I thought that Rudolph Grey’s now-classic Nightmare of Ecstasy was the only book one needed to read about Ed Wood. I was wrong.

Andrew J. Rausch and Charles E. Pratt have proven as much with The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood — not a biography, but a film-by-film examination of the crazed career of the legendary “bad” filmmaker. What sets it apart is the authors’ assertion that while Wood’s talent could not match his ambition, his passion is worthy of respect. After all, here we are, decades later, still watching and talking about his much-maligned movies, even if his reputation is not entirely earned or fair. For example, as wanting it is in polish, 1959’s Plan 9 from Outer Space is hardly the worst picture ever to grace the cinema screens, as it has been called.

Or, as Ted Newsom puts it in his immensely lively foreword, “How much can you say? He tried, mostly failed, then died.” But he gave it a shot.

In covering each movie in which Wood was involved (including those he did not direct), Rausch and Pratt note recurring themes that pop up throughout his CV: a distaste for homosexuality, despite his own plea for his cross-dressing fetish to be accepted; apple-pie morality, often forced with heavy hands; and a rather peculiar idea as to what passes for erotic, including the actual pornos he scripted.

Other themes don’t pop up until a rock-bottom Wood entered his X-rated phase: namely, “grotesquely hairy” asses.

More often than not, the authors’ synopses provide more entertainment than the movies. This is evident from the start, when they intro Wood’s 1953 debut: “With Glen or Glenda? Wood first proved his unique inability to tell a coherent story.” Later, 1969’s Love Feast makes the most out of what sounds like the least sexy scenario in sexploitation history: “The two beautiful women are completely naked while [Wood] resumes crawling around amongst them wearing only unappealing baggy underwear. … When he leaves to answer the door, the two models left on the bed begin to kiss each other passionately in an overly-long scene that reminded us of a mother bird trying to feed her hungry chick.”

Most memorably, of his faux sex-ed skin flick of ’71, The Undergraduate: “One of the film’s most (only?) interesting scenes features a narrator quoting from the Bible as a man’s testicles are massaged on screen. This is surreal as all hell.”

No matter the movie or the era, expect “illogical” and its variants to be bandied about like a badminton cock.

Quibbles with the BearManor release are minor and twofold: Too many rhetorical questions are posed, and it doesn’t quite make sense to me that 1978’s Hot Ice is excluded from the circus just because he served as assistant director. No matter, though — Misadventures still has plenty to offer, finishing off with a handful of interviews that includes the aforementioned Grey and one-half of the screenwriting duo behind Tim Burton’s Oscar-winning Ed Wood biopic.

For those keeping track of such things, Misadventures marks Rausch’s second book this summer, following Trash Cinema: A Celebration of Overlooked Masterpieces, also heartily recommended. Based upon this pair, I hope he keeps forgoing sleep. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or BearManor Media.

About a decade ago, while folding laundry, I watched a fun primetime special about TV shows that, for one reason or another (but mostly because they were bad), never made it past the pilot stage. What I didn’t know at the time was that hour-long special was based on a book! While that 1991 edition is now out-of-print, it has been revived, revised and republished as The Best TV Shows That Never Were by author Lee Goldberg under his aptly named Adventures in Television banner. (He simultaneously released two companion volumes, but we’ll get to those. Patience, my dear.)

While boob-tube employment is no requirement for penning such a volume, it no doubt helped Goldberg, whose screenwriting credits include the aforementioned special, plus episodes of shows as varied as Monk, Diagnosis Murder, She-Wolf of London, SeaQuest 2032 and Baywatch. In other, dumber words, dude knows his teevee.

Covering programs from 1955 to 1990, The Best TV Shows That Never Were is an absolute hoot. Of the three books, it’s the one to get, if not the one with which to begin. Divided among categories like “Star Vehicles,” “Ghosts, Angels and Devils” and “Big Screen to Small Screen,” the shows include 300 false-starters, a few of which today live as standalone movies, such as Leonard Nimoy as an ESP-afflicted race-car driver in 1973’s Baffled! and the 1977 Exorcist rip-off starring James Farentino, The Possessed.

