As befits the BFI Palgrave Macmillan imprint in the cinema arena, the reader can customarily be assured of provocative and unorthodox film reading – which is very much the case with I.Q, Hunter’s concise but penetrating British Trash Cinema. The optimistic claim that this is the ‘first overview of the wilder shores of British exploitation and cult paracinema from the 1950s onwards’ is probably accurate (although several excavations already been made into this territory), and there are intriguing insights aplenty into everything from Hammer’s largely neglected fantasy films (far less well-regarded than the company’s more famous Gothic horrors, on which has now settled the virtue of classical respectability) to the sex film industry of the 1970s (which this writer also covered in Sex and Film for Palgrave Macmillan). If Hunter’s unfashionable case for Ken Russell’s later camp extravaganzas is less persuasive, at least there is not the conventional dismissal of Russell’s work after his Delius and Elgar films for the BBC (and the odd honourable cinema outing, such as Altered States or Crimes of Passion). If there is one caveat about the book, it is the fact that in its brief 200 pages it has been impossible to cover all the deserving material which would have benefited from Hunter’s lively examination.

British Trash Cinema by I.Q. Hunter is published by BFI Palgrave