Writes Jon Lewis in his introduction to his new book, “In counterculture Hollywood there were any number of road trips, and most of them … led nowhere, at least nowhere good.” The next 251 pages prove that true. But out of “nowhere good” comes greatness, because Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture is the smartest, most fascinating film book 2022 has brought.

Don’t be put off by its publication from University of California Press or Lewis’ day job as a college film professor; it’s as accessible as it is intelligent (mangling of Cybill Shepherd’s name as “Cybil Shepard” aside).

The second word of Road Trip to Nowhere’s title should be plural, for its structure is vignette-driven: four separate essays with the commonality of time, place and mood. At roughly 60 pages apiece, do the individual pieces of Lewis’ quartet flow into a whole? Not really. Do I care? Not a whit. Each chapter is utterly fascinating and intoxicating in its mix of criticism and cultural history, reminiscent of the pleasures of Charles Taylor’s Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s.

Lewis starts with the stories behind a pair of key youthquake movies. The first, Dennis Hopper’s independent Easy Rider, proved such a from-nowhere hit, it sent an empty-handed studio system into panic mode. The second, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, is one of the panic-spawned results — and proof the suits didn’t have a clue at how out of touch they were with the a-changin’ times. (For those interested in more on Zabriskie and the literal cult from which its doomed lead was cast, I highly recommend Ryan H. Walsh’s Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.)

Next, “Christopher Jones Does Not Want to Be a Movie Star” chronicles the quick rise and quicker flameout of Jones, a troubled youth briefly turned into AIP’s top dog at the box office, thanks to a resemblance to James Dean — all in the face, not talent. After climbing from B-movie maven Samuel Z. Arkoff to A-list director David Lean, he walked away from it all … and into homelessness, yet another sad casualty of Tinseltown.

Chapter three is similar, but charts the paths of four actresses of varying fame: Jean Seberg, Jane Fonda, Dolores Hart and Barbara Loden. That only two got happy endings says a great deal about the system’s meat-grinding machinations; that one of those happy endings required getting thee to a nunnery says a great deal more.

Finally, Lewis considers Charles Manson. And really, how could he not? As Lewis posits, “Being counterculture in Hollywood meant one thing before August 1969 and something else again afterward.” Rather than simply revisit the details of Sharon Tate’s slaughter, Lewis tells a cautionary tale of Hollywood with “unsavory characters” in its orbit, from Manson back to the horrific dissection of Black Dahlia Elizabeth Short in 1947 and the unsolved murder of actor William Desmond Taylor in 1922. The line from one to the next is so smoothly drawn, it may as well be the Pacific Coast Highway.

With Road Trip to Nowhere somehow being my first exposure to Lewis, I grew anxious when I hit its halfway point, facing an inevitably end. Immediately, I ordered two more Lewis titles of film history, Hard-Boiled Hollywood and Hollywood v. Hard Core. For Road Trip, I can think of no finer praise than that. To borrow chapter four’s last line, “The defense rests.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Paul Downey’s The Shark Is Roaring achieves the impossible: making me want to rewatch Jaws: The Revenge. Subtitled, simply enough, The Story of Jaws: The Revenge, the BearManor Media trade paperback dives deep deep deep into everything you never knew about the 1987 sequel because, well, who wanted to?

Obviously, Downey did. Even if, like me, you dislike or perhaps downright loathe the franchise-killing third sequel, its backstory is undeniably entertaining; there’s more to tell than Michael Caine’s oft-repeated crack about the house he earned for time served. As the author details, the project was a rush job with a mere nine-month turnaround to meet the cart-before-horse date Universal had staked in 1987’s summer-movie calendar. Initial chapters weigh too heavily on a press kit-style recitation of facts and figures before getting to the good stuff of shooting down rumors and amplifying lesser-known info. Hey, who knew Miracle Mile’s Steve De Jarnatt was hired to write a script?

Reviews of Revenge were — how to put this? — unkind. Downey reprints excerpts of critical reaction for the record, your honor, with Roger Ebert’s diss of the shark looking like “canvas with acne” being particularly choice. Even Jaws: The Revenge director Joseph Sargent gets his own licks in, via an existing interview: “How do grown men with rather good credentials in terms of their training, their worldliness, how do we get involved with something that idiotic? It still puzzles me.”