But mostly the book is filled with rotten eggs that only can wish they’d seen such light, however dim. An an alarming number of them:
• are set in space;
• star Granville Van Dusen or Barry Van Dyke; or
• involve a flatulent, crime-solving dog.

When Goldberg ventures into criticism for the entries, the results range from amusing to hysterical. Of ABC’s failed Al Molinaro sitcom of ’77, Great Day, he writes, “This pilot was supposed to illustrate how fun life is as a skid row bum in New York’s bowery. It failed.”

Also failed, to name but a few at random:
• “Wacky monks.” Mickey Rooney as a superhero. A jukebox that doubles as a time-travel device. Believe it.
• Kathleen Beller as a private eye assisted by a trio of animated clay figures. Believe it.
• The Starsky and Hutch spin-off, actually titled Huggy Bear and the Turkey. Believe it.
• The Beverly Hillbillies Solve the Energy Crisis. Believe it.

I mean, can you frickin’ believe it? I’m dying for a Volume 2, Lee.

That latter pilot is part of Never Were’s chapter on retro revivals. If nostalgiasploitation rings your proverbial bell, then good news: Television Fast Forward is like an expansion of that section, trafficking in nothing but.

Covering the 1950s to the early ’90s, Fast Forward divvies the sequels up by source-material series and goes from there. For example, Gilligan’s Island contains items on its three Nielsen-smashin’ telepics: Rescue from Gilligan’s Island, The Castaways on Gilligan’s Island and, of course, the immortal The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island. (Where’s Gilligan’s Planet, you ask? In the appendix of animated adaptations, where it should be.)

Mileage varies depending on if the shows merit encapsulating; for some, Goldberg devotes pages, while others are lucky to get a sentence or two beyond perfunctory listings of the cast and crew. And quite honestly, I completely forgot The New WKRP in Cincinnati existed — all for the best, I’m sure.

Finally, there’s the one most likely to give you a hernia: Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989. Weighing in at 3 pounds and 828 pages, it’s an intimidating monster … and yet, it’s not meant to be read in the traditional sense, because it’s a reference work. For each year contained in the range of the subtitle, Goldberg breaks the pilots out initially by production company and network, and later exclusively by the latter, with further categorization between comedies and dramas.

To say Unsold is exhaustive is an understatement; the index alone runs almost 150 pages! Admittedly of far narrower appeal than the other two titles, it best functions as a flipper atop the toilet tank. Flip to random pages with each movement and soak in the quick-take details on, say …
• the barbershop-set sitcom Handsome Harry’s;
• the Steven Spielberg-directed Savage, a vehicle for Martin Landau as an investigative reporter;
• William Friedkin’s action-packed C.A.T. Squad;
• or the incredibly titled Flatbed Annie and Sweetiepie: Lady Truckers, starring Annie Potts and Kim Darby.

Whatever you do, don’t miss the introduction, which gives a fascinating peek into the business of the pilot process — from someone who’s been there, no less. —Rod Lott

Get them at Amazon.

It’s a good thing that Edinburgh University Press has a paperback of Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom on the schedule, because the hardcover’s list price may put off some otherwise interested parties. And that’s too damned bad, because I’d wager true exploitation-film fans will appreciate this smart, swift volume. Although technically an academic tome, it’s hardly work when the subject matter is so fun, and David Church traces the history of grindhouse cinema from its dirt-cheap roots (when what was playing was largely secondary) to its corporate co-opting today as a catchall term. While Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford’s Sleazoid Express remains the definitive depiction of the Times Square moviegoing experience, Church’s book excels in examining the scene ever since: namely, the second wave ushered by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s big-screen Grindhouse; the subsequent coattail-riding DVD reissues of B-, C- and Z-level fare; and now the faux-retro vibe of such titles as blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite and women-in-prison romp Sugar Boxx.

