Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula. Island of Lost Souls. The Most Dangerous Game. The Night of the Hunter. The Blob. For a company perhaps best known for releasing pristine editions of international arthouse classics, The Criterion Collection certainly has a healthy amount of cult films in its repertoire. Cult cinema is often a difficult beast to recognize, for such films avoid the roads best travelled in their journey towards recognition and renown. Unlike seminal films in the collection including The 400 Blows, 8 ½, or Rashomon, cult films aren’t typically met with immediate cultural or institutional recognition upon release, aren’t made by internationally-recognized talent, and don’t always have an immediately traceable history of influence. That is, however, what makes cult films so interesting and so valuable: they emerge without expectation or pretense and signal the most populist and anti-elite means by which a film can gain recognition, pointing to the fact that there are always valuable films potentially overlooked between the pages of history. Herk Harvey’s low-budget drive through horror masterpiece Carnival of Souls (1962), like many cult films, emerged into the top tier of film culture in some of the unlikeliest of ways. Harvey was an industrial and educational filmmaker; the $33,000 Carnival was his only feature work. The film had ten minutes lobbed off of it for its drivethru run to fit more screenings, and was largely a non-event when it first graced American screens. Carnival’s success is owed mostly to genre film festivals, late-night television [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

In 1960 Alfred Hitchcock released Psycho, oft-credited as the film that brought the horror genre out of the predominance of drive-in culture and into the realm of serious cinema, at least domestically since the early days of James Whale and Tod Browning. It’s the film that validated horror as a category thematically capable of producing accomplished art. Two years prior a film was released that was very much intended for the drive-in crowd with all of its conceptual silliness (a giant glob of jell-o envelopes humans and grows exponentially as it devours) may not have left as prevalent a mark on cinema history as Hitchcock’s masterwork, or even some of its popcorn entertainment contemporaries like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but where Psycho progressed the genre forward in artistic cinematic inclusiveness and Body Snatchers (as well as many others from prior decades) solidified its usage as powerful allegory The Blob accomplished multiple feats that in hindsight can make one wonder whether or not the minds behind it were, like the the film’s antagonist, not of this world. The Blob, fifty-plus years after its release, seemed to have been made by either soothsayers or time-travelers. How’s that for science-fiction?

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we invite Fat Guy Kevin Carr to give his opinion on a truly horrific weekend of bad releases. Also, we talk about the movies that came out.

Rob Zombie’s newest abortion horror film, Halloween 2, hits theaters today but he’s already deciding what to screw with next. A third Halloween perhaps? An original horror film? A movie with real characters instead of white-trash caricatures? What’s a shtick-rocker turned shit-director to do?

Is there anything more worth celebrating than B-movies of the 1950s? The aliens, the UFOs on strings, the rubber-suited monsters. There’s nothing else like it in cinema, and the genre is back in the spotlight with this week’s releases.

Our scoops about The Blob just keep on coming…

Sources from inside the production confirm for us that The Blob is in, and he is “huge”.