The New Beverly Cinema presents the Pure Cinema Podcast. My name is Ryan Sauer. I'm joined, as always, by the delightful Mr. Elwood Kane, and we are back at our thing where we talk about a film book, which is one of our favorite things to do.

And film books are one of the favorite ways we have had and did have to discover movies, I think.

I love our film book episodes. And the only thing I love more than that is the word psychotronic.

I have loved this word since the first time I saw it. I think nothing

outside of maybe the word midnight movie when I first saw it, the things that catch your attention,

you can't really explain why, like why you view yourself the way you do or cult movies or

whatever it is, right? That clearly pulled both was a tractor beam for both of us, right?

Is when I saw the word psychotronics, my intro to Psychotronic was the magazine. And I saw one in a comic book store saying and was like, whoa, the way the title was written is still to this day my favorite font I've ever seen. Like I just love it. And we put it on T-shirts back in the Jump Cut Day. We made a bunch of Psychotronite T-shirts that I don't think we sold them. I think I just had them. But it's a word that really great because I didn't know what it meant. And to be honest, I don't think I've ever really known what it meant. I don't think anyone knows what it means. But we have some definitions. But that led me to, I start collecting that. I think I have all about a couple issues now. And then it led me to the Psychotronic Encyclopedia film, which was the first one,

probably when I was 20 or something, you know, when I finally got to the book. But this and of course the video guide afterwards, which has just thousands of entries. Yeah. I mean, something like, this has like 3,000 something and that one has, the guide has like 7,000 something.

It's insane.

It's insane when it gets that.

But this first one was, you know, obviously based on like somebody just like, kind of like,

you know, there's a lot of similarities with the Perry, but the difference with cult movies

and Danny is I read that as much for the film discoveries as I do for his writing. His writing is so vocative and interesting and he has such unique perspective. And this is never about the writing. I don't think, sometimes it'll be a funny turn or frame or a funny thing that they, that they highlight. But it really is never, it's much more about just the fact that they are like putting these somewhere where you could find them, especially in a pre-internet age, pre-letterbox lists and stuff like that. This was the way to be like, oh, what are these crazy movies have in common? And I, you know, it's still hard to ever fully pin down. I wrote a few down that I don't think either rest are going to put them. Like literally when you say the word these are the ones and tell me if you disagree with any like first things that pop in my

head the baby oh my god psychotrotic movie blue sunshine yeah is a complete because it's like it

doesn't fit in the category of horror it does not fit in and there is no such thing as a cult movie

right you have to become a cult movie so god told told me to, of all Larry Cohen's films, God told me, looker when we talk about. Oh my God, yeah. Because it's more psychotronic than it is science fiction. The ultimate Romero's Nightwriters, you know, like other Romero films to me don't really fit that film the visitor is an obvious one the

tinket by Altman oh i love that these aren't ones i was looking to see if i don't know that they're

in this guy or not i'm just saying these and then a reincarnation of peter proud as a as a recent thing

we've talked about a bit the sender oh yeah big time love that one i've discovered last year for the

first time called arnold which is just that funny, weird. It's like not horror enough, not comedy enough, but it's like, anyway. And so these are movies that like you can't put your finger around. Sometimes they'll have elements of horror and science fiction and there's often, uh, sometimes there's clunky things. Other times there's like really out there things.

And so I, where I disagree with it, just a touch is when he puts in things like, you know, jaws and stuff like that. Because to me, Jaws is not psychotronic, but Orca is. And that is the key to defining difference. I can't, I can't back it up with anything. There is no science, but to me, Jaws is not psychotronic, neither is Halloween.

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