Bookgasm

As George Lazenby’s 007 opined in 0n Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the world is not enough. Neither is the new book James Bond and the Sixties Spy Craze, although it gets close.

Written by Thom Shubilla (Primetime 1966-1967), the handsome hardback from Applause tracks the wannabes, never-weres, knockoffs, one-offs and other Bondy-come-latelys proliferating after the worldwide moviegoing public gave a hearty “yes” to 1962’s Dr. No.

Rather admirably, the book gives overdue attention to those cinematic spies of comparatively short shrift — many colorful and comical — from Matt Helm and Derek Flint to Harry Palmer and Bulldog Drummond. Even better, Shubilla doesn’t stop there, devoting later chapters to the Mexican and European also-rans (including Sean Connery’s own sibling, Neil, in Operation Kid Brother), as well as television. It’s thorough enough, you may cry U.N.C.L.E.

But all this comes after the author spends nearly 50 pages introducing us to Bond, James Bond. While I get the need to set the table, 007 could be handled in the introduction, since we’re not told anything new — unless you count Lazenby’s aforementioned quote erroneously attributed to Connery.

Sixties Spy Craze reads like a Wikipedia page, for both good and ill, meaning it’s packed with facts, but lacks a narrative. For delivering pure production info, one could make the case nobody does it better. However, what’s sacrificed are Shubilla’s own viewpoint and assumed passion for this subgenre. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Damn you, Scream Queen filmmaker Brad Sykes. Damn you to hell! Do you expect anyone to ever get through your new book, Neon Nightmares: L.A. Thrillers of the 1980s? You’ve made so many of the movies sound so intriguing, one has to stop reading immediately to hunt down and watch the film under discussion before proceeding. Was this part of some master plan all along? Are you receiving a cut of royalties for every VOD stream of Richard Gere’s Breathless remake? Judd Nelson in Relentless? The computer-dating oddity Dangerous Love? Because this took me a month to finish reading, rather than my usual weekend. Do you not realize what that much lunch-hour viewing does to an iPhone battery in a day? I hope you and your addicting BearManor Media paperback, richly illustrated as it is, are happy for hijacking so much of my free time. Highly, highly recommended.

For Cloudland Revisited: A Misspent Youth in Books and Film, the venerable Library of America rounds up the late S.J. Perelman’s 22 New Yorker articles in which the literary rapscallion casts his adult eyes and poisoned pen on the pulpy paperbacks — and their flicker adaptations — of his boyhood. More often than not, the results allow Perelman to exercise — and exorcise — his considerable, even intimidating wit. The more familiar I was with the topic at hand, like Tarzan and Dr. Fu Manchu, the funnier the pieces struck. That said, I also drew heavy amusement from his discussions of then-“spicy” works, today as tame as Perelman is revered, after “greasing my face with butter to protect it from the burning prose.” One caveat: These pieces were written as early as 1937, when a learned vocabulary wasn’t an obstacle to readers; prepare yourself for “fantods,” “sachem,” “gravid” and more words Google’s ready to tackle. 

You may not believe me, kids, but before your fancy internet rolled around, we got information about new and upcoming movies from artifacts called “magazines” and “newspapers.” On-set articles and interviews for more than two dozen beloved genre movies are collected in companion volumes The Dreamweavers: Fantasy Filmmaking in the 1980s and Science Fiction Filmmaking in the 1980s: Interviews with Actors, Directors, Producers and Writers. To read them is to be transported back to the days of thumbing through issues of Starlog, Twilight Zone and Fangoria at the magazine rack while your mom shopped for groceries. As with 2022’s The Joy of Sets, both trade paperbacks come from Lee Goldberg‘s Cutting Edge imprint; unlike The Joy of Sets, Goldberg shares space with William Rabkin and spouses Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier. Whether a movie qualifies as fantasy or sci-fi sometimes seems arbitrary, yet it hardly matters. In Dreamweavers‘ lineup, you’ll meet Buckaroo Banzai, James Bond and a few guys who ain’t ’fraid of no ghosts; in the other, Mad Max, RoboCop and the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Half the fun is seeing how prescient these journalists were. Case in point: Of Howard the Duck, Rabkin predicts, “There’s a chance that American audiences simply don’t want to see a duck starring in anything besides a plate of orange sauce.” —Rod Lott

Get them at Amazon.

