After a demoralizing post-New Year's stretch where Turner Classic Movies' late-Friday-night "TCM Underground" slot seemed to have been turned into a dumping ground for toothless crap fit only for drive-ins catering to viewers who are still using training wheels--The Amityville Horror!? TCM, please!--things have started hopping there again, and I don't mean Night of the Lepus. Last week saw the channel's premiere of Willie Dynamite, a 1974 blaxsploitation movie about a flamboyantly dressed pimp played by Gordon from Sesame Street, and this week, March 14 at 1:00 am central/2:00 am eastern, TCM unearths a Cold War artifact beyond Rorshach's more feverish nightmares: Shack Out on 101 (1956), one of the strangest and most seldom-seen movies of its day. A poverty row production, it's set in a greasy spoon restaurant, with Keenan Wynn as the proprietor, Terry Moore (once the love object of both Howard Hughes and Mighty Joe Young) as the waitress, and Frank Lovejoy as a nuclear scientist--"a big, big man" in Moore's words--who regularly stops by to get into different kinds of trouble with Moore and with Lee Marvin, who plays the cook, known as Slob, who's moonlighting as a Commie agent. If the intense mixture of steaminess and paranoia and the energy that the cast gives off trying to keep the claustrophobic picture alive aren't enough to hold your interest in a vise, you can kill time during the dead spots by trying to figure out whether it's more implausible that Marvin would have been approved by the KGB recruiting office or the Board of Health.



Then, a week later, March 20 at 1:30 am central/2:30 am eastern, TCM Underground has the greatest counterculture roap trip of them all, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). James Taylor yes-that-James-Taylor, with a hawkish profile and great greasy-looking dark locks, is the nameless driver who tools around the country with his mechanic sidekick (the late Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys), getting into races for money; the magnificent Warren Oates is the middle-aged fantasist who finds their very existence so objectionable that he goads them into a race to Washington, winner take the other's wheels. Neither Taylor (who in an interview included in a 2007 Criterion Collection DVD release says that he's never seen the picture) nor Wilson ever acted again, and if Oates had never acted in anything else, his work here would be enough to secure him a position in Character Actor Heaven. When it was first released, Esquire ran a picture of its leading lady, Laurie Bird, on its cover and proclaimed it the movie of the year, a boast that the magazine later sheepishly retracted after it flopped in theaters. It would have to settle for being one for the ages.

TCM has so many hours of programming to fill up that it can hardly restrict the weird stuff to the witching hour, so Friday morning, March 13, 8:45 am central/9:45 am eastern, the network premieres Zotz!, a 1962 comedy directed by the scary-movie gimmickmeister William Castle. Little seen (and, like Shack Out on 101), not available on DVD), the film has acquired a cult reputation over the years based largely on its far-out title and the change of pace it marked for Castle, who soon moved back to plastic skeletons. It stars Tom Poston, the thinking man's Jim Nabors, who plays a professor who, Wikipedia says, "obtains powers to cause pain or slow movement, and even kill. He immediately suffers the consequences of his discovery: Jones realizes that when he points at another living creature, it causes a great pain. This prevents any intimate encounters with a woman. It is a metaphor of the age of nuclear weapons." Sounds hilarious!