Vanity Fear

A Pretentious A**hole's Guide to B-Movie Bullsh*t

The hero of this tale.

The hero of this tale.

When Allan Mott was 10 years-old, he discovered a section of the library dedicated to books about film. At first drawn to these works by his precocious love of cinema, he quickly became obsessed with them when he discovered that many featured surreptitious pictures of attractive naked actresses. This discovery fortuitously combined the twin obsessions of his young life: The fascinating history of narrative filmmaking and boobs.

Allan quickly figured out that the books most likely to offer the best of both these worlds were all about the same subject—low budget exploitation movies. And thus—before he had even actually seen any of the movies he read about—a love affair was born.

And not only has that love affair continued, but it has only grown stronger over the following decades. A few years back he was allowed to publish his own book on the subject, the imaginatively titled Scary Movies, which documented the creation, reaction and relevance of six of his favourite horror movies. It remains the best of the 12 books he’s managed to publish thus far. 

As a film theorist (which is a pretentious way to say that he writes really long reviews where the actual quality of the films are usually irrelevant) Allan operates under the belief that anyone can come up with interesting insights while deconstructing Citizen Kane, Persona, The Seventh Seal, 8 ½, Badlands or Breathless, but it takes imagination, hard work and a twisted personality to do the same with Skatetown USA, Don’t Go in the House, Cheerleaders Wild Weekend or Disorderlies.

Which brings us to Vanity Fear, which was once called The House of Glib before Allan got tired of constantly telling people what “glib” meant. Its purpose is to serve as a repository for any cinematic observation Allan wishes to make that is unlikely to ever be printed anywhere else. In practice this means anything too long for Flick Attack, too not a book for Bookgasm, and too not-Canadian for Canuxploitation.

He wishes he was able to update more often that he does, but the dude loves to party.