As any child of the 1980s will tell you, the video store was an essential part of growing up. You discovered movies in a manner Netflix and other streaming services cannot replicate: by browsing boxes. And because you paid per movie, you actually watched them — actively, not “second-screen” passively — thus giving them a fairer shot than any click-happy finger does today under the all-you-can-eat model. As a result, you discovered some gems. They may not all have been “good,” but gems nonetheless.

If you thought it was a wild time to feed the VHS monkey with cassettes like Parasite, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity and Cavegirl, imagine how much wilder it was to make them. Better yet, consume the concrete evidence that is It Came from the 80s!: Interviews with 124 Cult Filmmakers, the debut book from Italy-based film scholar Francesco Borseti. Published by McFarland & Company, it shares the behind-the-scenes drama of 28 low-budget features — stories that never have been revealed before, mostly because no one ever cared to ask.

Thank the rewind gods that he did, because Borseti often ends up with gold. The experience of reading — and watching the flicks themselves — can be summed up by three quotes, which I present to you with no further context:
1. “He wanted to direct and star in the film and do everything. But he did not know how to write, direct, or produce.”
2. “He will be shooting his own horror feature entitled Demonic Aborted Sewer Fecal Fetuses Revenge. If a script I wrote inspired someone to be creative, yes, that’s worth something.”
3. “He was an alcoholic, and he lost his pants just before he was due on camera.”

It Came from the 80s! isn’t “written” so much as transcribed or perhaps even copy/pasted, as many interviews were conducted through email. Not among the 124 subjects, oddly enough, is director David DeCoteau, who seems like he’d pick up your dry cleaning for $10, and is repped here by a pair of his early pictures, Creepozoids and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. His name is constantly dropped, as is Charles Band’s — an anecdotal trend throughout, rivaled only by suspected mob ties, directors taking undeserved credits and the number of porno filmmakers trying to go legit using straight-to-video horror and sci-fi as their express pass into the mainstream.

Included among the book’s 300 pages are such tantalizing tales as:
• how the AIDS epidemic affected the title of Blue Monkey, through three differing accounts;
• the dilemma of whether to get erect or not during the shooting of The Carpenter’s sex scenes;
• the infamous producer Harry Alan Towers‘ habits of visiting high-class hookers and bouncing checks to his screenwriters;
• Anthony Franciosa having to read his Zombie Death House lines off bread loaves;
• Dan Haggerty’s drunken rants between takes of The Chilling;
• how Roger Corman’s Gremlins-“inspired” Munchies can be used as leverage to score pot in Hawaii;
• and how crew members of Terror Night (aka Bloody Movie), while shooting at an actual nunnery, had to keep nuns from walking in on a sex scene between Michelle Bauer and actor Jimi Elwell, who claims the following: “I remember she was sitting on my face and then sliding down to my crotch. After the second or third take, I looked down at my chest and seeing a trail of female juice, I said to her, ‘Nice snail trail, you’re having fun!'”

Much more fun is to be had. Borseti could have done a better job in editing the conversations of the few people who are so long-winded, they venture into unrelated tangents. For example, I don’t care what the director of Deadly Intruder thinks about our nation’s health care system. I do care, however — and deeply — about Elizabeth Foxx’s memories making the T&A romp School Spirit; it’s just a shame the actress is not among those weighing in on that invisible-boy sex comedy. And that’s really my only complaint. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Curiously, two new books are about the idiosyncratic and ill-mannered German cult actor Klaus Kinski. The one to get is Klaus Kinski, Beast of Cinema: Critical Essays and Fellow Filmmaker Interviews, edited by Matthew Edwards and including the perspectives and talents of several others. (It takes a village, people!) Edwards — whose excellent 2007 collection, Film Out of Bounds, also was published by McFarland & Company — separates the book into thematic thirds: essays, interviews and reviews. In doing so, he and his contributors approach their subject from a variety of angles and points of accessibility. Covering everything from his iconic collaborations with Werner Herzog to his late-in-life residency in B-movie hell, the essay portion finds Beast of Cinema at its most buttoned-up, whereas the book loosens up considerably for Edwards’ Q&As with those who worked with Kinski and lived to tell about it — most notably, Schizoid director David Paulsen and actress Flo Lawrence, both rife with tales of the actor’s bad behavior, physical and sexual. By the time Beast hits the section of approximately 50 reviews, it has its shirt unbuttoned and feet on the table. Pour yourself two fingers of your hard liquor of choice and peruse the reviews, heavy on spaghetti Westerns, sexploitation, spy adventures and scary fare — unsurprisingly the reason I’ll return to this text in years to come.

