Movie lovers are always gassing on about the end of things.  Oh, how we love to mourn!  Up in Canada, the horror-hound’s TV getaway, Scream, morphed quietly and with little fanfare last September into Dusk.  Billed as “the supernatural, thriller and suspense channel,” Dusk is a gore-free zone that sounds suspiciously like a crust thrown to the TWILIGHT crowd, meaning what was once a shock syllabus of vintage horror and gnarly old grindhouse classics will yield to female cop movies (which, apart from THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, are a pretty dire lot) and emo vampire mopefests geared to the tweener Goth set.  And that’s called sad.  Sadder still is the demise of another Canadian cable channel, Drive-In Classics, which is slated to be “rebranded” as a Canadian franchise of the Sundance Channel on March 1st. 

Drive-In Classics made its debut in 2001, which seems in my mind not so very long ago but is in reality almost a decade behind us.  Styled after the “ozoner” experience of movie-going most popular between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s, this channel boasted (as the above launch promo will testify) a mind-blowing parade of schlock horror, chop-sockey, blaxploitation, Euro-sleaze, Russ Meyer movies and sci-fi of questionable scientific value interspersed with vintage drive-in short features and and overall retro cast that made you feel hip just seeing the ads.  My man in Ontario, John Charles (an authority on Hong Kong action films and my Kennel colleague at Video Watchdog) points out that Drive-In Classics didn’t actually show all the movies promised in their promos (some clips in the launch promo were lifted from the 1982 documentary IT CAME FROM HOLLYWOOD, which DIC also never showed).  The essential contradiction was never lost on John that the films shown on Drive-In Classics were cut for violence, language and nudity; the demilitarized zone of the drive-in experience that many of us remember from 30-40 years ago wasn’t exactly preserved by Drive-In Classics so much as it was sampled.  But still, putting on the TV late at night and catching, say, COFFY (1973), THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR (1968) or anything by Russ Meyer was infinitely preferable to M*A*S*H reruns, SILK STALKINGS or informercials for spray-on hair.  It was fun while it lasted.

In writing today, I’m really not grieving specifically for Drive-In Classics (tapes of which John shared with me over the years) so much as anticipating/dreading the end of yet another era.  As much as filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez revere the grindhouse experience of the 60s and 70s and attempt to preserve its flavor it in their contemporary movies, the people who experienced this particular type of movie-going at first hand are growing steadily older, if they’ve even lived this far.  People who followed the punk and new wave scenes and who kept the schlock flame alive via mimeographed and xeroxed fan ‘zines, Jerry Harvey’s  Z Channel (which, it’s worth noting, showed mostly arty fare but also borderline titles like ERASERHEAD and BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA) and syndicated shows like NIGHT FLIGHT and UP ALL NIGHT are close to retirement age; Michael Weldon‘s The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film is nearly 30 years old.  All this to say, I’m left wondering who will love these movies in another twenty years?  In another 30? Who will still thrill in 2030 or 2040 to Mexican horror (SANTO VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN, THE BRAINIAC, CURSE OF THE DOLL PEOPLE), Italian spaghetti westerns and psycho-thrillers with titles that curl around the block (SARTANA’S HERE… TRADE YOUR PISTOL FOR A COFFIN, WHAT ARE THOSE STRANGE DROPS OF BLOOD ON JENNIFER’S BODY?, THE BODIES SHOW TRACES OF CARNAL VIOLENCE), Japanese kaiju eiga (GODZILLA, MOTHRA, RODAN, KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, GAMERA, WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS, FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD), biker flicks (HELLS ANGELS ON WHEELS, THE BORN LOSERS, BURY ME AN ANGEL, THE LOSERS), atomic insect fear films (THEM!, THE DEADLY MANTIS, THE BLACK SCORPION, TARANTULA), high school sexploitation (THE TEACHER, MALIBU HIGH, CALIFORNIA DREAMING, THE POM-POM GIRLS) women-in-prison movies (THE BIG BIRD CAGE, SWEET SUGAR, CAGED HEAT, TERMINAL ISLAND), anything shot in the Philippines with non-Filipino stars (THE THIRSTY DEAD, THE MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND, BRIDES OF BLOOD) or even just the classic Depression era horrors (DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, THE MUMMY, THE BLACK CAT, THE RAVEN, THE OLD DARK HOUSE) that are in the bell lap of their first century and will be by the time my kids are out of college a full one hundred years old.  How many 100 year-old movies have you watched recently?

