Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Academic PEPLUM books

One of the most bizarre aspects of the PEPLUM genre is the prevalence of Academic books. Who actually reads them? I'm not talking about compendium books or books that list movies and reviews them. I'm talking about books who quote Immanuel Kant while talking about Steve Reeves. I'll have more on this subject in the upcoming issue of BY THE GODS!

 

99 pages are available and free to read online so I tried reading part of it. The authors describe Steve Reeves and his faux strength. Dude benchpressed more that the two authors lifted in their entire lives. David Chapman has written more books on the PEPLUM genre than any author and yet he hates PEPLUM movies. He needs to find a different subject. 






I have this book. It lists movies but there are no reviews. The author does write about the PEPLUM genre at the start. It's filled with errors. This book cost me $100 bucks. I like the format though.

 

The author of this book clearly had no prior idea who Maciste was before embarking into writing this confusing book. The acknowledgement section is absurdly long.
 

 

I didn't buy this book because it's extremely expensive but reading the reviews, well, I don't want to buy it. Who reads this stuff?

You can read reviews of books at the permanent blog page. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with you. These books are unreadable. Why can't a movie have been made for the sake of entertainment without trying to make it more.

Anonymous said...

For those wanting to explore various themes arising from peplum, in depth, most of these books can be accessed online through university libraries. A simple online search at my local university site uncovered much more written material including foreign language books, book chapters, journal articles, reviews, news and magazine articles, etc.