This Month on TCM, July 2010

Updated on June 29, 2010 By Ken Begg 19 Comments

Lots of Good Stuff on TCM in July (every month, really).  This is just the stuff that caught my eye.  Anyone who loves film should poor over their schedule on a regular basis.  Indeed, if anything catches your eye below, confirm the schedule yourself to make sure I didn’t screw up the time or date.  This can be found at www. TCM.com.

And if you see anything you think people might be interested in, add it in the comments.
The Cream of the Crop.  Arm the Tivos, warm up the DVD Burners:

Friday July 16th
11:00 PM BERSERK Hilarious murders in a circus meller (part of a whole slate of macabre midway movies; see below) starring Joan Crawford.  Again, VERY hard to see, especially letterboxed.

Monday, July 19th A Whole day of wonderful sci-fi cheese—see below—but the Big Ticket is
12:00 PM THE GREEN SLIME!  A LETTERBOXED PRESENTATION OF THE GREEN SLIME!  Set your Tivos or whatever!  Seriously, getting a letterbox copy of this is worth going the extra mile for.

July 24th
Saturday 6:00 AM THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE Infamous, very hard to see turkey that tries to be Vertigo as set in the Hollywood film industry.  VERY rare, hard to see film.  Again, letterboxed and everything.
What else caught my eye:

Thursday July 1st:
JD Night…all night!  Starting at 8:00 PM there’s a run of Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, The Delinquents, Crime in the Streets, the campy Hot Rods to Hell and The Wild One.
Friday July 2nd
12 PM:  Gildersleeve on Broadway.  I always had a bit of an affection for Gildersleeve, who went from a supporting character on the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show (Fibber had the famous, overstuffed closet that you opened to your own peril) to his own program to a short series of light by entertaining movies.
5:30 PM 13 Ghosts The William Castle one, of course.
5:45 AM  RFD Greenwich Village “A couple tours around New York in this promotional short for corduroy clothing.  11 mins.”

Friday late night, July 9th
2:00 AM Superstition Cheesy ‘80s witch revenge flick with tons of goofy special effects
3:00 AM Blood on Satan’s Claw Rather more restrained, well-regarded Brit horror.

Saturday, July 10th
6:15 PM Five Million Years to Earth The Best of the Quatermass films.

Friday, July 16th
8:00 PM Freaks
9:15 PMCircus of Horrors
11:00 PM Berserk
1:00 AM The Circus Queen Murders
2:30 AM Girls on the Loose: “A nightclub owner runs an all-woman robbery gang.”  Stars Mara Corday!
4:00 AM So Young, So Bad (I’ll bet!) “A crusading psychiatrist tries to help troubled reform school girls.”

Sunday, July 18th Fantasy Night
8:00 PM Beauty and the Beast The wonderful Jean Cocteau version.
10:00 PM King Kong It’s about a large gorilla.
12:00 AM Hunchback of Notre Dame The Lon Chaney version.
2:00  AM The Seventh Seal Legitimately one of the 100 greatest movies ever; the film where a man plays chess with Death.
4:00 AM On Borrowed Time  Weird-ass movie about an old man (Lionel Barrymore, Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life and the voice model for Underdog’s Simon Bar Sinister) who traps Death up a tree, insuring that nothing can die.

Monday July 19th SUPER CHEESE DAY (CONTINUE STRAIGHT AFTER THE PREVIOUS NIGHT’S MOVIES)
6:00 AM The Manster Have you seen this one?  You’ve got to!
7:15 AM The Killer Shrews
8:30 AM Wild Wild Planet Essential, utterly insane ‘60s Italian sci-fi!
10:15 AM War of the Planets Same deal!
12:00 PM THE GREEN SLIME!  It on TCM, so it will undoubtedly be LETTERBOXED!  Set your Tivos or whatever!
1:45 PM Soylent Green
3:30 2001: A Space Odyssey
6:00 PM 2010

Wednesday July 21st
3:00 PM Five Came Back Neat 1939 drama about the survivors of a remote jungle plane crash.