Arguably, the films of the 1960s and ’70s yielded the best soundtracks of cinema history thus far, and The Music of Counterculture Cinema, edited by Mathew J. Bartkowiak and Yuya Kiuchi, supports that theory with 14 chapters on some of those seminal titles, although not necessarily the titles you’d expect (for example, no essay is dedicated to Simon and Garfunkel’s game-changing work for The Graduate). Your enjoyment of the McFarland & Company collection may vary, depending on your love for the subjects visual and aural. For example, examining Wendy Carlos’ Moog-tastic score for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and the squarely futuristic “now” sounds of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella appeal to me, yet I don’t give a damn about what Country Joe McDonald has to say, on Woodstock or anything. What I admire most about the book is how it encompasses such a wide swath of pics, from Roger Corman’s misunderstood Gas-s-s-s to the bom-chika-wow-wow of the X-rated Deep Throat.

No question regarding the aptness of the title of Joi Lansing: A Body to Die For, as the actress indeed had that; Alexis Hunter’s unusual biography, however, does not inspire equal hyperbole. Available in hardcover and paperback, the BearManor Media release is not the full-life book many Lansing fans want and expect; instead, it’s a chronicle of the loving, lesbian relationship the author (aka “Rachel Lansing”) had with the B-movie bombshell after meeting on the set of 1970’s Bigfoot and extending until the 44-year-old actress’ untimely death two years later from breast cancer. I had never heard of their couple status (much less Hunter at all), and if shots of them together were not included in A Body to Die For’s generous-enough photo section, I might have doubted Hunter’s story outright, because it’s written with such over-reverence and awe that it often reads stalkery. From shrimp cocktails to silicone implants (say it ain’t so!), the tale is heavy with day-to-day details, but light on momentum.

To talk specificity is to talk William J. Fanning’s Death Rays and the Popular Media, 1876-1939: A Study of Directed Energy Weapons in Fact, Fiction and Film. And as that unwieldy title makes known, it’s only fractionally about the movies, yet when I hear the term “death ray,” my mind immediately flashes to villainous Auric Goldfinger expecting James Bond to die by slicing him vertically with one, crotch first. Goldfinger is one of the titles discussed, barely, with the bulk of the 15 pages on film spent on serials and real obscurities. Because so little of the McFarland release concerns itself with the cinematic — and those 15 pages failed to click with me — I can’t recommend it to film buffs at all. Perhaps those with rabid interest for the intersection of history, science and warfare will be able to glean something from it. —Rod Lott

Get them at Amazon.

Let’s not kid ourselves: In this age of Netflix algorithms and Amazon recommendations, who in the hell wants to consult a book — ewwwww! — for suggestions on movies to watch?

You can’t see it, but my hand is raised, and high. I trust people more than math.

Amid Mike Watt’s Movie Outlaws and The Collinsport Historical Society’s Monster Serial series (currently two and three volumes strong, respectively), there’s no shortage of ink-on-page equivalents of the ol’ conversational chestnut, “Hey, have you ever seen [insert movie title here]?” For my money, there’s always room for more, so scoot over to make way for Trash Cinema: A Celebration of Overlooked Masterpieces.

Edited by Andrew J. Rausch and R.D. Riley, Trash Cinema asks a host of writers to wax chaotic on one of 55 movies — technically 54, since the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special played not in theaters, but on the TV set in your wood-paneled den — that, far more often than not, should not be missed for connoisseurs of cheese and sleaze. With only a couple of chapters falling flat, the highlights include:
• SOV pioneer Tim Ritter (Killing Spree) discussing how influential Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left has been for him personally;
• Dwarfsploitation author Brad Paulson appreciating the notorious Filipino spy parody For Y’ur Height Only, starring the diminutive Weng Weng;
• and Full Moon veteran screenwriter C. Courtney Joyner (Doctor Mordrid) delivering such a fevered defense of the 1972 horror/Western hybrid Cut-Throats Nine that had me seeking a copy of the Spanish film pronto.

