Sheer Filth!: Bizarre Cinema, Weird Literature, Strange Music, Extreme Art Paperback – May 15, 2014

I expected more as far as intteresting sleaze movies/books/comics articles, but it was okay....

I was disappointed.

Sheer Filth! was a British pop culture fanzine which lasted for 9 issues published between 1987 and 1990. This volume repackages the articles and reviews from those issues together with some material later published in other magazines. England in the late ‘80s was in the grip of a moral panic about so-called “video nasties”. Film censorship had been tightened up in 1985 and many horror and exploitation films which had been fairly easily available in the early days of video rental ended up on a banned list. In this climate a rebellious fan community flourished with home-made zines as their voice.While most of the well-known fanzines concentrated on horror cinema, David Flint’s Sheer Filth! also covered art, music and literature, and cinematically branched out into other areas from porn to art films.What is wonderful about this volume is that it captures the fanzine scene as it was. Things are different today. At the time Flint did his interview with David F. Friedman, Something Weird Video were yet to start re-releasing his films on home video, and Friedman’s autobiography A Youth in Babylon was only just about to be published. Another interviewee Norman J. Warren is now gaining renewed appreciation as his films are released on blu-ray. Part of the thrill of these magazines was to read about something you hoped to be able to see that was not easily available. (And then there are those things you read about and were glad you didn’t see - videos by noise musicians who apparently got a puerile delight in accompany their unlistenable music with unwatchable images of corpse abuse.)The book is well-illustrated with black-and-white photos, ad mats, etc. Beware though, some of the photos are X-rated. You can’t say the title of the book didn’t warn you.There is nothing surprising about the fact that there is an article on Betty Page and one on Ed Wood, Jr.. What is surprising though is the serious four page review of a less well-known Robert Bresson film about nuns from 1943 - Les Anges du pêchê (aka The Angels of Sin).There are, of course, plenty of capsule film reviews, but equally interesting are the book reviews of such oddities as Joyce McKinney and the Manacled Mormon by Anthony Delano, Mirror Books, 1978 (a story which will be familiar to anyone who has seen Errol Morris’s documentary Tabloid, 2010) and The Illustrated Book of Sexual Records by G. L. Simons, Virgin, 1982.Coverage of the world of porn includes reviews of The Devil in Miss Jones, Behind the Green Door (which gets savagely panned) and some films starring Italian porno parliamentarian Cicciolina, and an interview with Annie Sprinkle.Annie Sprinkle isn’t the only sex therapist interviewed. One of the most interesting features is a talk with Tuppy Owens, founder of The Outsiders, a group where people with social or physical disabilities could find sexual partners. The Sex Maniac’s Ball was a major yearly party held to raise money for the group.While you would no doubt find plenty of coverage of Pee-Wee Herman and Linnea Quigley elsewhere, only in a British sleaze fanzine from the late 1980s would you find a review of The Sexy Secrets of the Kissogram Girls (1985) (dir. Peter Kay).Sheer Filth! is a delightful book to wallow in!

