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

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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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Like fellow best-sellers-turned-films Catch-22 and The Stepford Wives, Peyton Place has entered pop culture in a way that its title has become a household term whose definition is known even to those who haven’t consumed the source material. Grace Metalious’ 1956 novel, however, is the only one to ignite an all-out scandal for its frankness of postwar life in the U.S.: one marked by sex, rape, murder and more sex. What it did — and undid — is chronicled by Ardis Cameron in Unbuttoning America: A Biography of Peyton Place. “To read Peyton Place today is to ponder the sexual quicksand on which women (and men) walked,” Cameron writes, and while she does touch on the Oscar-nominated movie, the long-running TV series and the multitude of sequels, the focus is on Metalious book and its role in bringing suburbia’s secrets out from under the well-Hoovered rugs and ushering in feminism’s second wave. A decade in the making that draws upon decades of letters and other documents, Cameron’s Cornell University Press hardcover release is the best kind of history lesson: shocking, entertaining, enlightening, vital.

So writes Ron Backer in the introduction to his latest book from McFarland, Classic Horror Films and the Literature That Inspired Them, “I was surprised to learn how many classic horror films were based on works of literature. Who knew?” Um … everyone? I’ll cut the guy some slack, though, because the end result is a pretty enjoyable work of quasi-encyclopedic film studies, examining the “true symbiotic relationship in experiencing the same tale of horror in two different forms of art.” To that end, Backer covers 43 novels and short stories, and 62 subsequent movies across 40 thorough, judiciously illustrated chapters. From Universal to Hammer, your usual monstrous suspects are here, but to his credit, he also scopes out some obscurities, including Clements Ripley’s Black Moon, William Sloane’s The Edge of Running Water and Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s The Undying Monster. On the more contemporary side, he finishes with two early works by one Stephen King.

One would guess that learning the secrets behind the gruesome special effects of Hannibal would make the show less freaky. Nope! If anything, Jesse McLean’s The Art and Making of Hannibal: The Television Series just makes it creepier. Seeing such freak-of-the-week stuff like the neck cello, corpse totem and the bee man (oh, Lord, not the trypophobic bee man!) up-close is entirely unsettling when it’s staring you in the face in four colors and large spreads vs. fleeting across the cathode rays of a mainstream-network show. Titan Books releases a slew of these behind-the-scenes volumes with a production quality closer to the coffee table than the “collector’s” fan magazine of yesteryear, but few seem to merit such curtain-peek treatment; Hannibal, however, is a series that actually deserves this treatment. Its top-class ghastliness is matched by intelligent scripts, crisp direction and delicious performances; McLean’s sleekly designed trade paperback mirrors the series’ credibility.

My hot-and-cold reaction to the subject of The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro: Critical Essays can be summed up by the opening and closing lines of actor Doug Jones’ foreword: “Guillermo del Toro. A name that makes film fans buckle at the knee in reverence. … The man to whom I will forever be grateful for allowing me name to be associated with his in some of the most respected films in the history of cinema.” Geez, get a room! Del Toro is a serious talent, but he can do wrong; for starters, his running times show he doesn’t know how to quit while he’s ahead. And yet, I enjoyed reading about films I’m not particularly fond of in this John W. Morehead-edited collection from McFarland. It dives into issues of religious symbolism, childhood trauma, insect obsession and other recurring themes in movies great (Pan’s Labyrinth), good (Blade II), bad (Hellboy II: The Golden Army) and, um, Pacific Rim.

Select films of Woody Allen can exude so much neuroses to make the unaccustomed viewer cringe in discomfort. No scene, however, matches the awkwardness of a section within Woody Allen: Reel to Real, in which author Alex Sheremet exchanges emails with esteemed film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum over the latter’s negative remarks of Allen’s work in the past; it soon devolves into a war of words. “Wait,” you ask, “why is such a thing even included in a book?” Easy: Because Reel to Real is not a conventional text, but Take2 Publishing’s inaugural “DigiDialogue” experiment. In short, that’s a fancy term for “ebook,” but one that Sheremet vows will be updated periodically — not just as Allen makes new pictures (roughly one every year), but as readers converse with the author and one another on the films covered and opinions shared, as if an Internet forum were built-in. While the comments are not yet incredibly in depth in number (per the March 31 review copy I read), this undoubtedly will grow and be interesting for hardcore Allen fans to follow. Even without this feature, Sheremet’s insights on the films make for intelligent criticism; his chronologically arranged essays grow in length as Allen moves from “the early, funny ones” to “sitting at the grown-ups’ table.” Join the discourse! —Rod Lott

Get them at Amazon.