Daily Dead columnist Scott Drebit’s first book can be summed up in one sentence from its 33rd page: “Sometimes you just want to see children have their hands cut off with a samurai sword.” Hear, hear!

No, not in real life, Karen — just at the movies! Specifically, the four decades’ worth Drebit covers in said book, A Cut Below: A Celebration of B Horror Movies, 1950s-1980s, from McFarland & Company.

For the paperback, the author champions 60 films — not all horror, despite the subtitle, with sci-fi running a distant second. Like preschoolers, the movies featured are grouped tidily into fives to ensure a semblance of control; Drebit’s themed chapters include such terrors as zombies, satanists, animals and — yikes! — Canadians. Yes, there’s something for everyone … assuming someone out there is into “hookers in weird masks, slimy alien babies, interdimensional traveling, cheap beer, and plastic chainsaws.”

That quote describes one movie — 1989’s shot-on-video Things — and you better believe someone is into it: Drebit, for starters, then hopefully, the adventurous readers swayed by his passionate plead to give it a try, glacier-sized flaws and all.

Three times out of four, the sheer randomness of his picks works in A Cut Below’s favor, lifting it well above a “Horror 101”-style text. For example, I like that the slashers chapter tiptoes into thrillers for the Charles Bronson vehicle 10 to Midnight. I love seeing something as anti-mainstream as Japan’s Evil Dead Trap chosen to represent amusements from other countries. And I really love that the aforementioned chapter of the undead doesn’t invite a certain Mr. Romero to play — no offense meant, George.

As for the other 25% of the time, does Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space need even more ink? Although Drebit’s stated purpose is to commemorate, not unearth, I got more pleasure reading about the titles I haven’t seen. That’s not to say the book is bad when the subject is familiar — not at all, thanks to his folksy, chummy writing style always on duty as a safeguard. You won’t encounter a page not worth your time. If a follow-up is in the cards, I’m hoping for at least 60 more reviews. Is 600 too much to ask? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or McFarland.

To, ahem, wrap things up from the outset: With Mummy Movies: A Comprehensive Guide, Bryan Senn does it again!

Fresh from the slopes of 2022’s Ski Films, the prolific author unearths 138 mummy films in total after the applying all his filters: no shorts, no TV episodes, no hardcore porn, no fleeting appearances and no fakes. While that last qualifier smothers my hopes of reading Senn tear into The Mummy Theme Park, what’s left (read: a lot!) is sure to delight any fan of the subgenre. Horror naturally makes up a good chunk of that, but is hardly the stopping point.

After a brief introduction getting into the history of mummies in real life and popular culture (breakfast cereal included), Senn gets into the good stuff: excavating the films one by one. In Senn’s usual style for such guides, the entries provide a proper balance of plot summary, behind-the-scenes information and critical review — explored in such depth and fully researched, each practically inches toward monograph status.

From Boris Karloff and Brendan Fraser to Christopher Lee and, um, Tom Cruise, all the highlights and their sequels are covered, exactly as you’d expect. But anyone could do that. What makes Mummy Movies worth your investment are all the other titles he takes great pains to incorporate, ranging from Mexploitation (Santo!) to animation (Yu-Gi-Oh!?), and from comedy to kung fu. The only thing crazier than the cheap cartoons is the bulging sack of erotica, movies that bring boredom along with a most anachronistic element: silicone.

Noting that a mummy is more than a “zombie wrapped in toilet paper,” Senn holds a lot of love for his subject. As do I. That’s why the book is useful as a reference work, too, because he calls ’em as he sees ’em. For example, should you spend your time with:
• the wrestling spoof Monster Brawl? Yes.
• the collegian-made The University of Illinois vs a Mummy? No.
• the John Carradine paycheck The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals? Hell, no.

