Schlock on Stream

I seem to have spent a large part of today putting together another podcast for The Overnightscape Underground, to the exclusion of much else.  As ever, it is based largely upon my posts here for the past month.  I must admit that this one seemed to go together far more smoothly as usual - no devices unilaterally deleting recordings before they can be backed up, for instance.  Anyway, the long and the short of it is that, as is often the case when I edit these things together, particularly when it happens on a Friday, I find myself with neither the inclination nor the inspiration to come up with a new post.  It isn't that things haven't been happening that are post-worthy, or that I haven't watched a whole load of exploitation films this week.  It's just that I don't feel like writing about them right now.  I will mention, though, that I've had various streaming channels playing continuously on the TV as a background for my podcast recording and editing, mainly via an app called Rewarded.TV, which runs several live streams that carry old movies.  Typically, they have three films a day, punctuated by features, shorts or old TV episodes, running on a loop for twenty four hours.  One stream is crime themed (they carry some good, lesser known, film noirs from the forties and fifties), another is science fiction/conspiracy themed and shows a mix of older Italian, American, British and Japanese movies, (I saw Gorgo and Battle in Outer Space today), while the third specialises in horror movies, including many English language versions of continental films.  (They've had a few fifties Hammer movies on this week).

Many are films that don't often turn up on the free streaming channels - yesterday we had The Sentinel and Burnt Offerings back-to-back) - a few are more recent direct-to-video productions, but most are surprisingly good movies to find on this sort of service.  The channels also use very good quality sources for the versions they show rather than the usual fourth or fifth generation video dupes taken from scratchy and jumpy prints. So far - in the couple of weeks I've been watching, at least - there hasn't been much duplication of the films showing, something else unusual for this sort of service, which usually works with a very limited library of titles.  All-in-all, it provides a pretty good, free to air (it is ad-supported) service, which usually turns up at least one film a day that I want to watch, with the rolling format meaning that I can usually catch them at times convenient to me.  I should also mention that Rewarded.TV has a pretty extensive on-demand library of mainly older movies - while some of these are familiar and available elsewhere, I was able to watch Craze (1973) there, which I hadn't seen in an age and have never seen on any other service.  So there you go - not really a proper post but, for those of you with a Roku box, a recommendation of somewhere else you can get to watch classic exploitation movies, (Rewarded.TV may be available on other platforms - I don't know as I only stream via Roku).

Oh, before we go, for anyone interested, the latest podcast can be found here.