Downey offers oodles of differences between the script and screen, as well what changes between the feature’s various cuts. For example, a BBC broadcast in an improper ratio inadvertently revealed wires and other nuts-and-bolts evidence never meant to be glimpsed; meanwhile, the AMC cable cut carries a title card seemingly written by Criswell: “When there is no factor motivating an event, no case of cause creating effect; what triggered the action? Fate or circumstance?” Such a philosophical/metaphysical question surely was better suited for Hank Searls’ infamously voodoo-driven novelization, also discussed at length.

I wish The Shark Is Roaring carried a narrative throughline, but at least its topic-organized contents makes it a breezy, in-and-out read for lunch hours. Late chapters veer into Jaws cash-in video games and post-Revenge shark movies. Unfortunately, among these pages is an overly snide guest chapter from podcaster and moviemaker B. Harrison Smith, delivering a “fuck you” (his words) to the film. That the writer and director of Zombie Killers: Elephant’s Graveyard rants about “demanding better of our entertainment” than this “lowest of shit food” delivers is hypocritical at best, and sours Downey’s otherwise fairly fun party. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or BearManor Media.

Nearly 30 years after its initial publication, Yesterday’s Tomorrows: The Golden Age of Science Fiction Movie Posters is available in the revised edition author Bruce Lanier Wright always wanted. As he explains in a note opening this 2022 do-over, the original publisher presented the art as he never intended: the size of postage stamps.

That counterintuitive, cost-saving measure is finally righted by Castle Bridge Media in a gorgeous trade paperback true to Wright’s vision: one full-page poster (or the occasional lobby card) on the one side of a spread; a page of accompanying text on the other. As a bonus, the book features striking, colorful and clean design all around (courtesy of In Churl Yo), both in step with modern typography and overall approach to the page while exhibiting just the right amount of retro influence without getting hokey.

Spanning 1950 to 1964, some 75 films get the double-page treatment. Wright chronologically divvies them up into sections embodying the pervading mood of America at the time, from the space race to the Atomic Age and the Red Scare. Naturally, the movies reflect those feelings and fears, if not seizing upon them; whether audiences were conscious of it, they were lured to the cinema by posters that promised much and rarely delivered half that.

Each spotlighted film is discussed in an essay that’s part art appreciation and part film criticism, with historical perspectives seaping into each. Rare is the examination that treats the genius of advertising artists Reynold Brown and Albert Kallis as important to a film’s promotion as the cast or concept. With such pictures as Forbidden Planet, Queen of Outer Space, The Thing from Another World and the cover’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman among them, Wright embraces certified classics, cult classics and certified schlock — all without apology because none is needed. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

It’s Christmas in (almost) July! But no matter the season, Matthew C. DuPée’s A Scary Little Christmas is the book fans of holiday horror have been waiting years for.

Subtitled A History of Yuletide Horror Films, 1972-2020, the book groups some 200 movies (including sci-fi entries, despite the title) across such subgenres as slashers, anthologies, zombies, hauntings, elves, Krampus, sharks — even killer trees!

Fittingly, a deep dive into the Silent Night, Deadly Night pentalogy — and its reboot — kicks off the contents. It’s an ideal start, allowing DuPée to showcase everything his book does well in one spot: interviews with cast and crew, historical context, thoughtful commentary, God-honest criticism and — oh, yeah — fun! His introductory note of actively avoiding an academic approach isn’t just talk.

All the movies you’d expect are here — Black Christmas, Christmas Evil, Gremlins (which a disproportionate amount of filmmakers cite as an influence and/or inspiration) — but also the ones you don’t. That means recent indies like Ugly Sweater Party get their fair share of ink, because nothing celebrates the birth of the Christ child quite like “genital-ripping, baseball bat beatings and violent diarrhea explosions.”

That also means movies that aren’t explicitly festive get their due. Falling into this category are the overlooked thrillers ATM, P2 and While She Was Out; their inclusion cements DuPée’s book as essential. The appendix allows him to go even further with capsule reviews of additional titles that didn’t make the initial cut, such as Sheitan and The Lodge.

Errors number few (the most glaring suggests the Oscars are awarded for TV shows) because the book is near-exhaustively researched. While the interviews with cast and crew members could be trimmed of redundancy, they are enlightening — and often unguarded and candid. DuPée navigates his cinematic sleigh ride with good taste and no blinders, willing to give anything a fair shot. He’s unafraid to call out the crap (“a cascade of subpar independent horror schlock”), yet also acknowledges “sometimes you need some cheese with your wine.”

Where else are you going to get four pages of behind-the-scenes stories of Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.