His new book, Art! Trash! Terror!, is a sort of summation of his career. It's full of critiques of the horror and cult flicks he loves best and excellent interviews with the likes of John Waters, Veronica Cartwright, Stephen Rea, Joe Dante, Caroline Munro, Blacula-director William Crain, Love Witch über-auteur Anna Biller, Werner Herzog, and Nicolas Cage, who unsuccessfully tried to convince Alexander to slit a rooster's throat and eat a giant snail's dick.
The book's structure may sound a bit freewheeling, but it's neatly organized by film. It's the choice of films, which seems both personal and perhaps dependent on the people he got to interview, that's loopy. Critically revered films sit next to schlockers, recent ones beside classics, splatter pictures alongside historical dramas. I've seen a lot of these movies, and I do not love them all, but Alexander does, and above all else, that's what tethers them together. I raised an eyebrow at his choice to represent the career of the late, great David Lynch with The Elephant Man, certainly Lynch's most mainstream picture and the least likely to inspire anyone to shout Trash! or Terror! But the author justifies the inclusion of his own favorite Lynch film by focusing on its weirdness, even going so far as to suggest it's set in the same world as Eraserhead!
Although a stronger proofread would have been welcome, Art! Trash! Terror! owes nearly as much of its charm to Alexander's informal, 'zine-like writing as it does to the zany movies he surveys, though I wasn't crazy about his tendency to lapse into puns worthy of a seventies porno mag whenever he discussed sexploitation movies. Overall, though, Art! Trash! Terror! is a fun trek through cinema's wild side, and as any book of this type should, it helped me draw up a healthy list of unhealthy movies I need to check out.