The only piece of Mummy Movies giving me pause is the author’s use of the capital-M “Mummy” when referring to onscreen characters, and lowercase when not. It’s hardly worth bringing up … unlike, say, Ouija Mummy or The Sex Files: Ancient Desires, Senn’s lively entertaining pans of which already have outlived the flicks themselves. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or McFarland.

On the cusp on turning 12, I was floored by the March 20, 1983, broadcast of Special Bulletin, the NBC made-for-TV movie designed to look like a real-time news broadcast of a nuclear incident on the East Coast, courtesy of domestic terrorists. Although I knew it was fake, the effect was so chilling that exactly eight months later, my mom forbade us from watching ABC’s highly contentious The Day After, in which the threat — and eventual nukes — came not from our own, but the Soviet Union.

We American kids grew up with the fear, worry and anxiety of nuclear war as all too tangible. U.S.-Soviet relations were so bad, the mushroom clouds were not a question of if, but when.

You had to be there. Be glad you weren’t.

Not to say 2024 is all wine and roses; despite the Cold War in our collective rearview mirror, we’re inching closer to That 1983 Feeling than we’ve ever been. At least today, we have Mike Bogue’s Watching the World Die: Nuclear Threat Films of the 1980s to keep us company. Just hopefully not in a bunker.

Something of a companion to Bogue’s previous tome, 2017’s Apocalypse Then (which focused on 1950s atomic cinema and shares McFarland & Company as publisher), Watching the World Die is, rather surprisingly, not the grim, doom-and-gloom read I expected. Documentaries aside, which the author purposely doesn’t include, the decade’s movies on the topic were largely escapist, thereby taking the edge off. Having characters like Yor, C.H.U.D., Hulk and Godzilla romping around will do that.

In all, Bogue casts his critical eye on 121 films in detail, from populist blockbusters (WarGames), well-intentioned flops (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace) and indie darlings (Miracle Mile) to three James Bond entries and many more Italian SFers. However, where Watching the World Die most excels is in rummaging through the junk drawer of VHS obscurities — not because Bogue’s writing differs in these essays (it doesn’t), but because the flicks get bonkers.

You may have heard about the Steve Barkett ego project The Aftermath, but what about Thomas A. Cohen’s survivalist family saga, Massive Retaliation? The Dack Rambo vehicle Ultra Warrior? Or Canada’s Survival 1990 with its dog-eating mutants? Giving attention to such forgotten B- and C-level genre productions is something of an archeological dig of unpopular culture; that Bogue’s shovel dug that deep into oblivion is enough to forgive his book’s exclusion of comedies — the intentional kind, I mean. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or McFarland.

And now for a new book Martin Scorsese won’t be reading: Canadian journalist Shawn Conner’s Superheroes Smash the Box Office: A Cinema History from the Serials to 21st Century Blockbusters, from McFarland & Company. If you have any interest in the subject, though, I recommend it.

As a child of the 1970s, this voracious comics reader wondered why Superman was the only true four-color do-gooder at a theater near me; I longed for more. As a new adult of the 1990s, I couldn’t believe the studios finally caught up. Now, as an older adult of the 2020s, I honestly want the mighty Marvel movie machine to break into an irreparable state. How did we get from there to here? Film by film (more or less), Conner charts the answer.

His book is a zippy run through eight decades of examples — sometimes too zippy. Example: While 2004’s The Punisher isn’t a good movie, it seems odd to not mention its megastar antagonist, John Travolta. On the other hand, the author has a lot of ground to cover; luckily, he doesn’t waste time with scene-by-scene retellings like other books on this subject often do, instead focusing on development, production and reception

As the chapters progress into our current times of Avengers ad infinitum, either he was rushed or simply less enthusiastic; either way, I don’t blame him. Every now and again, you’ll run across an egregious error — James Gunn didn’t direct The Specials, just as screenwriter Scott Frank has never won an Oscar — but not so many to question his credibility. I’ve encountered far worse offenders just among those writing about caped-crusader cinema.