You could take issue with the BearManor Media paperback’s subtitle — in what world are cult staples such as Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space “overlooked”? — or you could just ignore it and enjoy. I recommend the latter, because I devoured Trash Cinema as quickly as a stray dog to a dead hobo. May there be a second heaping helping. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or BearManor Media.

Caseen Gaines’ We Don’t Need Roads isn’t the only current behind-the-scenes book on a hit comedy trilogy born in the 1980s. Jonathan Knight weighs in with The Making of Major League, and you can definitely tell it’s penned by a sportswriter. True to its subtitle of A Juuuust a Bit Inside Look at the Classic Baseball Comedy, the Gray & Company paperback is too “inside baseball,” giving it a, um, “Sheen” of inaccessibility to the average film fanatic. Knight earns points aplenty by interviewing every living important cast member — including Wesley Snipes, Tom Berenger, Rene Russo and, yes, even Charlie Sheen, who also pitched in the foreword — but I’d knock some off for constant overstating of the movie’s status of a cult classic (he contends it has achieved Rocky Horror levels) and for exaggerating drama that suggests the 1989 hit was some sort of industry game-changer. A minor-league Major League aficionado myself, I did learn a lot from the breezy read, including its original “twist” ending, the cutting-room fate of Jeremy Piven and the flick’s curious connection to, of all pics, Clive Barker’s Nightbreed.

With such low-budget/high-return smashes as Insidious, Sinister and Paranormal Activity, producer Jason Blum is Hollywood’s current king of horror. Can he do the same for that slim section of your local bookstore? Judging from the Vintage fiction collection he has edited, The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City, the Ouija planchette points to “YES.” It sure helps that for the 17 stories selected, he called upon such friends and collaborators as Ethan Hawke, Eli Roth, Scott Stewart and Mark Neveldine, the latter two being the respective directors of Dark Skies and those crazy-ass Crank movies. Although most of these guys are not known for printed fiction, they more than rise to the challenge, jumping mediums without losing the menace. Blum could strike gold by turning some of these tales into an anthology film. (Like that idea, Jason? Just credit me as an executive producer, thanks.)

The aforementioned Roth is one of the primary filmmakers at the (stabbed and bleeding) heart of Mark Bernard’s Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film. In the Edinburgh University Press release, the author examines the business behind pushing the likes of Rob Zombie and the Saw franchise onto audiences of the multiplex and then, more tellingly, to home-video consumers who salivate over discs branded with lurid promises of “UNRATED” cuts and extra content. (Guilty as charged!) Charting the coinage and spread of the “Splat Pack” term across continents, Bernard also discusses how today’s digital platforms have helped lift public opinion of the horror genre from execrable trash to insightful social commentary. While rehashing the histories of fright films and the format wars is unnecessary, Selling the Splat Pack emerges as a smart study in the economics of horror — not to be confused with the horror of economics.

Referenced seemingly everywhere since its original publication in 1992, Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film is now available in an affordable paperback edition as part of the Princeton Classics line. While the reprint sports a snazzy new cover, the interior layout has been ported, resulting in the photos appearing cruddy and muddy. It’s easy to see why this book is considered such a landmark in film analysis, and in her new, five-page preface to this edition, Clover boils the appeals of horror down to a sentence: “The point is fear and pain — hers and, by proxy, ours.” She’s referring to the concept of the slasher’s Final Girl — a now-widespread term she birthed. As her chapter within the also recently reprinted The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film shows, she performs skillful and credible dissections on mass-market horror shows like Alien and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but it’s her essay on rape-revengers — and defense of 1978’s notorious I Spit on Your Grave in particular — that she most excels. —Rod Lott

Get them at Amazon.