Methinks this coloring-book craze for adults has gotten way out of hand, and it was questionable to begin with. Now we have Die Hard: The Authorized Coloring and Activity Book welcoming itself to the party, pal, and it is at once a coattails-riding cash grab for 20th Century Fox and a knowing parody of the fad by stand-up comedian Doogie Horner, who wrote and illustrated and clearly has more talent than should be allowed for one human.

Here, in 80 oversized pages, Horner (author of 2010’s amusing Everything Explained Through Flowcharts) retells the tinsel-and-terrorists tale of Bruce Willis’ smash hit of the summer of 1988, through ready-to-color iconic scenes of the Christmas Eve siege on Nakatomi Plaza.

What sells the joke, however, are its activity pages, such as:
• connecting the dots to find out what message Willis’ John McClane wrote on a dead terrorist’s shirt,
• maneuvering a barefoot McClane through a maze of broken glass,
• and “John just killed Karl’s brother. Draw Karl’s face to show how he feels about that.”

While not quite a yippee-ki-yay, it would make a fine gift for rounds of Dirty Santa this coming holiday season. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

It took one childhood viewing of William Shatner taking on a small town’s Kingdom of the Spiders to make me an instant, lifelong fan of the horror subgenre of animal-attack films. Widening the scope to nature overall fighting back against an unappreciative and oblivious populace, Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann explore how these movies reflect how our culture grapples with our uneasy co-existence with flora and fauna, in their new essay collection from University of Nebraska Press, Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen. While I was primed for a highbrow take on a lowbrow topic, I was ill-prepared for how much fun it can be.

It’s important, however, to point out what this book is not: a reference guide, a few of which already exist, including William Schoell’s recently reprinted Creature Features: Nature Turned Nasty in the Movies. What it is is a sharply written, fiercely intelligent examination of their subject, which the co-authors approach from 10 angles and on many more films. It is likely the only book in existence that dares to straw a straight line from Darren Aronofsky’s Noah to Troma’s Toxic Avenger series.

Right away, Murray and Heumann surprise with their unique choices for chapters, contrasting the 1971 Oscar-winning documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle, which warns of insects inheriting the earth on an apocalyptic scale, with the 2009 experimental doc Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a look at Japan’s quirky reverence for the bug; in both cases, the insects are ascribed human traits, but only in the former do they represent our worst. From the 1975 William Castle production Bug to 1988’s Roger Corman-produced The Nest, cockroach cinema — able to take a shortcut to present the vermin as evil by exploiting our collective disgust — goes under the microscope as well.

Monstrous Nature is hardly 100 percent insect-driven, as subsequent sections delve into parasites (e.g. Barry Levinson’s 2012 slapdash found-footage project, The Bay) and cannibals (à la Antonio Bird’s 1999 mismarketed flop, Ravenous, which the authors convincingly brand as “feminist”). From comedic takes on toxic waste (Troma’s Class of Nuke ‘Em High franchise) to body-modification tales (the Soska sisters’ American Mary, whose heroine’s actions earn an interesting comparison to the Cyclosa spider), the book is full of discussions that engage the mind as they trigger your six- and eight-legged fears. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

One-night-only engagements and George Lucas tinkering notwithstanding, nowadays it pretty much takes the death of a beloved celebrity to get old movies back on the big screens of the multiplex; witness the recent passing of Prince and Gene Wilder, and the immediate return of Purple Rain and Young Frankenstein to first-run theaters. Once upon a time, however — the days before cable TV and VHS, to be exact — reissues were likely the only way audiences would get another chance to see a particular motion picture. Brian Hannan examines this bygone phenomenon in Coming Back to a Theater Near You: A History of Hollywood Reissues, 1914-2014, published in trade paperback by McFarland & Company. In admittedly “forensic detail,” Hannan chronologically examines this business model of sloppy seconds — initially a financial necessity for studios yet despised by exhibitors (until television and James Bond double-bills changed their tune). While the author grants big-picture visibility throughout this unusual slice of Hollywood history, his case studies — using films as disparate as Gone with the Wind and Reefer Madness — offer the greatest entertainment value. So thorough is Hannan, the footnotes to chapter one alone number 470! Don’t think that dedication to research translates into a wan read; Coming Back is a lively look back, packed with scads of incredible ads and posters that illustrate a peculiar sort of Tinseltown ballyhoo.

Man, what can’t Neil Gaiman write? (“Poorly” may be the answer, although the question was rhetorical.) Although famous for his fiction across novels both prose (American Gods) and graphic (The Sandman), the fantastic fantasist got his start in nonfiction. Published by William Morrow, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction is not a collection of that early journalism, but nearly 100 essays he has penned — plus reviews he has written, speeches he has given, introductions he has contributed — since “making it.” The title refers to his surreal experience at the Oscars in 2010; attending for Coraline, an excellent animated adaptation of his 2002 YA work, the out-of-element author recounts crossing paths with Steve Carell, Michael Sheen and the Westboro Baptist Church. The movies constitute an admirable chunk of Cheap Seats’ contents, with an appreciation of The Bride of Frankenstein; three pieces on pal Dave McKean’s MirrorMask, for which he wrote the screenplay (with Gaiman’s Sundance diary being the best of the trio and somewhat of a companion to the title article); and, for the small screen, childhood nostalgia for Doctor Who. You’ll also find pages on music, comics and a lot of lit — all splendidly crafted, no matter the topic.