Friday, July 23rd
2:15 AM Big Bad Mama Sexy Angie Dickinson is a depression era gangster in this ‘70s cult classic.  Co-stars William Shatner!
5:45 AM The Golden Years “In this instructional film, bowling is made respectable and appealing to middle-class Americans through modernization and design. BW-14 mins.”

Saturday July 24th
6:00 AM THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE
10:00 PM Cabin in the Sky Gorgeous all-black musical starring Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and Lena Horn.  Great movie.
2:15 AM Shaft  He’s one bad mutherfu…

Monday, July 26th
6:15 PM The Canterville Ghost Amusing fantasy piffle about a ghost (Charles Laughton) with a cowardly reputation trying to inspire American GIs, including Robert Young.

Thursday, July 29th Rock Night!
8:00 PM Rock, Rock, Rock
9:30 PM Rock Around the Clock
11:00 PM Bye Bye Birdie
1:00 AM Jailhouse Rock
2:45 AM Go Johnny Go!
4:15 AM Don’t Knock the Twist

Friday July 30th
2:00 AM  Shanks Extremely weird cult item, directed by William Castle and starring mime Marcel Marceau as “A mute puppeteer discovers how to manipulate dead bodies.” So it’s kind of the precursor for Weekend at Bernie’s.
3:45 AM Corruption: Peter Cushing as a mad plastic surgeon who tries to restore his girlfriend’s beauty.  Does that ever work out?
5:30 AM The Relaxed Wife “The modern miracle of tranquilizers helps working men and their wives deal with life’s little problems. 13 mins.”

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  • The Rev. D.D.

    Holy shit. My brain is doing cartwheels right now. I cannot WAIT to inflict The Green Slime on my loved ones. SO…HAPPY. I also look forward to seeing a couple of those Gamma-1 movies finally. Too bad they’re not playing all four.

    I saw Shaft in Africa but never the original. I can rectify that now.

    Superstition is pretty cheesy fun. It’s probably too gory for Ken, and it’s not good and a touch mean-spirited, but I liked it better than Braineater Will did. I think everyone should watch it up until the circular saw scene; you’ll have seen the most insane moments and can bow out, but you really must see the microwave scene and the saw scene. They are truly something special.

    Shanks is pretty weird, and I don’t know if it was good or bad, but it’s definitely not boring. Marceau’s bodily control was amazing; there’s one scene early on I had to pause and call people in to see because I couldn’t believe what he did was humanly possible. I’m trying not to say too much, because I think you should go in as cold as possible if you’re going to watch it.

    I LOVE that they play a little “educational” film at the end of their “TCM Underground.” Those are almost always a treat. “The Relaxed Wife” sounds like a good one. They played a psychedelic one for refrigerator covers a while back that was like the whole decade of the ’70s in one little package, and one on Tupperware that ended up looking like the whole thing was a cult recruitment tool. If they rerun the construction safety short “Shake Hands with Danger,” be sure to watch it…and prepare to sing the theme song for weeks after.

    And if they ever again play “One Got Fat,” you can behold the bike safety film a young Rev. saw in 3rd or 4th grade that scarred him for life, leading to years of him describing it to people only for no one to know what he was talking about, until TCM played it earlier this year, giving him proof he hadn’t fever-dreamed the whole thing, and got to subsequently scar others with it.

    DAMN I need to shut up now.

  • BeckoningChasm

    “War of the Planets”? That’s not the shambling horror that was loosed upon us at B-Fest, is it?

    Michael Weldon said it best “Most Italian science fiction films are about as exciting as a blank screen” (before noting the one that isn’t, Planet of the Vampires).

  • BC — No, that was War of the Robots.

    And anyway, I don’t know, “shambling” implies movies of some sort. That’s not the War of the Robots I remember.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Ken – I meant “shambling” in the Lovecraftian sense, though perhaps “funguous” or “worm-riddled” might be better fits.

