We’re here to talk about the programming block that you put together for Shout! Factory. I was looking over the list, and it’s a really interesting group of mostly underseen genre films. So how did you arrive at that selection of films?
Well, when they came to me with this idea, the only caveat was that you have to choose movies from the list of movies that they own. That narrowed it down a little bit. It wasn’t like I could just go off and talk about any movie that ever existed. I tried to choose things that I thought sounded familiar but might not have been seen as much. There were some famous titles and there were movies that I think people had heard about, but probably never really sat down and watched. They’re all a little offbeat, which I like, and there are movies that I thought, along my way, had meant something to me as I was going through the cinematic history of my life.
Did you have a particular one on the list that you felt meant the most to you or had a particular impact on you when you had seen it?
I’m not so sure that there’s any one that stands out. There are some movies that are definitely higher quality than other movies. “The Hitch-Hiker” is one of the best movies on that list. Ida Lupino, she’s a very pioneering woman director who started her career by taking over a film from a male director who had a heart attack. Then she just finished the movie because she was starring in it. Then she discovered she really liked all this stuff and had picked up an incredible amount of film lore from just being an actress. So that’s probably the “best” picture on the list, but almost all the other ones have something interesting to recommend them.
I’m a big monster movie guy, and I’ve never had the opportunity to watch “Attack of the Crab Monsters,” so when I saw that on your list, I was really happy. It gave me an excuse to finally sit down and watch it. I’m really looking forward to that one personally.
Well, that’s what this list is good for. It’s a good excuse for watching movies that you just never got around to.
I think part of it too, with all the streaming services and everything, there’s just so much. You can watch anything at all times and it’s a little overwhelming. So moments like this are nice because you have a curated thing. I think curation is more important than it ever was.
I agree, and that’s one of the reasons I agreed to do this. It fits in with my website Trailers From Hell, which is a site where we have filmmakers talking about movies that maybe the audience isn’t familiar with and they feel that the people should know about. I do that on my podcast as well. There’s so much material available now. I’m thrilled that there’s so much available, but it’s such a morass of stuff that you really need somebody to cut through the chaff and say, “Okay, this is something you really should pay attention to.”
Yeah. I’m not saying I want to go back to the way that it used to be, but at the same time, when you just want to watch something, it’s a little tough.
When there were only three or four channels in your local station, if there’s some movie that was on, and it was on in the middle of the night, and you had to stay up and watch it, you knew you’d never see it again for another five years or six. Now, you can just push a button on your machine and you can tape it.
What’s interesting too is, I have a special edition release of “The Thing,” and they have a TV edited version of that on there. It’s one of my favorite movies. I didn’t realize how often we were watching really compromised versions of these movies we loved. Even if you would catch them on TV, sometimes you were watching a severely compromised version of that film.
There was a whole subset of Universal executives who did nothing but shoot new scenes for pictures that they couldn’t get onto the network because they had to cut so much violence and sex out of them that they were too short. So they would actually go back and they would hire new actors, and they would just add scenes to pad out the movies. They did that with horror films like “Kiss of the Vampire.” They also did it with classy movies like “Secret Ceremony.” They just would run roughshod through the footage and try to make anything they could that would fit in two hours.
