Daily Dead columnist Scott Drebit’s first book can be summed up in one sentence from its 33rd page: “Sometimes you just want to see children have their hands cut off with a samurai sword.” Hear, hear!

No, not in real life, Karen — just at the movies! Specifically, the four decades’ worth Drebit covers in said book, A Cut Below: A Celebration of B Horror Movies, 1950s-1980s, from McFarland & Company.

For the paperback, the author champions 60 films — not all horror, despite the subtitle, with sci-fi running a distant second. Like preschoolers, the movies featured are grouped tidily into fives to ensure a semblance of control; Drebit’s themed chapters include such terrors as zombies, satanists, animals and — yikes! — Canadians. Yes, there’s something for everyone … assuming someone out there is into “hookers in weird masks, slimy alien babies, interdimensional traveling, cheap beer, and plastic chainsaws.”

That quote describes one movie — 1989’s shot-on-video Things — and you better believe someone is into it: Drebit, for starters, then hopefully, the adventurous readers swayed by his passionate plead to give it a try, glacier-sized flaws and all.

Three times out of four, the sheer randomness of his picks works in A Cut Below’s favor, lifting it well above a “Horror 101”-style text. For example, I like that the slashers chapter tiptoes into thrillers for the Charles Bronson vehicle 10 to Midnight. I love seeing something as anti-mainstream as Japan’s Evil Dead Trap chosen to represent amusements from other countries. And I really love that the aforementioned chapter of the undead doesn’t invite a certain Mr. Romero to play — no offense meant, George.

As for the other 25% of the time, does Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space need even more ink? Although Drebit’s stated purpose is to commemorate, not unearth, I got more pleasure reading about the titles I haven’t seen. That’s not to say the book is bad when the subject is familiar — not at all, thanks to his folksy, chummy writing style always on duty as a safeguard. You won’t encounter a page not worth your time. If a follow-up is in the cards, I’m hoping for at least 60 more reviews. Is 600 too much to ask? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or McFarland.

To, ahem, wrap things up from the outset: With Mummy Movies: A Comprehensive Guide, Bryan Senn does it again!

Fresh from the slopes of 2022’s Ski Films, the prolific author unearths 138 mummy films in total after the applying all his filters: no shorts, no TV episodes, no hardcore porn, no fleeting appearances and no fakes. While that last qualifier smothers my hopes of reading Senn tear into The Mummy Theme Park, what’s left (read: a lot!) is sure to delight any fan of the subgenre. Horror naturally makes up a good chunk of that, but is hardly the stopping point.

After a brief introduction getting into the history of mummies in real life and popular culture (breakfast cereal included), Senn gets into the good stuff: excavating the films one by one. In Senn’s usual immersive style for such guides, the entries provide a proper balance of plot summary, behind-the-scenes information and critical review — explored in such depth and fully researched, each practically inches toward monograph status.

From Boris Karloff and Brendan Fraser to Christopher Lee and, um, Tom Cruise, all the highlights and their sequels are covered, exactly as you’d expect. But anyone could do that. What makes Mummy Movies worth your investment are all the other titles he takes great pains to incorporate, ranging from Mexploitation (Santo!) to animation (Yu-Gi-Oh!?), and from comedy to kung fu. The only thing crazier than the cheap cartoons is the bulging sack of erotica, movies that bring boredom along with a most anachronistic element: silicone.

Noting that a mummy is more than a “zombie wrapped in toilet paper,” Senn holds a lot of love for his subject. As do I. That’s why the book is useful as a reference work, too, because he calls ’em as he sees ’em. For example, should you spend your time with:
• the wrestling spoof Monster Brawl? Yes.
• the collegian-made The University of Illinois vs a Mummy? No.
• the John Carradine paycheck The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals? Hell, no.

The only piece of Mummy Movies giving me pause is the author’s use of the capital-M “Mummy” when referring to onscreen characters, and lowercase when not. It’s hardly worth bringing up … unlike, say, Ouija Mummy or The Sex Files: Ancient Desires, Senn’s lively entertaining pans of which already have outlived the flicks themselves. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or McFarland.

On the cusp on turning 12, I was floored by the March 20, 1983, broadcast of Special Bulletin, the NBC made-for-TV movie designed to look like a real-time news broadcast of a nuclear incident on the East Coast, courtesy of domestic terrorists. Although I knew it was fake, the effect was so chilling that exactly eight months later, my mom forbade us from watching ABC’s highly contentious The Day After, in which the threat — and eventual nukes — came not from our own, but the Soviet Union.

We American kids grew up with the fear, worry and anxiety of nuclear war as all too tangible. U.S.-Soviet relations were so bad, the mushroom clouds were not a question of if, but when.

You had to be there. Be glad you weren’t.

Not to say 2024 is all wine and roses; despite the Cold War in our collective rearview mirror, we’re inching closer to That 1983 Feeling than we’ve ever been. At least today, we have Mike Bogue’s Watching the World Die: Nuclear Threat Films of the 1980s to keep us company. Just hopefully not in a bunker.

