James Chambers

James Chambers hates "Hollywood," most musicals, and post-RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK Steven Spielberg movies; he thinks most movies that come out each year are dookie, and only twice in his lifetime has he agreed with the Oscar for Best Picture (UNFORGIVEN, 1992; RETURN OF THE KING, 2003), which is why he ignores all award shows. He took Tim Burton’s PLANET OF THE APES and Spielberg’s WAR OF THE WORLDS as blatant, direct personal insults, although he has never met either of these directors. And yet he remains a hopeless cinema addict searching for those films that startle, entertain, enlighten, or just plain keep him on the edge of his seat for ninety minutes or more without really blowing it in the end. He most often encounters such movies among the low budget, genre efforts of filmmakers too stylish, inventive, or mad to be entrusted with $150 million dollar budgets and the fate of Scientology on their shoulders.

He has edited more than half a dozen critically lauded reference books on film, including The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, and the Library of Great Filmmakers (including volumes on Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Orson Welles), which he mentions here only to make himself sound accomplished and not to steal the credit rightly due the actual authors of those books who did all the really hard work on them. He also writes fiction — mostly stories about dark and scary things — that has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and he published his first short story collection, The Midnight Hour: Saint Lawn Hill and Other Tales (with illustrator Jason Whitley) in 2005. He is online at www.jameschambersonline.com.

Reviews:
DUNWICH HORROR, THE
HYPNOTIST, THE
PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES
THEY LIVE

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