I’m not prepared to make the argument that the world needs schlock in the same way it does the media of fine art, sculpture, music or dance but I’ll be sorry to see it go, if and when it does.  I guess it’s inevitable (mummers probably felt this way once upon a time and probably put up a big fuss about the imminent demise of mummery, for all the good it did them) but I don’t have to be happy about it.  One of the things I value about schlock or trash cinema or psychotronica or whatever you want to call it is the way is cross pollinates everything in the world, from high art to the lowest common entertainment denominator.  The people who made these movies were often branded bottom-feeders, employing as they did Hollywood has-beens, cast-off sets and time-worn plots but I think they were more like gleaners: they made use of whatever they found lying around and they played the percentages.  If biker flicks and horror movies were both tried and true genres, why not make a biker horror film (WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS, HEX)?  If fright flicks and westerns were equally popular, could a horror western (BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA, JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN’S DAUGHTER) go wrong?  (The answer, by the way, was yes.)  This world, this idiom, this niche was like a vast junk drawer full of neat stuff and sometimes what made the stuff neat was where it lay in relation to everything else stuffed in there.  I came of age midway through this vogue, which I suppose you could say is bracketed between 1957 (with the release to television of the Universal catalog of classic horror films, the dawn of the MonsterKid collective consciousness) and, oh, I suppose the demise of VHS tapes in favor of DVDs around the turn of the 2oth century to the new millennium.  My life was greatly defined and my tastes sharpened by the drive-in/grindhouse aesthetic of One Damn Thing After Another.  Of course, appreciation of these kinds of films continues but the passion feels gone or at least greatly diminished.  Film blogs, such as Chris Poggiali and Paul DiCirce’s Temple of Schlock (which began as a fanzine back in the 80s, cut up and pasted and mailed out like a ransom note) and Don Guarisco’s Schlockmania! carry the torch but the clock still feels as though it’s running out.  Not helping matters is how many trash classics of the past (THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, BLACK CHRISTMAS, WHEN A STRANGER CALLS, FRIDAY THE 13TH, MY BLOOD VALENTINE) have been remade, rebooted and (that word again) rebranded as soulless corporate assets.

For most of my life I’ve put up with a lot of crap and condescension from family and friends about my tastes in what was misunderstood as morbid entertainment.  I find it strange, then, that just as my beloved entertainments are slipping into an unreachable antiquity, the mainstream has embraced them.  The undead are hot like never before, whether in ghosts form (THE GHOST WHISPERER, GHOST HUNTERS, GHOST HUNTERS INTERNATIONAL, and Animal Planet’s THE HAUNTED, which focuses on paranormal threats to house pets and livestock), vampirism (TWILIGHT, TRUE BLOOD, THE VAMPIRE DIARIES) or werewolves (TWILIGHT again, the UNDERWORLD franchise, the rebranding of THE WOLFMAN).  Moms and Pops can can satisfy their jones for forensic yuks via the seemingly countless CSI shows and true crime chronicles on cable Discovery and Investigation Discovery and Autopsy Discovery and I don’t even know where else.  My psychotronic brethren and I have only ourselves to blame, wishing for years as we did for a measure of legitimacy.  Well, here it is, bigger than life, in prime time, broadcast in high definition, cross-marketed up the wazoo and underwritten by ads for male enhancement pills and warming female lubricants.  It all seemed more honest at the drive-in.  It was a lot more fun.