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

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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

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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

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I can think of a few people who may hate reading Caseen Gaines’ history of the Back to the Future trilogy. These people are Eric Stoltz (fired from the lead role of Marty McFly after filming began), Crispin Glover (more or less blackballed from the sequels), Jeffrey Weissman (Glover’s ill-treated replacement) and Cheryl Wheeler (a stuntwoman who nearly died during a questionably safe stunt in Part II).

Everyone else, go for it! While inessential in terms of claiming a cineaste’s shelf space, We Don’t Need Roads is a must-own for anyone with a deep fondness for the classic time-travel comedy, especially if you were among those audiences wowed upon its release in the summer of 1985. That’s the power of love.

Author of similar treatments on A Christmas Story and TV’s Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Gaines grants an insider’s view into the creation, production, impact and enduring legacy of the films, thanks to personal interviews with many key players. While Michael J. Fox, Thomas F. Wilson, Steven Spielberg and the aforementioned Glover are not among the dozens of participants, those who are can’t be considered lesser-ran slouches, including Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Huey Lewis and the two “Bobs”: producer Gale and director Zemeckis, both of whom wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay — plenty of credibility.

Naturally, the first film takes up more space (as it should) than the consecutively shot sequels: 1989’s darker follow-up and 1990’s lighthearted Western. Readers get plenty of dished-up dirt on all, however. While presented chronologically, Gaines’ narrative finds him spending a bulk of each chapter focused on particular (and sometimes peculiar) aspect: Stoltz’s dismissal, the pimped-out DeLorean, the music of the Enchantment Under the Sea high school dance. It’s a unique way of approaching a behind-the-scenes tale, but if you don’t want an overload of info on, say, hoverboard technology, remember that patience is a virtue, and just settle back and enjoy the ride. So nontaxing and entertaining is We Don’t Need Roads that the Plume paperback can be read in virtually no time at all — and that’s even without a flux capacitor. —Rod Lott

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Authors of more books on film noir than you have pairs of underwear, Alain Silver and James Ursini now turn their attention to American Neo-Noir in their latest trade-paperback collaboration for Applause Theatre & Cinema Books.

Following the close of the “classic noir” period with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 1958, neo-noir is loosely defined as the next step of the genre — one that embraces the motions of and comments upon its preceding movement. Silver and Ursini weave their way through its history, right up to today, nimbly moving from one title to the next with sheer unpredictability.

They tackle their subject here not chronologically, but thematically, with chapters devoted to fugitive couples, director duos, the femme fatale and so on. Along the way, they codify such sub-subgenres as “rap noir,” “kid noir” and “Native American noir,” somehow without sounding silly.

Their style always has been a delicate balance between the academic and the accessible, and here, that means Fyodor Dostoyevsky is as likely to pop up as a reference as Alfred Hitchcock, that Stakeout and Stripped to Kill merit as much consideration as Taxi Driver and Thief. As you wonder what something like Spring Breakers or, God forbid, Cyborg 2 is doing here, the authors will tell you and make it seem perfectly natural. While Silver and Ursini are not about to turn in their scholar-credibility cards by placing ’80s action-movie he-man Chuck Norris on a pedestal as a paragon of neo-noir, they will tell you the film in which he gets closest to it.

Roughly the final fourth of the book is an exhaustive filmography of some 500 titles — a helpful feature carried over from their previous (and also recommended) Applause genre surveys, including The Zombie Film and The Vampire Film. Design of this volume is also similar, in that the text (in a sans serif typeface I find too primitive) is supplemented by a wealth of still photos.

Incidentally, captions for those pics contain many innocent typos and outright factual errors, from misidentifying 1997’s forgotten David Duchovny vehicle Playing God as Playing Code to confusing Robert Mitchum with the comparatively towering Jack O’Halloran (and dropping the “O’” from the latter’s surname). Although the main text itself doesn’t sport as many boo-boos, the book overall could have used another eagle-eye to ensure the fifth Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool, didn’t appear as The Drowning Pool (being the true title of a Paul Newman film also covered within).

Since American Neo-Noir discusses a few titles as recent as January’s Jennifer Lopez thriller The Boy Next Door, I wonder if perhaps the book’s production cycle were rushed, which could account for such flubs. Ultimately, it matters not, because once more, Silver and Ursini have delivered yet another wholly readable, instantly addictive long-form essay on a genre beloved by moviegoers who may not know it’s a genre at all. They can now, emerging with a greater understanding … and an overbrimming Netflix queue. —Rod Lott

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