Of all the notable deaths in the past decade, I still haven’t got over the demise of David Bowie. Even though his corporal body was given to a higher power — whatever that power is — his true testament is the art he created for the world, be it music, film or, as we soon learn, paintings.

A cinematic obituary wasn’t enough for Bowie, but director Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream deliberately tries and, in the end, virtually succeeds in giving the world a succinct portrait of the man and the many different masks he wore, starting with a true space oddity.

Bowie’s sound and vision collide in the electronic dirge of “Hallo Spaceboy” and working from here, there and anywhere; apparently, there is no linear time in this cinematic pool. With beakers and test tubes swirling around him, the androgynous facade makes its way into the dawn of Ziggy Stardust and beyond. And like an ever-changing spider from Mars, he slithers and recoils past the Thin White Duke, later emboldened with the junkie Kraftwerk periods, with a little man who fell to Earth in between. Blue, blue, electric blue, surrounded with his coke spoons and heroin drips, the late ’70s are a complete haze of sobriety.

With his schizophrenic brother and sleepy mother in their well-tooled coffins, riffs of lilting heroes (we can be them, you know) placate the creation of plastic pop that devolved into the 1980s and the great isolation that same with it. But, after a few years of intense solitude, he became an industrial icon and well-rounded artist well into his death in 2016.

I have purchased this documentary on two separate occasions: once, after my debilitating stroke, and now, as part of the Criterion Collection. After each and every screening, it plays more like a masterwork of one man’s life, with layers of complexity that take the good and the bad, with no narration or talking heads. Even though we will never truly know Bowie, Morgen gives us the whole kinetic picture, albeit covered in spacey debris.

Truly remarkable in its dreamlike way, Moonage Daydream is an open-curtain, open-air market to the life of this artist, with every persona, character and alter ego cataloged for further inspection. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Danger, romance and seduction: the holy trinity of a now-extinct film subgenre that kept beautiful, busty women named Shannon employed for the better part of the 1990s. Besides the obvious visual attributes, what made those flicks tick? Where did they come from? More importantly, why did they disappear?

Filmmaker Anthony Penta answers all in his remarkable documentary, We Kill for Love: The Lost World of the Erotic Thriller, a penetrating deep dive into a VHS and Cinemax mainstay. From bioluminescence to tumescence, Zalman King to Jim Wynorksi, and Eyes belonging to the Bedroom and the Night, Penta explores wide terrain across an astounding number of movies, including Irresistible Impulse, Virtual Desire, Deadly Embrace and others with names seemingly spit out by the Tweed-O-Matic Instant Erotic Thriller Title Generator (see page 427 of Flick Attack Movie Arsenal: Book One). It’s anything but a surface-level look, surpassing what easily could have been a promotional puff piece.

In laying the foundation of the erotic thriller’s history, Penta’s main thrust draws a direct line from 1940s film noir to these sensibly financed suspensers of simulated sex. Don’t know why I never thought that before, but I’ll be damned if he isn’t right! The difference being I never wanted to see Barbara Stanwyck without clothes.

While it’s clear Penta loves these straight-to-video pictures, his perspective is hardly the only represented. In addition to heavy hitters like Kira Reed Lorsch and Athena Massey, we get a panoply of voices, resulting in filmmakers’ examinations, participants’ set reminiscences and academics’ feminist readings, both for and against. Clips abound as Penta and company discuss tropes you might have missed (overhead fans) and those impossible to escape your notice (“so many candles”). With Andrew Stevens, who deserves props for jump-starting the trend, and Monique Parent, who looks better than ever, among the storytellers, We Kill for Love continually fascinates. The research and grunt work behind its eight-year gestation period is all on the screen.

Personally, I found most erotic thrillers to be boring, but finding the occasional gem — say, Private Obsession, Animal Instincts and Body Chemistry — more than made up for the time spent getting dirty in the mines. We Kill for Love is never boring, and we’re talking about a cup that runneth over with 163 minutes. The documentary is so well-built and cut, viewers will be engaged for its entirety. Besides, it’s not the length that matters, right?

