In the introduction to her psychological biography “The Farrows of Hollywood: Their Dark Side of Paradise,” critic and film scholar Marilyn Ann Moss declares “I intend neither accusations nor support of Mia Farrow, the Farrow family or Woody Allen in these pages.”

But within a couple of pages she’s revealed the failure of that “intention,” if indeed she ever had it. She lights into the damning but one-sided HBO documentary “Allen v. Farrow,” which finally drove the holly stake through Woody Allen’s reputation with chilling footage and irrefutable audio evidence of his sinister side and his probable guilt.

“Looking more like a romantic melodrama…heavily armed with weapons of mass conversion.”

Oh? The reason that series had any power was seeing a little girl, filmed shortly after the incident in question, relating what happened, seemingly uncoached if encouraged to open about about what she says and continues to say she experienced. That’s “romantic melodrama?”

Long before Moss reaches her eye-rolling “Husbands and Wives” analysis that “Woody might have also been asking if he could leave his relationship with Mia. And in his own way, he did — by beginning his affair with Soon-Yi,” Moss has given the lie to her initial claim.

Whatever the intention, she’s out to show the damaged and toxic environment Mia Farrow grew up in, her sadistic, alcoholic, womanizing and fanatically (“hypocritically”) Catholic father and remote, uninvolved mother, their impact on a family oft-visited by tragedy and scandal, and let Woody Allen pretty much off the hook.

The book is mainly about Farrow’s father, a classic Hollywood reinvention tale, an Australian seaman and vagabond, abandoned by his parents, handsome enough and with the chutzpah to elbow his way into the movies as a screenwriter, then director, marrying the gorgeous starlet the world lusted over as she was Jane to Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan in a string of cheap but wildly popular movies of the ’30s and ’40s — Maureen O’Sullivan.

And boy, what a piece of work John Farrow was — widely disliked, high-handed and verbally abusive on sets, physically abusive in his creepy “cutting” sex life, sometimes letting his sadism slip onto the set or into his screenplays.

Moss goes a bit overboard in praising Farrow as an under-appreciated auteur of his era. Of his best known films, only “The Big Clock” is acknowledged as a classic, John Wayne’s “Hondo” has a depth and edge unusual for his Westerns and some of his work with Robert Mitchum holds up. But as Moss has done books on Raoul Walsh and George Stevens, perhaps we should sample Farrow’s film noirs with a bit more respect.

Farrow won an Oscar, apparently undeserved, for his brief bit of work on “Around the World in 80 Days.”

Irish-born actress Maureen O’Sullivan rarely got the lead, outside of her “Tarzan” turns. She was the Catholic wife who declined to divorce her abusive and very public cheat of a husband, turning their house into two separate domains and even forcing him to build a separate entrance so that she wouldn’t have to hear the creep creeping home after his many assignations.

Mia Farrow’s memoir “What Falls Away,” frequently quoted here, was perfectly revealing and offered plenty of invitations to read between the lines about her boarding school/not-the-best-parents childhood, even if it didn’t wholly explain her mania for adopting children with mild or severe disabilities. Moss takes a stab at that, and at putting causes and effects on this or that aspect of the Farrow family and how Mia’s siblings turned out.

Moss is on shakier ground trying to psychoanalyze the lot of them, although on the surface it’s been long assumed that Mia Farrow got “revenge” on her dead father by briefly marrying the abusive Frank Sinatra, whose great love Ava Gardner carried on an affair with John Farrow 15 years before.

And the broad, un-informed swipes at Catholicism — Moss refers to the “crush” O’Sullivan kept over her bed, insisting the kids cross themselves whenever they entered her sanctum ( “Creche” or “crucifix?”) — make one wonder whether she’d have had the nerve to go after Allen on the same grounds and wonder what role Jewish mothers and Jewish upbringing play in creating a Woody (Allen Stuart Konisgberg), a Weinstein, Polanski et al.

The answer is “She wouldn’t.” Nobody else has, either.

And it’s plainly not Allen whom Moss is “going after,” here. There’s a hint of “Farrow brought this on herself” in this lopsided, somewhat salacious and psychologically under-qualified victim-blaming biography. But as anybody wading into this unsavory scandal finds out, there’s no getting through it without soiling yourself in the process.

“The Farrows of Hollywood: Their Dark Side of Paradise,” by Mariyln Ann Moss. Skyhorse Publishing, $32.50, 296 pages including filmographies and index.