If you’ve ever thought of a career in the film industry, or even if you want to make your own amateur films (but don’t want them to look amateur), I’ve got a product to recommend.

I’ve worked in the film business (as an animator)since the 1980s without having gone to school to learn it. I’m not saying whether or not you should follow the “self-taught” route that I did, but I think you owe it to yourself to look into all of your options.

I’ve downloaded and studied THE NO BUDGET FILMMAKING ULTRA PACK and believe that you aspiring movie makers can benefit from doing the same. You can go to their website and check it out yourself by clicking on the image below or right HERE!

While you’re there, get your copy of THE 7 SINS OF FIRST-TIME FILMMAKERS, a report that’s FREE (whether you decide to purchase or not)!

I’ve also written a SQUIDOO LENS that goes much more deeply into this subject. You can find it by clicking HERE!

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Everybody has their own definition of the term “cult movie,” but I did my best to cover all of the bases.

I’ll be busily working to build the other categories in my store during the next week. You can see how it looks now by clicking HERE!

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My friend Dave “Sparky” Fox at In Toon Productions just sent me this YouTube video, not so that I can watch a couple of men kissing, but because an example of his fine artwork can be seen at the end of it.

If YOU know of somebody who would like to have his or her face appear on a giant-sized comic cover of his or her very own (or if you’d like one made for yourself) contact the talented and dependable folks at In Toon Productions by clicking right HERE!

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..but there’s now a Comedy DVD category in my Amazon Store. They allow me to put up to 540 titles in any given category and I was determined to fill this one up today. There was a lot to wade through and I spent several hours at it in one sitting, but there are now 540 movies that more or less fall into the comedy genre waiting for you all when you click HERE!

My horror and science fiction sections aren’t filled to capacity yet but they will be very soon!

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That’s right. This site isn’t the only place on the web where I yak about myself. I’ve just finished and posted THE FLASHFINK PHENOMENON over at Squidoo. It explains some more of what I’m all about and my plans for this site. You can get to it by clicking HERE.

I’ve also been building up the list of DVDs in my Amazon Store. when I’m done there will be THOUSANDS of movies, CDs, books and other things listed there by the time I’m through. You can get to it by clicking HERE.

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My “Astore”(that’s what we Amazon insiders call them) is coming along and I’ve added a lot of stuff to it (with plenty more to come!). Here’s an ad for it that I’m posting in various places on the web. I hope it isn’t too small.

Go ahead and click on it. It won’t bite.

Also, my MySpace friend Billoney kindly pointed out that I had screwed up the link to my MySpace blog in yesterday’s post. It’s fixed now and you can behold its many wonders by clicking HERE!

And take a look at Billoney’s site by clicking HERE!

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I wrote a post a while back called YouTube Videos That I Like. In it I stated that I would replace the clips contained within it with some new ones a couple of times per month, but I’ve since had a better idea.

My MySpace blog is LOADED with YouTube Videos and I keep adding more to it almost every day. So I’ve deleted the YouTube Videos That I Like post and will put a banner in the sidebar of this site that links to my MySpace blog clips.

Until that banner is built, you can get to that blog by clicking HERE!

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Not much of a post today, folks. I’ve been really busy but I want to put something in this blog at least six days a week. Sometime during the next few days I’ll be presenting some information and memories about the gentleman pictured above.

Bye for now and I’ll be back with something more substantial tomorrow!

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It occurs to me as I look at the posts I’ve written in this blog so far that the direction that I’m trying to take it in might not seem clear yet. I hope this installment will change that.

When I was a kid I was really crazy about monster movies, even though I had very limited exposure to the films themselves at first. In the sixties the old Universal Monsters were popular because of their frequent appearances on TV via showings of their old movies. A lot of this popularity was among the kids of the time so there were all kinds of monster products marketed to these “monster boomers.”

I saw a lot of this stuff and was fascinated by it, especially the Aurora monster model kits and any appearances by the Universal creatures in comic books (DC’s humor comics often featured stories with them). It never occurred to me that there were magazines about monster movies until I discovered the longest running and most successful of the bunch, FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND. There will doubtlessly be a lot written about the monster magazines of my youth in future posts, but for now I’ll just say that they were a major part of my childhood years.

At one point I decided to make a list of the hundreds of monster/horror/science fiction films that I had seen. From then on each now movie that I saw which fit in these categories would be added to the list.

But there was one small problem stirring in the back of my mind.

There were a lot of movies that I felt belonged on my list but somehow didn’t at the same time. They weren’t horror or science fiction pictures, yet I couldn’t help but think of them as “my kind of movies.”

Then, when I was in my early twenties I finally saw horror movie number 1,000 (it was a Canadian film called OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN). It proved to be an important day in my film viewing career for another reason because on the way home from the theater I walked into a bookstore and saw a copy of this:

It was just what I was looking for without even knowing that I was looking!

Included in Michael Weldon’s PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM were capsule reviews of all the movies on my list. But there was something more. A lot of the films I had seen but hadn’t included on my list were also in this book. Michael “got away with it” by coming up with a new term for describing this stuff, as this video makes clear:

I immediately adopted the word Psychotronic and went home and (with the aid of the book) added to my list all of the films I had been excluding. The total jumped from exactly 1,000 to over 1,300!

I found out that the book had grown out of a weekly then defunct fanzine Michael had been publishing in New York. The Psychotronic zine had functioned as an alternative TV GUIDE for New Yorkers.

My copy of the book has gotten pretty beaten up over the years from all of the times I’ve referred to it. It also ended up in two pieces due to a drunken living room soccer accident between my roommate and his brother.

Then in 1989 PSYCHOTRONIC MAGAZINE was reborn! This time it wasn’t just a television schedule for locals, but had grown into something much more. Between the covers was tons of obsessively researched information (if information could be weighed) about the films I liked, as well as articles about movies, books, comics and all kinds of related stuff.

Issue number three (pictured right here) was the first one I got a hold of. A rundown of all of the issues that came out would be to long for this post. I’ll just say that there were 41 GREAT issues of PSYCHOTRONIC and that I would go crazy waiting for each new one to come out.

Here’s what the cover of issue number 11 looked like:

And here’s number 34:

The magazine even spawned a second volume of the original book.

I’m sorry to say that PSYCHOTRONIC was much too good to last, and stopped publishing a few years ago. What does all of this have to do with me and this website?

Only that I plan to cover, in my own humble way, the kind of stuff on my site that Michael Weldon wrote about in his books and magazines. I hope you enjoy it.

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I just signed up for Twitter last night. Yeah, I know I’m getting into the game late but you should have seen how long it took to join MySpace (and I haven’t even checked out Facebook yet). So if you want to make yourself feel better by knowing that no matter how boring you think you are there’s at least one guy living a duller life than you, click HERE.

There’s also a link to my Twitter page in the left sidebar of this page.

And there’s one loose end to mention: I know that most of the links in the right sidebar of this page aren’t all for other blogs( like a “blogroll” is supposed to be) but for a mixture of blogs and “real” sites. This is a problem I’ll be fixing in the next few days, so don’t touch that dial!

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