Having written the history of American International Pictures in 1984’s Fast and Furious, it makes sense the ridiculously knowledgeable Mark Thomas McGee would be the one to write Katzman, Nicholson, Corman: Shaping Hollywood’s Future. Available from BearManor Media, the book spotlights the careers of “three pioneers in bargain basement entertainment,” primarily in the 1950s: producer Sam Katzman, AIP co-founder James Nicholson and multihyphenate content machine Roger Corman. Rather than tie them together in one narrative — which would make sense, given their crossed paths — he handles each man separately. In his usual easygoing style, McGee is less interested in sharing their stories than he is leaping from one anecdote to another, not always stopping to ensure transitions for smooth sail-through. The result is highly conversational, as if you’re seated at the corner of a bar with the author, but he’s a good drink or two ahead of you, so forgive him if and when he rambles. While I would have preferred a tighter-told work — or at least one with consistency in presentation among its thirds — fans of the AIP era should find enough behind-the-scenes nuggets to chew on, not to mention capsule reviews of select films and a smattering of photographs. KNC is not bad, but it’s not essential, either.

Few things have influenced the horror film more than the Grand Guignol, aka that theater in France in which characters were rather graphically tortured and killed onstage; it’s not uncommon to see “Grand Guignol” used as a descriptive adjective in film criticism today. Short of catching some brave local theater troupe in your area staging a tribute show, Mel Gordon’s Theatre of Fear and Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962 is as close as we can get to experiencing this late, great art form. (And having sat through one of those tribute shows, I much prefer this book.) Gordon quickly but satisfyingly dispenses with the origins and history of the place so he can dig into the real meat of the piece: single-paragraph descriptions of 100 Grand Guignol classics, supplemented with a more-than-generous helping of photos, playbills and revealed tricks. Originally published in 1988, this expanded edition from Feral House arrives with an additional script (“Orgy in the Lighthouse”) and, in the trade paperback’s center, 14 color pages, all but the last of which reproduces the original illustrated posters, both lavish and ghoulish. Thriving on visual stimulation throughout, the volume is a gorgeous package of garish content. Following Sin-a-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks and It’s a Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, Feral House continues to knock these new-and-improved reissues out of the park.

The genre of the giallo is so voluminous by now, it is all too easy to fire off a bad book in search of a quick buck. Mind you, Michael Sevastakis’ Giallo Cinema and Its Folktale Roots: A Critical Study of 10 Films, 1962-1987 is not that book. (This is.) With each chapter devoted to a particular film, the McFarland book makes the case for the giallo’s artistic merit — an idea most mainstream critics scoff at once the blood runs running. Rather than focus on the usual suspects (in titles and directors), Sevastakis spreads the wealth, with no filmmaker repped more than once; while the names you expect are indeed here (Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, etc.), the work chosen for each is not necessarily the anticipated default selection — for instance, Umberto Lenzi is featured by neither Eyeball nor Spasmo, but Seven Blood-Stained Orchids — and damn, does the author break it all down with aplomb. His discussion is detailed, insightful and intelligent — perhaps a deeper dive than you’d like for leisurely reading, but hey, it backs up his point that there’s much more to these films than meets the (gouged) eye. —Rod Lott

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More creatively satisfying than World Gone Wild, his 2014 survey of postapocalyptic films, David J. Moore’s The Good, the Tough & the Deadly: Action Movies & Stars 1960s-Present is in reach of claiming definitive status, but falls short in its deliberate choice (too convoluted to discuss here) to exclude the genre’s seminal titles from coverage. Die Hard? Not here. Escape from New York? Not here. Lethal Weapon? Not here. Excessive Force II: Force on Force? Totally here! In essence, the 5-pound hardcover is built mostly upon the VHSographies of such lower-rung stars as Michael Dudikoff, Mark Dacascos, Oliver Gruner, Billy Blanks and Don “The Dragon” Wilson, and there’s absolutely not a damn thing wrong with that obscurities-first approach. Prepare to find yourself spending hours falling down the rabbit hole of looking up one flick, which only reminds you of three to four others, thereby decimating any intent to consume its contents in an orderly fashion. Supplementing around 500 pages of reviews (with Destroy All Movies’ Zack Carlson and Seagalogy’s Vern occasionally weighing in) are here-and-there, unedited transcripts of Q-and-As with personalities like Dolph Lundgren and Cynthia Rothrock. These would be more welcome if Moore’s interview style were less ass-kissing, had fewer yes/no questions and contained absolutely no statements along the lines of “Say something about [insert title here].” Mitigating factor: Heavily illustrated in full color throughout.