Something of a companion to Bogue’s previous tome, 2017’s Apocalypse Then (which focused on 1950s atomic cinema and shares McFarland & Company as publisher), Watching the World Die is, rather surprisingly, not the grim, doom-and-gloom read I expected. Documentaries aside, which the author purposely doesn’t include, the decade’s movies on the topic were largely escapist, thereby taking the edge off. Having characters like Yor, C.H.U.D., Hulk and Godzilla romping around will do that.

In all, Bogue casts his critical eye on 121 films in detail, from populist blockbusters (WarGames), well-intentioned flops (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace) and indie darlings (Miracle Mile) to three James Bond entries and many more Italian SFers. However, where Watching the World Die most excels is in rummaging through the junk drawer of VHS obscurities — not because Bogue’s writing differs in these essays (it doesn’t), but because the flicks get bonkers.

You may have heard about the Steve Barkett ego project The Aftermath, but what about Thomas A. Cohen’s survivalist family saga, Massive Retaliation? The Dack Rambo vehicle Ultra Warrior? Or Canada’s Survival 1990 with its dog-eating mutants? Giving attention to such forgotten B- and C-level genre productions is something of an archeological dig of unpopular culture; that Bogue’s shovel dug that deep into oblivion is enough to forgive his book’s exclusion of comedies — the intentional kind, I mean. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or McFarland.

And now for a new book Martin Scorsese won’t be reading: Canadian journalist Shawn Conner’s Superheroes Smash the Box Office: A Cinema History from the Serials to 21st Century Blockbusters, from McFarland & Company. If you have any interest in the subject, though, I recommend it.

As a child of the 1970s, this voracious comics reader wondered why Superman was the only true four-color do-gooder at a theater near me; I longed for more. As a new adult of the 1990s, I couldn’t believe the studios finally caught up. Now, as an older adult of the 2020s, I honestly want the mighty Marvel movie machine to break into an irreparable state. How did we get from there to here? Film by film (more or less), Conner charts the answer.

His book is a zippy run through eight decades of examples — sometimes too zippy. Example: While 2004’s The Punisher isn’t a good movie, it seems odd to not mention its megastar antagonist, John Travolta. On the other hand, the author has a lot of ground to cover; luckily, he doesn’t waste time with scene-by-scene retellings like other books on this subject often do, instead focusing on development, production and reception.

As the chapters progress into our current times of Avengers ad infinitum, either he was rushed or simply less enthusiastic; either way, I don’t blame him. Every now and again, you’ll run across an egregious error — James Gunn didn’t direct The Specials, just as screenwriter Scott Frank has never won an Oscar — but not so many to question his credibility. I’ve encountered far worse offenders just among those writing about caped-crusader cinema.

With a surfeit of similar texts, what really kept me invested in Superheroes Smash the Box Office was Conner’s sense of humor about the whole enterprise. Fanboys may bristle for him for refusing to kneel at their false idols. For instance, CBS’ Incredible Hulk pilot is “a great show if you want to watch Bill Bixby change a tire in the rain.” And of Todd McFarlane’s stated quest for “integrity” and “dignity” in shepherding Spawn to the screen, Conner writes, “Strong words from a man with creative control over a film with a dwarf clown who emits green farts.” I’m still laughing over that one. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Thanks to the recent resurgence of “folk horror,” one of Nigel Kneale’s more underappreciated works of British television, the single-season anthology series Beasts, finally has earned the attention and reputation it didn’t quite get in 1976. Case in point: Andrew Screen’s first book, The Book of Beasts: Folklore, Popular Culture and Nigel Kneale’s ATV Horror Series.

Published by Headpress, which already has a Kneale biography in print, the weighty tome embraces — and achieves — its mission to be the definitive text on the show. The only way it could surpass that would be inclusion of Beasts’ episodes themselves, whether through disc or download. As the song goes, you can’t always get you want.

But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need. It certainly made my day of airport layovers and flight delays easier. If you’ve enjoyed Beasts, this book is just that. If you have yet to see it, I wouldn’t recommend reading until you do, because, c’mon, spoilers. (The ending of “The Baby” alone will thank you.) Luckily, it’s readily available.

For all six episodes (and “Murrain,” a 1975 one-off rightly considered to be an unofficial precursor), Screen doesn’t just dig; he excavates. Reading each chapter is like getting a DVD commentary so detailed — on-set information, post-airing reaction, every moment broadcast and each evolution from Kneale’s original script — it runs over the allotted time. For example, for “Special Offer,” a standout hour in which only a mousy grocery employee can see the mischievous critter she blames for items literally flying off shelves, Screen gives further context by exploring other telekinesis-themed works (yes, Carrie) and real-life reports of poltergeist activity of the time.

Going above and beyond, the author includes information on what viewers might have seen if Beasts had been granted a second season. Not a ton exists — in some instances, an episode title is all Kneale wrote — but where else would you find it?

Kneale’s name never will go unassociated with his most famous creation, the Quatermass franchise. But the celebrated screenwriter left behind such a remarkable body of work, other items not named The Stone Tape or The Year of the Sex Olympics deserve top-of-mind consideration, too. The Book of Beasts goes a long way to push a certain animal-themed series there — invisible dolphins, rat attacks and all. —Rod Lott

Get it at Headpress.