FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Cult Film Website Spectacular Optical to launch Book Series with “KID POWER!”
www.spectacularoptical.ca

Film writer and programmer Kier-La Janisse and Canuxploitation scholar Paul Corupe, the team behind cult film and pop culture website Spectacular Optical, are prepping the label’s inaugural anthology book, KID POWER!, about images of child empowerment in film and television. With cover and key art by Austin Sellers, subjects spanning North America, the UK, Australia and beyond, and a diverse array of some of genre criticism’s most unique voices, KID POWER! will be an essential addition to any collector’s bookshelf.

Spectacular price check 50mg viagra Optical Book One: KID POWER! will be launched during Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival in July of this year. The book will be full colour, heavily illustrated throughout, and will be the first canadian online pharmacy in an ongoing series of Spectacular Optical anthology books on cult cinema with an emphasis on supporting Canadian genre and pop culture writers.

The full contents of the book are:

• It’s a Yorkshire Thing: An Interview with David Bradley of KES – by Kier-La Janisse

• After-School Shootout: The Lowry Brothers’ HAWK JONES – by Paul Corupe

• Bad Hair Day: Producer Rock Demers on THE PEANUT BUTTER SOLUTION – by Bret Berg

• Curley and his Gang: The Laughably Short Life of Hal Roach’s Second Kid Comedy Crew – by Zack Carlson

• They Can See In The Dark:  An Interview with Richard Nielsen, Writer/Producer of THE LITTLE VAMPIRE – by Cheryl Singleton

• Motherless Child: The Power and Poetry of THE UGLY LITTLE BOY – by Chris Alexander

• They Let Me Keep a Crocodile: A Conversation with Stephen Rosenberg, Child Star of 1978s JACOB TWO-TWO MEETS THE HOODED FANG– by Zack Carlson

• Memories of THE CHILDREN OF TIMES SQUARE – by Robin Bougie

• Dear Judy: Australian Girlhood Mythologised  – by Briony Kidd

• Cosmic Rays and Mind Travel: Anthony Read’s CHOCKY Trilogy – by Owen Williams

• Knowing is Half the Battle: An Interview with ABC Afterschool Specials Producer Martin Tahse – by Kier-La Janisse

• A Who’s Who of ABC Afterschool Specials – by Kier-La Janisse

• Stinky: Abbott and Costello’s Resident Man-Child – by Robert Dayton

• Motion Picture Purgatory: KENNY, THE KID BROTHER (1988)- by Rick Trembles

• The Dark Side of Disney: An Interview with John Hough and Paul Hough – by Kier-La Janisse (*JUST ADDED!*)

• Kids Flicks Are No Laughing Matter – by Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

• Ann Turner’s CELIA: They Kill Rabbits, Don’t They?- by Briony Kidd

• Nicoletta Elmi: Italian Horror’s Imp Ascendent – by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Craig Martin

An Indiegogo campaign will be launched in late March to fund printing through pre-sales of the book, in regular and collector’s editions. Editions of the book include:

• Regular Edition
• Collector’s Edition (limited to 50, comes with compilation CD)
• Collector’s Set (limited to 20, comes with compilation CD, JACOB TWO-TWO “Child Power” T-shirt and KENNY-inspired skateboard deck designed by Jay Shaw, http://www.kingdomofnonsense.com/)

 COVER ART by Portland-based illustrator and graphic designer Austin Sellers (http://www.austinmadethis.com/):

EDITOR BIOS:

Owner and Editor-in-Chief: Kier-La Janisse
Kier-La Janisse is a film programmer for Fantastic Fest and SF Indie, the founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and Owner/Editor-in-Chief of Spectacular Optical. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival in Vancouver (1999-2005) and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (2005). She has written for Filmmaker, Shindig!, Incite: Journal of Experimental Media, Rue Morgue and Fangoria magazines, has contributed to The Scarecrow Movie Guide (Sasquatch Books, 2004) and Destroy All Movies!! A Complete Guide to Punk on Film (Fantagraphics, 2011), and is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press, 2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012). She is currently working on the book A Song From the Heart Beats the Devil Every Time about children’s programming from 1965-1985.

Managing Editor: Paul Corupe
Since 1999 Paul Corupe has shared his passion for Canada’s film history at Canuxploitation.com, a site recognized as the essential source for uncovering the forgotten films of Canada’s past. He has written about genre film and Canadian cinema in publications including Rue Morgue magazine and Take One: Film and Television in Canada. He has appeared in several documentaries about Canadian film and scripted episodes of Bravo’s On Screen! television series.

ABOUT SPECTACULAR OPTICAL:

Named after the sinister institution in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Spectacular Optical began as an online journal in April of 2011, in anticipation of the Fantasia Film Festival’s 15th Anniversary. An outgrowth of the festival’s seasonal blog, the journal was the festival’s way of connecting with movie-goers on a year-round basis, and nurturing the exciting talents that are a part of the festival’s lineup each year. In fall of 2012, the journal’s affiliation with the Fantasia Film Festival was discontinued, and it was bequeathed to its editor Kier-La Janisse, who has since re-established Spectacular Optical as an independent small-press publisher of collectible film and pop culture books with an emphasis on supporting Canadian genre film writers and designers. In addition to our print books, throughout the year best discount cialis Spectacular Optical will continue to publish articles, essays and interviews with established and emerging genre filmmakers, artists, curators and exhibitors on our website.

For more information, contact Kier-La Janisse at bigsmashproductions@gmail.com

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).