Brian Thomas watched three movies a day last year. As he worked 14-hour days to complete the guide to Asian action films he was writing, the West Rogers Park apartment he shares with his wife, Kristin, and their pets began to overflow with videotapes and DVDs. “I didn’t see my wife much,” he admits, “although she watched some with me.” When they needed a break from the mess, they’d go out to the movies.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Thomas saw his first Japanese monster movie, Godzilla Versus the Thing, on TV while growing up in Kane County in the late 1960s. “A lot of these movies had just the kind of things I wanted to see and wasn’t getting,” he says. “You’d see American science-fiction movies and want to see the big monsters breaking up cities and fighting each other, and a lot of times it was just a lot of scientists standing around and talking.” Later, he got hooked on kung fu flicks like Enter the Dragon and Five Fingers of Death, in which “the fight scenes are the point of the whole movie.”
His career as a critic began almost by accident, when he started reviewing science fiction, horror, and action movies for the newsletter of the Psychotronic Film Society in 1985. “I was going to early meetings at Mike Flores’s apartment and Del Close’s place,” he says. “I was showing up at shows and talking about movies, and they said, ‘Hey, why don’t you write some of that stuff down?’” The experience led to work for other publications, including Cinescape magazine and the VideoHound line of film guides. (He stopped drawing comics when the industry fell apart several years ago, and until he started making a living as a writer he supplemented his income by designing Web sites.) A few years ago he pitched VideoHound the idea of a book on horror movies, but the imprint already had one of those. Instead, said the publishers, how about a guide to Asian action movies?
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