  • Rock Baker

    Last time I tapped The Green Slime it was off TCM, and the listing said it would be scope, but it turned out to be that same cropped TV print I’d earlier taped off TNT. If it does turn out to be scope this time, can I talk anyone into making a copy for me? We might be able to work out some sort of trade… At the very least I’d like to borrow it so I can tape a copy!

  • Foywonder

    Would it be considered bragging if I said I already own a letterboxed print of The Green Slime and that the letterboxed print I own is a rare English-dubbed copy of the Japanese cut of the film that’s only about 73 minutes because for Japanese audiences most of the romantic triangle scenes were edited out?

  • sandra

    Shouldn’t that be “The Green Slime IS Coming” ?

  • Rev. DD:

    http://www.archive.org/details/OneGotFa1963

    It’s public domain. And narrated by Edward Everett Horton(!).

    You’re welcome. I think.

  • Rock Baker

    I dunno, you cut out the soap opera stuff and you lose footage of Italy’s hottest babe! Doesn’t seem like a winning deal to me. BUT, if someone were to take that footage and splice in the cropped American footage and titles (even more if there’s some way of pulling the picture back so it stays the same size as the frame changes) then there’d be a pretty nifty item. I just wish they’d done that for Frankenstein Conquers the World when they released it on DVD.

  • Rock Baker

    “Shouldn’t that be “The Green Slime IS Coming” ?”

    That would be The Birds.

  • GalaxyJane

    Clearly I need to buy a DVD-R, STAT!

  • Gamera

    Yeah, the VCR is history and I never bought a DVD-R or TiVo since there’s never anything on. Gee when it rains it pours.

  • zombiewhacker

    I don’t know about you guys, but I’m more jazzed about Five Million Years to Earth and particularly Blood On Satan’s Claw which I haven’t seen since I was a tadpole.

    Also Castle’s 13 Ghosts which I’ve never seen.

  • Rock Baker

    You can only get so much out of 13 Ghosts on TV. If you can swing it, I’d advise tracking down the DVD which includes both the TV version and the Illusion-O version, complete with a Ghost Viewer! Sadly, the disk includes only one Ghost Viewer and the included form to order more viewers is long expired. One can use 3-D glasses to get the same effect, but with only one eye at a time.

  • zombiewhacker

    Silly me, I didn’t even know 13 Ghosts was in 3-D.

  • ZW — Assuming you’re serious, it wasn’t. In theaters, they projected the film so that you could only see the ghosts if you wore these 3-D type glasses, which corresponded to a far more elaborate Ghost Viewer the main character has. If you wore your pair, you saw the ghosts, if you didn’t, you didn’t. That was the idea anyway. It was Castle’s gimmick for that film.

    On TV, of course, you can always see the ghosts.

  • Rock Baker

    Not to be anal, but the viewer actually had two parts, a red strip and blue strip. If you just watched the movie without it, the ghost scenes looked red. By holding up the viewer and looking thru the blue strip, you could see the ghosts. If you were a chicken, you could look thru the red strip and the ghosts couldn’t be seen (assuming I correctly remembered which color was for which view).

    For what its worth, the two Gamma films being aired are the best of the four. Two centered around one Commander Matt Hollstead and the other two featured Commander, Jackson I think his name was. Hollstead was a much more dynamic figure I thought. It might’ve been his white-haired sorta Italian Race Bannon look.

  • zombiewhacker

    Ken, thanks for the info.

  • Muldwych

    “Shake Hands with Danger” and “One Got Fat” are both also available as downloads from Rifftrax. They’re a buck apiece and even better with Mike, Kevin and Bill’s riffing added in.
    “Blood on Satan’s Claw” features several actors from Doctor Who: Wendy Padbury, who played Second Doctor companion Zoe, and Anthony Ainley, who played the Master when the character was revived following the death of Roger Delgado (not the melty Deadly Assassin one, the other one).