This book looks low rent. It took me a while, but I eventually picked it up on Amazon. It was just an inevitability that I would own this so I bit the bullet. The interior is even worse than the exterior, but I'll be damned if Mike Seate isn't a damn good author! Shocking, but the motor-mouth responsible for Cafe Racer Magazine and Cafe Racer TV is actually a really eloquent scribe.
The cool thing about this book is that it's written like a chronological history book. Where as the Big Book of Biker Flicks is simply a review/synopsis of each movie in order, this book strings everything together with a sort of narrative and social commentary. It flows well.
The layout leaves much to be desired. It's more shocking for the fact that someone laid this out in the year 2000. It looks like an Economics text book from middle school. There's no excuse for any book to look this dry. It has no personality. But thankfully it is legible and readable, and the content more than makes up for the poor Art Direction.
The book is printed B&W, and even in 2000 Mike Seate was watching VHS instead of DVD. The images of the movies are VHS covers instead of movie posters. What the hell? At the time, many of these were probably only available as old VHS, but still... the posters are WAY fucking cooler than the VHS covers and should have been sourced for this publication.
Surprisingly, I definitely recommend this book, but only to bikers and film nerds. But mostly bikers. Mike's writing is top shelf. I'd love to see this updated with a brand new layout and new content from the last 12 years. Mike, get to it!
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