Flasz On Film

In 2014, a documentary titled Dawson City: Frozen Time brought much-needed attention to the fact that most of the output of the Silent Era is gone forever as a result of poor film preservation and the simple fact that before the industry moved to cellulose acetate as a raw material for film stock production, nitrocellulose was the standard. And as you might know – and if you don’t, there are YouTube videos that would rapidly educate you on the matter – nitrocellulose is extremely flammable. Hours of footage of Nanook of the North were lost in a split second because the filmmaker developing and editing the picture was smoking a cigarette while doing so. Entire libraries went up in flames on occasion. That’s in addition to the fact that people for the most part didn’t see movies as art worth preserving in the first place… so they didn’t. 

Therefore, the widely used figure you will often hear is that 80% of all silent movies have been lost. Every now and then a discovery is made where someone comes across a private stash of old reels and that’s how we might get access to some more weird and obscure old movies, which are then painstakingly restored and preserved. However, unless they are the long-forgotten missing reels from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, you and I will never ever see them. For us proles, it’s not 80% of the Silent Era that is gone forever. It’s more like 99.9% because we simply don’t have access to the vast majority of whatever’s left, which is mostly kept in vaults and carefully curated as to what would be interesting enough for people to see.  

Tell me, how many silent movies can you find on Netflix or Disney Plus? Without checking I can tell you that the number is zero or close to zero. Because silent movies don’t put butts in seats. What does is a new Ryan Reynolds movie, and only for a week or so… unless he’s in a limited TV series which is then trickled down over the course of several weeks. And this new Ryan Reynolds movie or a TV series is then kept as a streaming-only exclusive (read as completely devoid of a physical release) because in the current landscape of fierce competition between streamers, the exclusive content is what keeps people from unsubscribing.  

What nobody cares about, however, is the content that doesn’t put butts in seats in considerable enough numbers. A streaming exclusive that doesn’t perform isn’t just going to sit in the online library forever. It takes up precious zeros and ones and those zeros and ones cost money in server upkeep. Therefore, a lot has been made of the fact that last year, major streaming players purged good chunks of their books, specifically getting rid of content nobody was watching… which is also often content that nobody could access otherwise. I can only assume that rights to these films and shows were (or soon will be) added to these inexpensive libraries of low-tier content that other streamers typically rotated, and which now may eventually be picked up by smaller providers who often offer these movies as free to watch with ads. But some of them will inevitably end up lost in the shuffle and we’ll never hear from them again.  

And that’s something that’s been happening not just recently or to recently released streaming-only content. This is a process that affects all cinematic output, from silent films, exploitation movies and B-movies from the 50s, 60s and 70s, to VHS-only genre schlock from the 80s and 90s and Direct-to-DVD bargain bin fare. And I’m not even going to touch the subject of indie movies that die a quiet death after doing a few rounds on a festival circuit and end up languishing in the filmmakers’ drawers because nobody wants to release them. It’s impossible to even fathom how many movies we simply don’t know about and will never know about because they are completely inaccessible to the general public, and even when they are, there is no way for the general public to discover them. 

However, not all hope is lost because where the streaming giants fail to see a profit, others will step in and rescue movies that literally nobody in the world cares about. So, in addition to bottom-rung streamers like FreeVee, Plex and Tubi where you can find movies that Netflix no longer finds lucrative in addition to some real genre gems and old classics, you can still count on YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion in addition to a whole host of even more obscure streaming services catering to specific niche audiences, to pick up the slack. Well, it’s the people who upload countless movies onto those free-to-access streaming platforms, sometimes over and over again, because the website owners may eventually remove them on the rare occasions when rights holders find out someone else has been watching movies for free that they happily kept locked away in vaults.  

Therefore, if you’re after a VHS oddity from the 80s, an obscure silent movie or maybe if you’re planning a comprehensive retrospective of all movies Roger Corman ever produced, you’d be wasting your money if you thought you’d find any of them on major streaming services. They’re all on YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. Some are probably on Tubi and Plex. And others are peppered across the internet. All you need to do is use the magic of a search engine and look for them because you won’t find movies like Robot Wars or Wedlock elsewhere. But you can bet your backside that someone digitized their VHS tape and made it available somewhere.  

The key is learning how and where to look. And maybe getting a VPN because some streaming services are geographically ringfenced. Services like JustWatch will still direct you even to small-time and often geo-locked services where you can see a movie you may not be able to access otherwise. If you’re after Christmas-themed slashers like Silent Night, Deadly Night (and its many sequels), or Christmas Evil, you’ll probably find them on Tubi or Plex. If you feel like watching Skyjacked with Charlton Heston, there’s an obscure Brazilian ad-powered streaming platform that has it. If you’re lucky enough and what you’re after is a movie other people may have already considered worth preserving, it may be available on Archive.org, which is how you can find some minor Hitchcock movies like Lifeboat or complete VHS genre camp like Robot Wars.  

And if you really want to soil your pants, there are movies worth watching in the online equivalents of the kinds of movie theatres Travis Bickle wanted to take girls on dates to. That’s right. Even places like PornHub and YouPorn (and probably many others) host “real” movies, like old X-rated exploitation movies from the 70s and made-for-TV softcore where some of your favourite stars and filmmakers may have started their careers. After all, that’s how I watched Wes Craven’s The Fireworks Woman, which was one of the few adult movies he made between directing The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. By the way, you don’t have to go to the lengths that I did any more, because this movie has now been added to Archive.org. 

Again, what you need to learn is how and where to look. With a VPN and a handful of major subscriptions you will have access to a lot of movies you didn’t even know you had access to. Granted, most of cinema is either completely gone or well beyond our field of vision, just like we don’t know how big the universe is because it expands faster than light can travel through it. But take solace in the fact that with a little bit of looking, you may be able to watch movies you never thought existed or you never thought you’d find again because the last time you saw them was when you were twelve and they never got anything more than a bottom-shelf VHS release. Which is how I recently found Crash and Burn. On YouTube. Somebody put it up there and it’s now a part of the ever-expanding kingdom of abandonware movies that only hardcore fans care about enough to ensure others would watch them.  

Now, I might as well go and watch The Horror at 37000 Feet on YouTube, follow it with a quick stop at Tubi to see Stuart Gordon’s Fortress and, if I’m feeling frisky, come back later this weekend to watch Ticks on YouTube because it’s been literally three decades since I saw this piece of body horror schlock with Seth Green in one of the lead roles. And maybe, just to assuage my own anxiety, I’ll watch something on Disney Plus, if only to make me think it’s still a good investment to keep the subscription going. So, I might add a rewatch of The Creator to my weekend plans.