Badmovies.org Forum

Been awhile since I been on here. So recently I was thinking what happened to all the movie marathons that featured the older horror and action flicks. Back in the day USA, TNT, FOX, AMC, AND TCM all used to run marathons for about every non-work holiday we had. Now were lucky to see anything decent, even during halloween. What Happened!
It was through the movie marathons I was introduced to The Thing (both of them), Reanimator and From Beyond, Night of the living dead, Logons Run, Flash Gordon, The evil dead movies and countless more. Now days your lucky to see any of these movies on tv let alone strung all together into a movie marathon. Now all we get it seems is the crappy Sci-fi channel marathons were they show a bunch of Sci-fi channels crappy movies, maybe a decent bigger budget flick, and if were lucky one good old school B-flick.
(Sigh)

Short answer is all the networks changed.  TNT wanted to focus more on being serious and dramatic and so Monstervision and 100% Weird got dropped.  Practically all the independent stations have disappeared or bought up into network affiliates. 

Sad, too.  I used to love Monstervision and USA Up All Night.  Granted I was like, 8 and watching them, but still.

We had a local station here that was a weird UHF type station, that would run like, Matlock, The Monkees and pro wrestling during the week.  But the weekend they'd show weird, cheaply made direct to video movies, of all genres.  Marial Arts, Monster Flicks, Comedy, etc.  I wish it'd come back.

Does AMC still run a bunch of horror flicks at Halloween?

They did last Halloween, hope they continue to do so. There is a local station, KDOC, in Orange County California, that has a mini marathon of old monster movies on Saturday nights, but sadly all the rest are gone, just about every local station had a Horror/Sci-fi type program, now there are none.

I've thought about a variation of this quite a bit.  It seems like every new network that pops up runs a lot of movies in the line-up, then starts pumping out their own series.  I remember when FOX was a newborn and was like this - movies 2 or 3 nights a week.  Gradually, FOX productions took over.  WB and UPN were like that, too, in their early days.  There must be some marketing reason for this, since there is a pattern.

Most of the major networks have been dropping movies for all intents and purposes: NBC, CBS, and ABC.  Remember when they ran their weekly movies at least twice a week, anyone, anyone? 

New networks can't afford new programming for each night of the week.  Low budget movies are great filler for them.  If those stations get bigger, they slowly cut away with filler until we're being drowned in the muck of reality television.  It's a combiantion of budget, and as the network gets more powerful, they demand the local stations obey them with blind devotion...

DVDs maybe?

Halloween 4 over and over and over :lookingup:

Yeah, for some reason they seem to like showing 4,5,and 6 over and over.  Usually really late, too, like at 11PM to like 4 AM.

Sci Fi shows some movies as well. 

 Yes,sure do. And I think nada is right.VHS tapes,cable TV,DVDs, and the like basically made running movies(with commercial interupptions and cut for TV ) mostly obsolete. CBS Late Movie, ABC Movie of the Week,Double Creature Feature....Nite Owl Theater, the Late,Late Show...blahblahblah...(rattles on like a doddering old fool for a few seconds and nods off...)

good luck if you can even find networks that show OLD stuff, i remember growing up and even as a teenager watching movies that were way before my time. The networks showed old stuff.

Now they're scared to show anything prior to 1998.

I was at the library the other day and a guy walked up saying "What kind of order are these dvd's in?" and i replied "Alphabetical". He grunted and said "I wish they'd put all the NEW stuff seperate"

wtf is this..blockbuster? where people only graze the outer wall? Dig deep people...visit the middle

but i digress

I know Walgreen's has a few dvd's of older flicks, usually pretty cheap.  They had a double feature one with Bela Lugosi, and a few others as well.  One might have been White Zombie, but I didn't get a good look at the disc.

But most video stores I've gone to have most of the mainstream stuff.  Not that I don't like some of them, but I'd like to see some more of the lower end indie flicks.

UHF TV and the early days of cable are the reason I am the cult movie afficionado that I am today, so I can share in the misery and disappointment that everyone is feeling right now.  There are still a few networks that fill up their weekend schedules with movie marathons, but they're not really anything you want to watch.  FX seems to be in a race with other similar networks to see how many times they can show Dodgeball in a single day of programming and Sci Fi has some kind of diabolical contract with The Asylum to run nothing but their mockbusters.

The short answer is that we are a dying breed and the home video and cable markets have changed so drastically that smaller niche market channels either never get off the ground, like The Horror Channel, or are snatched up by larger affiliates before they even have to resort to reruns and old movies.  The majority public apetite for movies these days is different, too.  Why watch a cut version of Humanoids From The Deep on a local channel when you can switch over to such and such network and see Spiderman 2?  It's a huge bummer.

There are a few web-based alternatives, though.  A lot of public access movie shows like Remo D.'s Manor of Mayhem are available streaming on the web (http://www.ampmedia.org) and there other similar resources like Cult of UHF (http://cultofuhf.wordpress.com/l) but they're just not the same.

Up here in New England we had WLVI, who started Saturdays with the Creature Double Feature and then fleshed out their schedule until 10pm with movies, an eight o'clock movie every night and then a late show after the news was over.  It was paradise for me.  WFXT did early anime on weekday afternoons until the mid-80's and WSBK did The Movie Loft (with a trivia spewing host) when The Bruins and Sox weren't playing.  Those were the days...