If you want to prep for next year’s Twin Peaks relaunch with a recent text on the cult series, buy Brad Dukes’ oral history, Reflections. If you buy two, get that and Twin Peaks FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About a Place Both Wonderful and Strange. In this entry of Applause’s pop-culture FAQ line, David Bushman and Arthur Smith cover the David Lynch/Mark Frost cult classic with a crash course that qualifies both as entry-level and deep-dive. The co-authors are at their best in the general, behind-the-scenes stories of how the groundbreaking series and its misunderstood movie prequel came to pass and how the television was changed forever after. Of almost as much interest are chapters detailing the various tie-in books, copycat TV series and cultural references, but the more obsessive the sections get (such as laying out the entire mystery’s events in a timeline), the less I was interested. Unlike the aforementioned Reflections, this FAQ is nonessential for Peaks freaks (or those destined to be), but it certainly doesn’t hurt, either.

A follow-up to their Up from the Vaults volume of 2004, John T. Soister and Henry Nicolella’s Down from the Attic: Rare Thrillers of the Silent Era Through the 1950s excavates two dozen films that truly meet the “rare” criteria and presents more information on them than we’re likely to get anywhere else. Among those covered: a lost Charlie Chan mystery, 1926’s The House Without a Key; an Edgar Wallace feature in 1934’s Return of the Terror; and 1921’s Island of the Lost, an unofficial adaptation of H.G. Wells’ Dr. Moreau that predates the official one. The label they place upon 1937 Sherlock Holmes entry, Der Hund von Baskerville, could apply to all of their subjects: “more of a curiosity than a classic.” Soister and Nicolella are the first to admit that “no great movies [are] in the bunch,” but they approach each picture as if it were, with amazingly thorough research and critical review. Synopses can — and do — grow tiring, but given the obscurity of these thrillers, the authors can be forgiven on the basis of historical preservation. Like so many of McFarland & Company’s film books, the wealth of stills and poster art is most appreciated, especially in the case of the mesmerizing Just Imagine, a forward-thinker from 1930.

Two things steered me toward wanting to read James Presley’s The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror: First was the unexpectedly clever reboot of The Town That Dreaded Sundown, which depicted the still officially unsolved crime spree. Second was the segment on said subject in the documentary Killer Legends, which utilizes Presley as a talking-head expert. I’m glad something did, because the book — now in paperback from Pegasus Crime — is deserving of status as a true-crime masterpiece à la Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, in part because, as with that 1974 classic, it chilled me to the core in the middle of a sunny afternoon. Combining an investigative reporter’s doggedness with a storyteller’s skillful hooks, Presley gets under your skin and stays there long after you’ve hit the last page.

In 11 sharp and witty essays, each focused on a particular film, Hadley Freeman takes a long look back at the countless hours spent with Ferris Bueller, Andie Walsh and Marty McFly — and what we collectively gleaned from their return visits — in Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned from Eighties Movies (And Why We Don’t Learn Them from Movies Anymore). Front-loaded with “chick flicks” like Dirty Dancing and The Princess Bride, the book widens appeal as it goes, looping in Batman, Ghostbusters and peak Eddie Murphy as Hadley celebrates these pictures by breaking down their simple pleasures and more complicated subtext. She praises the era’s comedies for being “willing to deal” with issues of social class (thanks, John Hughes), while also damning them for having their female characters “dress like shit” (thanks, John Hughes). Despite the author’s overuse/misuse of “literally” and transitory lists whose punch lines fail to pop, Life Moves Pretty Fast is a smart, no-brainer buy full of laughs, love and longing. —Rod Lott

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