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Welcome to IndieWire After Dark, where we pick a new theme for our midnight movie programming every month!

Join us Friday nights at 9:30 p.m. Et to explore the best in fringe films — available at any hour in the streaming age.

Kick up your feet and get ready to take note. This September, we’re celebrating Back to School Night.

IndieWire After Dark is practicing the fundamentals over the next four weeks, kicking off a fall semester of midnight movies that’s all about students, teachers, parents, and the lethal side of learning. Yes, the following recommendations are education-themed — but they’re also great building blocks for any new students in this school of cinema.

Not unlike Harvard, Yale, or the elite university in “Halloween H20,” the admissions rate for titles featured in our weekly watch-and-rewatch club is competitive. We want to see every Tubi, Freevee, and fringe Shudder effort out there.

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.

First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.

Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.

The Pitch: A Meddlesome Producer’s Bloodiest, Briniest Catch of the Day

As titillating as it is atrocious, “Humanoids from the Deep” has everything. Sandy boobs. Practical gore. A woman director undermined by Roger Corman. Garnish with those dead dog scenes, and what more could you ask of a creature feature from the summer of 1980?

Starring Doug McClure as a hero fisherman, Ann Turkel as an inquisitive biologist, and Vic Morrow in a shifty special performance, this sluggish monster invasion imagines a community ravaged by sea creatures (Aka clumsy actors in suits...

Director/Tfh Guru Allan Arkush discusses his favorite year in film, 1975, with Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Rules of the Game (1939)

Le Boucher (1970)

Last Year At Marienbad (1961)

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982)

Topaz (1969)

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)

Hollywood Boulevard (1976) – Jon Davison’s trailer commentary

The Innocents (1961) – Joe Dante’s trailer commentary

The Earrings of Madame De… (1953)

Rope (1948) – Darren Bousman’s trailer commentary

Make Way For Tomorrow (1937)

The Awful Truth (1937) – Charlie Largent’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Duck Soup (1933) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

Going My Way (1944)

Nashville (1975) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary, Dan Perri’s trailer commentary

M*A*S*H (1970)

Shampoo (1975) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Bonnie And Clyde (1967) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

The Nada Gang (1975)

Get Crazy (1983) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary

Night Moves (1975) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) – Katt Shea’s trailer...

By Todd Garbarini

Directors Joe Dante (1984’s Gremlins) and Allan Arkush (1979’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School) cut their teeth in Hollywood putting together trailers for Roger Corman films in the early 1970s and got the idea to make their own film by piecing together stock footage from other Corman pics and shooting a story around the clips. Armed with $55,000 from Mr. Corman, Hollywood Boulevard is the result. Released in 1976 on a smattering of screens, Hollywood Boulevard is a charming and entertaining send-up of Hollywood filmmaking which stars the incomparable (and sadly, the late) Candice Rialson as Candy Wednesday, a fresh-off-the-bus naïve blonde who, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, wants to be an actress and walks straight into the office of agent Walter Paisley (Dick Miller). His advice to just go out and walk the streets and be seen is taken quite literally, and she finds herself suckered...

Well, here we are again, back in Corman waters. Why do we keep coming back? What is the pull of a Roger Corman production that calls to us like a syphilitic siren wailing from the rocks, beckoning us home? My guess is quality chafing the walls of quantity. There are a lot of exploitation movies out there, and most were justified their position on the lower rung of a double bill on a Tuesday night at the drive-in. But un film du Corman is different – he’s always had an innate gift for corralling talent on the rise, and kind enough to foster it on the way down. His turn of the decade monster mash Humanoids from the Deep (1980) is a perfect storm of his wondrous cinematic sensibilities.

And of course I mean ‘wondrous’ as it applies to our station, the gloriously trashy and deliciously weird. Humanoids fits neatly into...

.Not available on DVD. column since it began nine months ago and I realize that 19 of the previous 24 films I.ve written about are from the decade of the 1970.s. It.s not that there aren.t worthy forgotten films of the 50.s, 60.s or 80.s that have yet to see life in digital format, it.s just that, being born in 1961, it was the .70.s when I came of age and I.ve always had a fixation with the many films I saw at the drive-in in the last half of that decade. Besides, only from the politically incorrect .70.s could have come a disco musical comedy about a woman with a talking vagina.

Chatterbox, made in 1977, is no porn film (though bare breasts abound), but a silly R-Rated comedy based on a ridiculous but titillating situation that today doesn.t seem at all sleazy or dirty but really funny and kind of innocent.