Man, I remember seeing TCM Underground for the very first time. Rob Zombie was going to be the host, and I was very excited, because I loved his band White Zombie, and I met him a couple of times when they were a bar band in New York City, before they broke big. He’s a nice guy, and fanatical about cult, exploitation and horror movies, so I thought he’d bring a lot of trivia and insider knowledge to the table. After all, most White Zombie songs are about movies like that, and in fact, the band is named for a great classic horror movie: White Zombie, 1932.
It was disappointing then, to find Mr. Robert Zombie (née: Cummings, Straker) oddly unenthusiastic when he hosted TCM Underground, citing only cursory kinds of details of the movies at hand. Then he disappeared, never to return again. Maybe he was busy, or maybe he only likes discussing such movies with friends, and not some classic movie channel TV crew: who knows. But it has left the programming without a host, and there are so many hosts who could do it, too!
Why not get Joe Bob Briggs? His books and articles are really fun, even if he likes to stretch the truth a bit here and there to string out a good yarn, as he did in his “history” of The Curse of Frankenstein (from Profoundly Disturbing: Hammer fans will know where he cheated the facts a bit for more impact). He’d be fun, anyway. Also, there’s someone named Jonathan Rigby, and he’s written some great books about the English horrors from the Hammer heyday, and is very knowledgeable about them all. And of course, Greg Mank and Tom Weaver, perhaps the best American film historians in the horror genre, as well as Tim Lucas, who does the Video Watchdog magazine, and knows tons about all this stuff and more. (Upon consideration, Tim Lucas may be the best choice, due to all the background details he could get on almost any film of this type, right at his fingertips, from working on his magazine for so long. Plus, he loves these movies more than most, and he could suggest programming as well for so many crazy horror and exploitation movies most people have likely never seen, from all over the world.)
So how about it, TCM: a host for TCM Underground? Please?
(BTW: I love Rob Zombie, and he loves these movies, which is why I don’t understand why he didn’t seem to relish the hosting job for TCM Underground. {Bigger fish to fry?})
But if TCM wants to stick with a metal musician for the hosting job of TCM Underground, why not get Kirk Hammett (from Metallica) to do it? He’s a fanatical collector of classic horror memorabilia, and I’ll be he knows even more than I do about these movies (and I have a huge library of dusty old movie books). Plus, he's a very nice and likable guy, so he might be great. And because he’s from Metallica, he might even lure some new viewers: who knows?
But if TCM wants to stick with a metal musician for the hosting job of TCM Underground, why not get Kirk Hammett (from Metallica) to do it? He’s a fanatical collector of classic horror memorabilia, and I’ll be he knows even more than I do about these movies (and I have a huge library of dusty old movie books). Plus, he's a very nice and likable guy, so he might be great. And because he’s from Metallica, he might even lure some new viewers: who knows?