With a surfeit of similar texts, what really kept me invested in Superheroes Smash the Box Office was Conner’s sense of humor about the whole enterprise. Fanboys may bristle for him for refusing to kneel at their false idols. For instance, CBS’ Incredible Hulk pilot is “a great show if you want to watch Bill Bixby change a tire in the rain.” And of Todd McFarlane’s stated quest for “integrity” and “dignity” in shepherding Spawn to the screen, Conner writes, “Strong words from a man with creative control over a film with a dwarf clown who emits green farts.” I’m still laughing over that one. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

To tell the history of the Warner Bros. studio is to tell the history of the movies. Reading Warner Bros.: 100 Years of Storytelling makes this apparent. Written by Forbidden Hollywood’s Mark A. Vieira, the hefty Running Press hardcover is an all-gloss affair, but in an impressive way, as the presentation matches its subject’s prestige.

Decade by decade, Vieira covers the WB releases as it transitions from silents to sound, from Technicolor epics to New Hollywood shake-ups, from blockbuster cinema to the franchise-driven today. This being a coffee-table book, Vieira’s text can’t go in depth, so he weaves as big a coverage blanket as possible, knowing the poster art and still photos are the project’s true stars. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

After covering the filmographies of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Ted V. Mikels, Christopher Wayne Curry turns his completist’s eye to a more difficult subject with The Incredibly Strange Features of Ray Dennis Steckler. Certainly this is the only text to draw a dotted line between the director of Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and Luis Buñuel. After all, Steckler was the kind of low-low-budget filmmaker who thought nothing of ending a movie “with three characters the viewer knows and five they do not.”

Published by McFarland & Co., the book is a thorough examination of the man’s nearly 50-year outré oeuvre in — but mostly on the fringes of — Hollywood. As Curry puts it, “Hollywood was not answering and Steckler was tired of calling.”

Those aware of the psychotronic legend largely do so for his early pictures, including the Arch Hall Jr. vehicle Wild Guitar, the aforementioned accidental superhero spoof Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and the mouthful-titled, monster-musical madness from which Curry’s book takes the most opportune pun, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?

The author takes readers through each in an amazing amount of detail, essentially scene by scene. This would be frustrating if not for Curry using the opportunity to weave in behind-the-scenes stories and facts, historical context, interview quotes and related minutiae all the while; thus, the effect is akin to listening to a solid DVD commentary, both informative and lively. Naturally, his own opinions play a great part. While Curry sees many of Steckler’s deficiencies as a plus, it’s hilarious when he doesn’t, as in his coverage of the padded slasher Blood Shack (aka The Chooper): “Simply put, there should never be protracted conversations about irrigation and filtered water in a horror film.”

A shameless self-promoter, Steckler (who died in 2009) would no doubt be overjoyed with being the focus of an entire book. But no doubt he’d be livid over the chapter devoted to the roughly 75% of his directorial career he not merely disowned, but denied: the dozens and dozens of hardcore pornos. Curry covers them all, but only in brief, because they’re so bad, they don’t merit, er, probing. (And considering how bad Steckler’s legit pics could get, that says a lot.)

Curry’s all-encompassing description of the X-rated fare says it best: “These films contain the usual humping, bumping and pumping, all of this augmented by mounds of unkempt curlys, arcing ropes of reproductive fluids, pimples, cold sores, in-grown hairs and lots of sweat. … The viewer’s sense of smell is spared, but for the eyes and earls it is an all-out assault.”

The book would not be complete without looking at this sordid bulk of Steckler’s work. Same goes for his oft-leading lady, the beautiful Carolyn Brandt (Body Fever), detailing Steckler’s marriage-wrecking infidelities. Without venom, Brandt sheds a light on their personal life to a degree of candidness I’ve not seen reported (not to mention shares a curious tidbit about Ilsa star Dyanne Thorne’s nipples). Curry deserves commendation for telling the whole story, proving a writer can show reverence without being disingenuous.

The only knock against the book is one of unavoidable timing: Severin Films’ recent Steckler box set, in which Curry participated, renders some of the contents out of date, in that projects regarded as lost no longer are. However, these are few and minor.

If you’ve never experienced the uniqueness of a Steckler film, you’re not ready for Incredibly Strange Features. For everyone else, it’s fascinating and fun. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.