In the grand scheme that is film history, these movies were as fleeting as an orgasm. The big-budget icons like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct still enjoy life in our pop-culture conversation, yet the hundreds of sadly ephemeral imitators not constructed as star-studded blockbusters — your Sexual Roulette and your Turn of the Blade — are what Penta celebrates, because who else would? As Samantha Fox once sang, naughty girls need love, too. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

File under “news to me”: Sightings of a cryptid called “the Dogman” triangulate among a 700-square-foot slice of Texas. Seth Breedlove’s Small Town Monsters shingle is on the case, offering yet another speculative documentary with high production values and no smoking gun.

For The Dogman Triangle: Werewolves in the Lone Star State, we follow Aaron Deese, who literally wrote the book on the subject, and Shannon LeGro (from Breedlove’s On the Trail of UFOs: Dark Sky), an investigator going in cold. Firsthand and secondhand witnesses describe an “instantly terrifying” creature standing upright with glowing eyes and bloody teeth. Expert Lyle Blackburn (Breedlove’s Skinwalker: The Howl of the Rougarou) opines the Dogman could be a hairless bear, thanks to mange.

Momo: The Missouri Monster, the first Small Town Monsters doc I saw, spoiled us with its Boggy Creek-style reenactments. Here, interviews are supplemented largely with drawings. Evidence consists of photos of footprints; an audio-only clip of howling; and a cataract-blurry, low-contrast video of Something Moving in the Distance. Again, nothing verifiable or scientifically sound — but that’s not the point of these projects.

The Dogman Triangle ends with an onscreen quote from H.P. Lovecraft, which is cool, set in the Papyrus font, which is not. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Did Jayne Mansfield really join Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan? Was she its high priestess? Did the two have an affair? The documentary Mansfield 66/67 poses these questions, yet offers no definitive answers. Clever title aside, it skims along the surface level.

Pegging itself as “a true story based on rumour and hearsay,” the film shares what even those who haven’t seen a Mansfield movie may know: She was addicted to alcohol and attention, not necessarily in that order. Likewise, LaVey was her near-equal in the department of Publicity Whoredom. But only one of them went around wearing a ridiculous horns-and-cape getup, and he’s written off as, hilariously, “more Count Chocula than Charles Manson.”

As padded as Mansfield was bosomy, this film from House of Cardin co-directors (and spouses) P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes features well-informed commentary from the well-informed likes of Mamie Van Doren, John Waters, Mary Woronov, Kenneth Anger and Tippi Hedren.

On the other hand, the participating academics’ opinions — peppered with phrasings of “sex-positive” and “occupational patriarchy” — feel out of place in a doc that includes a poor-taste cartoon recreation of Jayne’s son Zoltan mauled by a zoo lion, not to mention the interstitial musical numbers and interpretive dances by men and women dressed as the camp sex symbol. While Mansfield 66/67 is pretty painless, it lacks so much insight, your time is better spent watching Mansfield’s movies. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Now that Jerry Springer is not of this earth, it’s time to revisit his lasting legacy: The Jerry Springer Show. If you weren’t alive or cognizant in the late ’90s, you might not believe what a cultural phenomenon his utterly trashy TV talk fest was — so large, the former Cincinnati mayor was able to parlay the ratings juggernaut into a feature film, 1998’s Ringmaster, in which he played himself. Suck on that, Oprah!

Springer’s weekday gig was so popular, producers realized they could make a mint selling a series of “UNCENSORED” VHS compilations through direct-response commercials. Following in the footsteps of the monster hit Cops: Too Hot for TV! and its rogue’s gallery of sequels, Jerry Springer: Too Hot for TV! was the first — a near-hour circus of footage that was, well, too hot for TV.

No bleeps, no blurs. Mostly, it’s fists a-flyin’ between family members who share too many chromosomes, but occasionally we get the flashed fake breast or unappetizing crotch shot. Nearly everyone cusses with the regularity of the words “and” and “the,” or pronounces “ask” as “ax.”

Vocabulary shortcomings aside, Springer’s guests threw the best punches for your daytime TV dollar. Springer actually has precious little screen time here, yielding it to topless waitresses, cross-dressing siblings, dog-faced strippers and a morbidly obese woman who may render you lactose-intolerant by making an ice cream sundae in her cleavage. As the carnage continues, an air of depression casts itself over the proceedings.

The moral? Stay in school, kids. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.