I don't review my own books here at the Nameless Zine, very deliberately, but I did review a charity anthology that I appeared in because there was plenty of material in there that I had nothing to do with and I could happily talk about that. In the same spirit, I'll tackle a couple of nonfiction anthologies this month which contain a few chapters by me, focusing on the contributions of others.

There will be three of these volumes, all edited by David C. Hayes, former local and highly regarded man of far too many talents, who now lives in Michigan. If my memory holds up, I first met him at a film screening, of a colourised version of 'Plan 9 from Outer Space', an event he introduced as a tie-in to a book he had written on the fiction of Ed Wood, Jr. who had directed it. That was a long time ago and a lot has happened since then, not least his being a dedicatee, with his cohorts at Cinema Head Cheese, in my first book, 'Huh? An A-Z of Why Classic American Bad Movies Were Made'.

These books are retrospectives of action stars, but told by multiple hands in deliberately varied fashion, much of it varying degrees of comedic, as the titles suggest. The first two are now in print: 'Hard to Watch: The Films of Steven Seagal' and 'Missing the Action: The Films of Chuck Norris', puns of course on their movies 'Hard to Kill' and 'Missing in Action' but not inappropriate ones. The third book will be 'Bloodspurt: The Films of Jean-Claude van Damme', which is still forthcoming but I'm looking forward to it all the more now I've read these two.

The scattershot approach, where a variety of critics, film historians and others grabbed a title or three from the filmographies of these stars and wrote a thousand words on each, deliberately without any specific editorial guidance, works pretty well. I'm pretty happy with the approach I took, which was to have fun with the material while providing a little history and context. Some others did likewise, but a few took more unusual approaches. I particularly appreciated Ron Ford's decision to tackle Seagal's 'The Asian Connection' as a comic strip, and Joe LaLonde's choice to review through the lens of leadership lessons.

Unfortunately, Steven Seagal, the first book's subject, is not a particularly notable one in cinematic terms. He isn't a good actor. He isn't a particularly good fighter. He made very few good movies and the best ones are all at the very beginning of his career. It would be a painful task to watch through his entire filmography and it it's fair to say that reading it even in an increasingly sarcastic fashion through this book can be painful too. I'd suggest 'Hard to Watch' as a bathroom book, so you can dip into it every once in a while and learn the reasons why you're not going to watch the movie any particular chapter is about.

There are some excellent chapters, like Christoph Paul's attempt to explain 'Under Siege' entirely in Zen gibberish, but the most fun ones are those that cover things beyond mere films. Hayes dedicated chapters to everything Seagal, from his disastrous 'Saturday Night Live' appearance to his Lightning Bolt energy drink, via a pair of mixed-genre albums and an unreleased Super Nintendo game. I'm also kind of proud of my take on his horror movie 'Against the Dark' as a cinematic interpretation of a child's imaginary script, preserving every insane aspect as written. I have a few other chapters in there too, but I'm proudest of that one.

I found 'Missing the Action' a much more substantial book because, the universal disdain of every contributor to the "talents" of Steven Seagal was replaced by an admiration for Chuck Norris. Sure, he isn't the greatest actor in the world either but he is a very capable martial artist and there's honest to goodness merit to many of his movies. What shocked me was how many chapters included a variation of "I wasn't expecting much but this film was actually interesting because..." I wrote one of those, on an early movie, 'Slaughter in San Francisco', because it was a Hong Kong production shot in the U.S. with Norris as the villain rather than the hero and he was, I tell no lie, dubbed into English.

What that meant was that writers were spurred into contributing something much more substantial than just an extended synopsis, a common approach that bogged down 'Hard to Watch'. Put simply, they had more to say because their subjects were more interesting and more worthy. I enjoyed this book from a lot of different perspectives: fun writing and historical background and even personal connections. I had fun with it and I learned stuff, even about movies I'd seen. And, once again, my favourite piece may be about something other than a film, because Kevin Moyers has a lot of fun talking about Norris's Total Gym infomercials.

If 'Hard to Watch' is a little hard to read because of the universal opinion that Seagal is a complete asshole devoid of almost any of the talents that might be useful to bring to the making of movies, 'Missing the Action' is fascinating because Norris seems to be a decent guy, even if many of us don't always agree with his views. I hadn't realised going into this project how much respect makes a difference to the end result. It turns out that it really matters a huge amount, which is why 'Missing the Action' is easily the better book of the two and I'm looking forward all the more to 'Bloodspurt'. ~~ Hal C F Astell