And now for something that could start as many arguments as the current presidential election: TV (The Book): Two Experts Pick the Greatest American Shows of All Time. Undertaking this rather intimidating endeavor with due diligence, noted boob-tube critics Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall have ranked and reviewed the finest 100 U.S. series in the history’s medium. After a maddeningly redundant introductory chapter that preserves their Google Chat debate on whether The Simpsons or The Sopranos is most deserving to claim that No. 1 slot (spoiler: Homer > Tony), the paperback functions as the kind of dynamic reference work that movies get all the time, while television rarely does. In our era of binge-watching and “peak TV,” their book is perfectly timed (if already dated) and rife with thoughtful, helpful, why-it-matters essays on such picks as Cheers, Twin Peaks, Batman, St. Elsewhere and Police Squad! Their taste is near-impeccable — How I Met Your Mother?!? — and extends beyond the top 100 to shout-out current newbies likely to land on the list in future editions, shows of “a certain regard” that didn’t quite make the cut (from the short-lived Kolchak: The Night Stalker to season one of True Detective) and top-10 lists of made-for-TV movies, miniseries and live plays. Peppered throughout are looser lists to celebrate the finest in theme songs, pilots, finales, bosses, homes, ridiculous names and memorable deaths (Chuckles, we hardly knew ye). Despite the dead-serious approach (not to mention insane algorithms) Seitz and Sepinwall take to their self-imposed assignment, fun is first and foremost the name of their game. It earns the equivalent of the TiVo Season Pass.

It only took several hundred years, but that anti-Santa demon known as the Krampus finally has become an American celebrity, thanks to movies like A Christmas Horror Story, Night of the Krampus, Krampus: The Reckoning, Krampus: The Christmas Devil and just plain ol’ Krampus. Exactly from where did this unconventional leading man come? That’s the global-spanning goal — cleared! — of performance artist Al Ridenour in The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil. Using the baby-consuming creature’s recent cinematic surge as a launching pad, Ridenour explores the horrific goat-man’s European origins, town-to-town traditions (Buttnmandl, anyone?), stage appearances and more, all pithy and neatly arranged under subheads for easy-to-digest reading. Personally, I would have preferred more focus on the aspect of pure pop culture. One of the most appealing chapters introduces readers to the Krampus’ monstrous relatives, such as Pinecone Man. As is the modus operandi of outré publisher Feral House (whose recent volumes on Grand Guignol theater, sleazy sex novels of the 1960s and men’s adventure pulp magazines are all incredible), this trade paperback is a veritable visual feast of maps, photos and possbily insane vintage illustrations. So visual is The Krampus that it’s quite possible that functionally illiterate could spend time leafing through its pages and emerge satisfied, but why? They’d miss out on half the fun. —Rod Lott

Get them at Amazon.

While regular visitors to this site would join me in disagreement, the very things that make horror films from Italy so distinctive — namely, unflinching violence, oft-excessive gore and heavily linked sexuality — are why scholars and critics long have turned their collective noses up at it. And yet, even a casual viewing of Mario Bava or Dario Argento works reveals real visual artistry at work, even amid controversy.

Standing on our side are Stefano Baschiera and Russ Hunter, co-editors of Italian Horror Cinema, and their 11 fellow contributors, giving the form that study of which others find it unworthy. The best kind of academic-minded texts (read: accessible), the trade paperback is ready-made reading for the genre’s most fervent enthusiasts, whose hunger doesn’t end with the final shot.

New from Edinburgh University Press, Italian Horror Cinema pushes Lucio Fulci on the shark-vs.-zombie cover and, within a baker’s dozen of essays that awaits inside, seemingly every remaining Italian filmmaker of note, right up to such current directors as Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the team behind The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears.

Russ Hunter lays the trade paperback’s foundation with an informative survey of the country’s early fright fare, including a silent Frankenstein picture and — exclamation theirs — 1916’s I Prefer Hell! This provides proper context for the articles that immediately follow, chronicling Italian horror’s international dawn in the 1960s to its largely retro-reflexive existence today, with an in-between stop to the living rooms of a VHS-obsessed ’80s. While chapters on Bava and Argento are expected, their theses are not; in the latter case, that means Karl Schoonover’s study on how the maestro treats the ecological and the unwanted.

The further the reader goes, the more specific the contents become. Adam Lowenstein demonstrates the influence of the giallo on the all-American slasher film, with a primary focus on the now-iconic Friday the 13th; turns out, the relationship is akin to the peanut butter and chocolate of a Reese’s cup. Meanwhile, a less healthy marriage — that of (often unsimulated) animal cruelty in the cannibal epics — is probed by Mark Bernard (whose terrific Selling the Splat Pack was published by Edinburgh last year). Those moviegoers who extend their love of cinema into their choices of reading material and listening pleasure will appreciate the chapters on Italian film journals and the unsettling yet irresistible soundtracks of Goblin. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.