlemen, with this book in your shopping cart, you'll never again accidentally rent chick flicks like The River Wild (which has a deceptively manly title) and The Bridges of Madison County (which deceptively stars manly Clint Eastwood). --Raphael Shargel



In the search for quality entertainment, a man must be heavily armed against the snobbery and derision of a Leonard Maltin or a Janet Maslin. Here, at last, is a movie reference guide that doesn't look down its nose at action films, but actually celebrates the genre. Based on rock-hard decades of macho wisdom, The Manly Movie Guide is your ticket to movies that shoot first and ask if it makes sense later. Yet this masterful compendium goes way beyond Arnold, Sly, and Bruce. While it does list hundreds of your favorite films and categories, The Manly Movie Guide is far more than just a collection of capsulized reviews. Like the brawniest heroes, this book has wit, sensitivity, and a real brainy heart. Not to mention the guts to use them all with extreme prejudice. Part movie reference, part pop culture guide, part humor and part homage, The Manly Movie Guide is a must for film fans of every gender and testosterone level.