Kick! Bang! Chop! Sock! Enter the Dragon, Deep Thrust, Hardboiled, City on Fire, The Big Heat, Naked Assassins. “All you ever wanted to know about the high-octane world of Far Eastern filmmaking: from the balletic to the ballistic, from the grace of Bruce Lee to the bullet-ridden bloodletting of John Woo, from the comedy stunts of Jackie Chan to the action choreography of Ching Siu Tung, from versatile leading man Chow Yun Fat to fighting females Michelle Khan and Cynthia Rothrock.” GR

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 128 pages
Illustrated

The first and still the best book on sleaze films. Interviews the producers: Herschell Gordon Lewis, Ted V. Mikels, Doris Wishman, Ray Dennis Steckler, Larry Cohen, and more! Essays on the genres: Biker films, J.D. films, mondo Films, Santo, sexploitation films, Ed Wood Jr., women-in-prison films, as well as such classics as Spider Baby, God Told Me To, and Wizard of Gore. Plus quotes from the worst, a list of fave films, an A to Z of low-budget personalities, etc. Promo for an educational film, Signal 30: “You are there when the blackened and brittle, mangled and bleeding bodies of what once were living, breathing and laughing human beings are pried from their motorized coffins.” Russ Meyer on Tura Santana’s mythical presence in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!: “In the instance of Tura, she was wearing boots and she was so voluptuous—big hat, big pair of hips, big boobs—a great Junoesque-looking lady… A lot of people draw all sorts of conclusions… ‘Gotterdammerung’… ‘Flight of the Valkyries.’ She’s part Cherokee and part Japanese… She’d been a stripper… and was as strong as a fucking ox… That was one of the few times I’ve lucked out in casting a role.” And more! GR

Publisher: V/Search
Paperback: 212 pages
Illustrated

A biography of a former carpet-layer who is best remembered as the Hunchback, the Phantom, a man with no legs, a clown, a vampire, an old woman in a dress, a knife-thrower without arms, a blind beggar, an old Chinaman, and 992 other prosthetic nightmares. No wonder fans cried, “Don’t step on that spider—it might be Lon Chaney!” This self-made master of disguise was the single greatest acting bargain Hollywood ever pulled off the shelf. Not only could he play handsome leading men, he could also portray gnarly villains and various oddball characters, often in the same picture. And he did his own makeup! He didn’t care how much the binding and appliances hurt because he was suffering for his art. Teaming up with Freaks director Tod Browning, Chaney starred in, among others, The Unknown (as the armless man), London After Midnight (the vampire) and The Penalty (in which he was legless). One of Hollywood’s greats. GR

Publisher: Vestal
Paperback: 394 pages
Illustrated

An artistic enemy of National Socialism since the early ‘20s, Grosz was a superb and savage chronicler of German humanity and politics. As the artist says in his preface to the Berlin edition of 1930: “Realist that I am, I use my pen and brush primarily for taking down what I see and observe, and that is generally unromantic, sober and not very dreamy. The devil knows why it’s so, but when you take a closer look, people and objects become somewhat shabby, ugly and often meaningless or ambiguous. My critical observation always resembles a question as to meaning, purpose and goal… but there is seldom a satisfying answer… I raise my hand and hail the eternal human law… and the cheerful, good-for-nothing immutability of life!” GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 125 pages
Illustrated

The Jazz Age Bettie Page: A corn-fed Kansas beauty in ebony bangs who radiated good clean sex on the screen. Seven autobiographical essays that follow the celebrated dancer-actress-writer through her short but spectacular career. Brooks kissed off Hollywood in the ‘20s and made herself a legend in European cinema. Through her portrayals of independent, liberated souls, Brooks’ star flamed a decade ahead of Dietrich’s and Garbo’s. Lulu is the lesbian-loving, man-eating German girl she played in G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, a bewitching vixen who flirts fatally one last time—with Jack the Ripper! Oddly enough, in many of her European art films, Brooks’ amoral characters are killed off in the last reel. Returning to Hollywood, she was seen as tainted goods, too risqué for America. GR

