It was 1987 and I was already a film freak, busting out my BMX to hit the local video store whenever I had the cash. A little further from the video store was a shop called Pegasus, that was the local comic book store where the proud geeks of the four color grind would hang out and try to impress each other with random knowledge and useless trivia of their favorite characters. I collected comics, but I also found other oddities and bits of random cool. It was there that I found back issues of Cinefantastique and I haven’t stopped collecting them since. They had a remarkable stable of writers and full color pictures on a really slick stock, the magazine looked as good as it read.

Created by the late Frederick S. Clarke in 1967, originally as a fanzine and then relaunched to the masses in 1970, It carried the tagline ‘the magazine with a sense of wonder’ and it started that philosophy by drawing you into the publication with remarkable covers. They could be haunting, magical, exciting, but they were always compelling. You never judge a book by its cover, but judging a magazine by the cover image is usually a good bet as to the kind of goods you will find inside. Clarke had historians and authors like Tim Lucas, Don Shay, Bill Warren, Mick Garris, Stephen Rebello, Steven Rubin, Dan Scapperotti and more. This helped form the foundation of intelligent film writing that I would later draw upon and try my best (though often fail) to live up to. It was as vital as Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fangoria, and later Video Watchdog (founded by Tim Lucas and still running strong today). In honor of this classic magazine, we put together the Top 10 covers of all-tiime. There was no particular criteria outside of personal taste and the titles I tend to go back and look at in my own collection with great frequency. So buckle up, Bastards, and get ready to flip through this list:

DAILY GRINDHOUSE PRESENTS:

THE Top 10 Cinefantastique covers of all-time. Dig it!

10. FEATURED FILM: KRULL

VOLUME 13 NO. 2/3

.09 FEATURED FILM: LOGAN’S RUN

VOLUME 5 NO. 2

.08 FEATURED FILM: THE BLACK HOLE

VOLUME 9 NO. 3/4

.07 FEATURED FILM: PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE

VOLUME 4 NO. 2

.06 FEATURED DIRECTOR: THE FILMS OF

TERRANCE FISHER

VOLUME 4 NO. 3

.05 FEATURED FILM: THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD

VOLUME 3 NO. 2

.04 FEATURED FILM: A BOY AND HIS DOG

VOLUME 5 NO. 1

.03 FEATURED DIRECTOR: RICHARD DONNER

VOLUME 8 NO. 4

.02 FEATURED FILM: BLADE RUNNER

VOLUME 12 NO. 5/6

.01 FEATURED FILM: THE DEAD ZONE

VOLUME 14 NO. 2

RUNNERS UP…

Clarke went on to create several more magazines, most notably the infamous Femme Fatales which we will be taking a look at tomorrow. For more information on the history of Clarke and his classic magazine, click here.

FIGHT DIRTY,

G

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Tags: CINEFANTASTIQUE, top 10