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

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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

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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

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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

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G4, I hardly knew ye.

I knew of you, but never watched you. And what I knew was limited to absorbing media mentions of Attack of the Show!, your channel’s daily flagship program — mostly that you covered video games and launched the career of OKC’s own Olivia Munn.

So when Show! contributor Chris Gore’s look back at the irreverent live TV series opens with a declaration of being made “by the fans for the fans,” I understand I’m not the documentary’s target.

Still, as hagiographies go, I enjoyed Attack of the Doc! all the same. (More still, Gore, where are those Film Threat retrospective projects you talked up years ago?)

Fast and frenzied, the Doc!-umentary functions well as a clip show — a greatest-hits collection for both the fervent and the uninitiated. In an hour and a half, it breathlessly clicks through such highlights as:
• a contest of drinking Cholula hot sauce,
• diving into a giant chocolate cream pie,
• turning someone’s anal canal into a live hot spot,
• James Cameron beating a mannequin with a folding chair,
• James Cameron talking “space dragon sex”
• and comedian Eric André spontaneously demonstrating Buffalo Bill’s dick tuck from The Silence of the Lambs.

Good times. And as the voiceover interviewees emphasize more than thrice, a lot of the things they did then would not go over well today. That’s an understatement, but then again, last year’s Jackass Forever didn’t exactly play it safe (in fact, I haven’t seen that much nut damage since the floor of a Texas Roadhouse after closing).

Whether Attack of the Show! “changed everything” as Attack of the Doc! purports, I’m not qualified to say. (I don’t game. I don’t buy Funko Pops. I don’t worship Stan Lee.) But I’m willing to let them have it on the basis for acknowledging how ridiculous and petty fandom can get. That said, if Show! is truly responsible for Jimmy Fallon’s Celebrity Party Game Ha-Ha Power Hour (formerly known as NBC’s The Tonight Show) as suggested, I reserve to right to take it back. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.