Every now and then a book comes along that provides a perfect snapshot of an era. Published between 1987 and 1989, the fanzine Sheer Filth offered a potent mix of bizarre and transgressive film and book reviews, strange and outré music coverage, extreme art, passionate (often rabid) feature articles and fascinating interviews with icons of cult film and entertainment.Under the guiding hand of editor David Flint, Sheer Filth managed 9 issues before being put to bed in 1990; the editor went on to (in his words) "bigger, glossier projects" (which include the seminal Fab Press book  Ten Years of Terror: British Horror Films of the 1970s  written with Harvey Fenton). But in those 9 issues Sheer Filth was the breeding ground for a number of prominent writers, who, like Flint, went on to bigger things; these writers included David Kerekes, John Hill and David Slater, amongst others; and the fanzine itself led to Headpress, Divinity and Sexadelic, also edited by Flint.Fenton and Flint have collected together those 9 issues of Sheer Filth into one sleaze-tastic volume; it's a glorious read, bringing with it an authentic whiff of late-1980s anti-censorship sexual politics.Flint introduces the volume with a fascinating account of the rise of the fanzine in the wake of the Video Nasty furore and the tightening of censorship under Thatcher. Mags like Sheer Filth, Whiplash Smile, Bleeder's Digest, and Rats in the Cellar in the UK provided sleaze fans with a glimpse of the forbidden and the obscure, stuff that the mainstream publications would never touch (Sheer Filth brought the world the first coverage of Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik and of the now cult classic Deathbed). As Flint says in his introduction, "The fanzines were part of what felt like a movement... of transgressive culture". Mags like Sheer Filth were a backlash against the moral conservatism of the 1980s: an attempt to blast open doors to a more open culture by celebrating taboo subject matter - revelling in a world of "Sixties garage punk, fetish clubs, horror film festivals, illicit porn, industrial music, underground cinema, true crime, performance art, occult dabbling, extreme literature and general weirdness."Sheer Filth provides a good dose of all of these things in its 240 pages: Cathal Tohill provides a comprehensive career retrospective of the Sultan of Sleaze, film producer David F. Friedman, complemented by an in-depth interview of the same by Flint; Dave Slater reviews the extreme circus of Archaos; David Kerekes visits an exhibition of transgressive films depicting the body in extremis at Manchester's Cornerhouse; Ian Kerkhoff provides a scholarly account of Italian porn star/ first lady of the Italian Parliament, La Cicciolina, in action; Tohill catalogues the 1940s-60s cheesecake bondage movies of Irving Klaw; and there is much, much more besides.In its celebration of graphic sleaze Sheer Filth has a certain nostalgic value in these access-all-areas internet times; but back in in the 1980s, Flint would have faced falling foul of the Obscene Publications Act with articles like `Some Reflections on the Disappearance of the Cumshot'. And lest we forget just how pernicious the moral reformers of the time really were, Flint reminds us of a House of Commons motion tabled in the early 1990s to widen the obscenity laws so as to prohibit the publication of De Sade's Juliette - this was a novel written in 1797!But Sheer Filth is an important book not just because it provides a record of the battles against censorship by the `unpopular' culture of the 1980s-90s; it also preserves some rare and fascinating interviews that would otherwise be destined to sink without a trace. Within its pages, Flint interviews cult figures like Hershell G. Lewis (giving a rare interview on his nudie films); Buttgereit; Samuel Z. Arkoff, Brit horror maestro Norman J. Warren; old time `nudie cutie' Pamela Green; and post porn modernist, Annie Sprinkle. And what mainstream magazine would feature French auteur Robert Bresson alongside Pee Wee Herman in its pages?Flint and Fenton are to be congratulated for this wonderful compilation of Sheer Filth. More than just a catalogue of depravity: it's an important cultural document. Let us hope similar fanzine collections (Headcheese and Chainsaws, anyone?) are forthcoming.

Covering low brow culture but never dumb, Sheer Filth! wrote about everything from true crime novels to industrial music and interviewed porn stars alongside cult filmmakers. Editor David Flint published Sheer Filth! for nine irreverent issues, throwing in dirty cartoons along with film and book reviews. Where else can you read about both SPK and Samuel Z. Arkoff? This paperback edition compiles almost everything from those nine issues in one place. Plenty to read and look at, all in glorious black and white. My only issue is I feel this book would have been better served in a magazine-sized format. Still, good luck getting any of the originals. Hard to beat at this price.

I own all 9 original fanzines(totally worn out). Therefore I was really disappointed because everything that made sheer filth a joy was edited out of the book. David flint said keep the faith shame !

Documentation is the first step before seeing rare, obscure and genre films. This publication is heaven on earth.

Good old fashioned, wholesome family reading. This now sits on my shelf, in between Readers Digest Animal Behaviour Vol. 1, and Little Johnny Appleseed's alphabet fun book. It has everything; sex, violence, sadism, smut, pulp, dirt, fetish, humour. To round off, very educational and respectful of its origins.

sheer filth as expected