By Gerald Peary

This sweet, amusing documentary revolves around collectors (all eager males) who are crazy with nostalgia for the mainstream cinema of the late 1970s through the 1990s.

Mad Props, directed by Juan Pablo Reinoso. Streaming on Prime, Apple, Vudu, and other platforms.

Tom Biolchini is an American success story, an amiable, super-friendly lawyer-turned-banker in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a fine wife and two great children, an extraordinary architecturally designed house, and deep pockets to pay for his increasingly expensive hobby. Biolchini is a movie lover obsessed with popular American cinema, especially genre films, and he’s willing to bid a hundred thousand dollars and more to buy props from his favorite pictures.

As we see in the sweet, amusing documentary, Mad Props, Biolchini and other collectors like him (all eager males) are crazy with nostalgia for the mainstream cinema of the late 1970s through the 1990s, and they thirst now to own concrete pieces of what they’d seen as fleeting images on screen. This film follows Biolchini on a pleasure trip through the USA and also to England, France, and Italy, where he interviews other collectors and often gets giddy with excitement about what goodies he’s shown.

Among the many items paraded out in this film are a volleyball and a synthetic dead body from Castaway, poker chips from Casino, a flaming arrow from Braveheart, a machete from Jaws. But the great bulk of coveted objects come from science fiction and horror films, with items from early Star Wars films and from Alien and Aliens the top-priced sellers of all.

May I confess that I’m the worst audience in the world for this film? I’m a snobby arthouse aficionado who detests the Marvel world and all those packaged macho figures you can buy as merchandise from those idiotic movies. In earlier days, I actually disliked Star Wars and felt that its great success began the ruination of Hollywood. Not surprisingly, most of the props so beloved in this documentary I find ugly and grotesque remnants from movies that mean nothing to me. Alien vs. Predator? Please! As Biolchini travels the world, the things he’s most awed by — swords, masks, monsters, miniatures —all blur together in my deadened mind. He might pay six figures for such precious juvenilia. I wouldn’t want any of it in my paneled den, if I had a paneled den. More sensibly, I’d pack this stuff for the bins at Goodwill.

But my Achilles heel is that I am a collector too. I also am bitten by the benign madness, only I collect first edition books and not helmets worn by Darth Vader. So I can’t help but feel an affection for all these goofy guys in Mad Props. They’re so darned proud of what they’ve spent infinite hours hunting down; and they would eagerly show their findings to anyone as smitten as they are about, say, a glove worn by Freddy Krueger strangling a nubile babe in Nightmare on Elm Street. Oh, I know their feeling. Please come to my house and check out the 1930s literary magazine signed not once but twice by T.S. Eliot.

A scene from Mad Props. Credit: Juan Pablo Reinoso

I should mention that the enterprising filmmaker, Juan Pablo Reinoso, traced down for his documentary the real-life Freddie Kreuger while on a trip to L.A. He’s the affable actor Robert Englund. Also interviewed for no special reason is Mickey Rourke, many plastic surgeries later under a white cowboy hat. Hey, if you wondered what happened to Rourke, well, here he is, telling weary Hollywood stories. This documentary picks up steam heading back to Tulsa. In Biolchini’s own city is the home where in 1983 Francis Coppola shot S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, and a lovably loony guy saved it from destruction by buying it and turning it into an Outsiders shrine. Who am I to argue with 4,000 school kids coming through every year to be pointed to where C. Thomas Howell’s Ponyboy once stood?

Finally, let me concede that a few of the items in Mad Props even resonated for me. They were from my touchstone films, so I went properly bananas learning that they’re still around. In a basement museum in Lyons, France, sits the VistaVision camera with which Hitchcock filmed the masterly Vertigo! May I touch it and stroke it? And could I be tempted to join the bidders at a London auction competing for a beat-up jacket worn by Rutger Hauer in the mighty mighty Blade Runner? Wouldn’t that look delicious displayed under glass in my living room!

Gerald Peary is a Professor Emeritus at Suffolk University, Boston; ex-curator of the Boston University Cinematheque. A critic for the late Boston Phoenix, he is the author of nine books on cinema; writer-director of the documentaries For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism and Archie’s Betty; and a featured actor in the 2013 independent narrative Computer Chess. His latest feature documentary, The Rabbi Goes West, co-directed by Amy Geller, has played at film festivals around the world.