Publisher: Limelight
Paperback: 109 pages
Illustrated

More than 240 black-and-white photographs of brilliantly conceived African masks, intense with “the psychic power projected from the depths of human experience,” including animal heads, faces, grotesques, beaded and tufted images, headdresses made of wood, ivory and brass. One of the great influences on 20th-century Modern art, prominently as uglified in the works of Picasso. Features “the psychology behind the masks, the roles of the dancer, the dance and the audience, naturalism vs. abstraction as applied to the masks, the carving styles of various tribes, and the place of the carver in tribal society.” GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 248 pages
Illustrated

A movie-by-movie chronology of Chandler’s bout with Tinseltown. Nobody bitched more about the writer’s place in Hollywood than Chandler. And nobody profited more, financially or in reputation, than this British-bred American pulp novelist, creator of the white-knight gumshoe, Phillip Marlowe, who walked the mean streets of Los Angeles. The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake—all by Chandler and all examples of film noir at its finest—tough yet sentimental, at once sad, yet funny, vicious but sublimely poetic. In a town that was legendary for ruining literary giants (Hemingway, Faulkner, Hammett), it was Chandler’s mastery of the hard-boiled screenplay that left him one of few survivors.
Between 1943 and 1950, he worked for four different studios, cranking out an amazingly consistent body of work, and a total of 10 movies have been made from his six filmed novels. Examples of his brilliantly crisp, sardonic wit spice up many film classics, as in the famous “let’s trade murders” scene in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Or in the sexy way Veronica Lake picks up Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia. GR

Publisher: Silman-James
Paperback: 228 pages
Illustrated

The dish, the dirt and the wit from the famed raconteur of cinema’s subtleties. “What optical sleights-of-hand there were, what jugglings of the editing technique were utilized to convey that ‘something’ after all had happened to the carnally eager but morally handicapped lovers in films… The legacy of that long struggle to be literally truthful about sex—that natural and wholly necessary thing—took the shape of film stills that, if gotten all together in one museum, would look like an erotomaniac’s dreams of heaven and hell. It has been a melodrama in itself: the efforts of this book to provide a visual university of sexual images representing film history as impersonated by actors and actresses. The author’s duty has been to put it all together in words that cement meanings to meanings the way sex cements bodies to bodies.” Chapters on “The Kiss,” “Bosoms and Bottoms,” “The Love Gods,” “Camp Sex,” and “Sex Symbols and Fetishes.” GR

Publisher: Citadel
Paperback: 256 pages
Illustrated

“Yes! Seriously warped movies from around the world collected together in a single volume!” There’s The Worm Eaters, Truck Stop Women, G.I. Executioner, The Bone Crushing Kid, Motel Confidential, Cannibal Hookers, Oasis of the Zombies, and Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid. And there might even have been Ilsa Meets Bruce Lee in The Devil’s Triangle. It would have been “the match of the century!” says the ad, promising a release in fall of ‘76. Sadly Ilsa Meets… never got made. But fear not, plenty of celluloid sleazies did, as described in these comical and cutting reviews taken from the British film magazine Slimetime, the U.K. version of New York’s Psychotronic Video. Also includes detailed essays on three specific sleaze genres: biker, blaxploitation, and Hollywood drug movies. GR

Publisher: Critical Vision
Paperback: 199 pages
Illustrated

“My whole face is breaking out. It is covered with puffy areas, scabs and some flowing acid serum which tears up my nerves. I suppose I shall finish the exteriors this morning… Alekan knows in advance the kind of strangeness that I am after… The least workman is gracious. Not one of them has sulked in spite of this tedious shifting around of wires… following orders, which from the outside, seem sheer caprice… The makeup men and the dressers know their jobs. Lucile and Escoffier carry their tiny mistakes as if they were a cross. In short, the unit is an extension of myself. The old dream of forming one person out of many is fully realized. I will put up with this pain until it becomes unbearable.” GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 142 pages
Illustrated