Yep, me too. Do channels still air B-movies at midnight and past?
Actually, USA also used to air B-movies in the morning as well. My brother and I watched a movie about bees invading and one about snails invading. We liked them at the time.
Oh yeah! I had forgotten all about that until now. So bad it’s good stuff. 
Prior to that I can remember going to slumber parties as a kid before any of my friends had cable. Channel 55 was the only station to stay on the air past midnight, and they showed all kinds of monster movies. I couldn’t even tell you what they were now, but we watched them.
I still miss Joe Bob Briggs Drive-In Theater. Especially in the summer, I’d be up in the middle of the night when it turned cooler in the house, keeping an eye on the TV. Watched the movies but as with so many other hosted movies, the parts with the host were better than most of the movies.
One of the premium channels … not HBO … once had a late night series of movies hosted by Joe Bob Briggs. One night he did “The Adventures of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yaks,” which was a terrible movie, but it had a young Tawny Kitaen as Gwendoline, and she was smoking hot, and it had a storyline about a tribe of French fashion models who lived in the Chinese deserts and ran around topless and shaved all their hair off except for a topknot … you have to wonder what kind of drugs they was taking … and played kinky BDSM games. Other than that, it was a very dull movie.
I loved Shock Theater on, I think, Saturday nights. T came on around 10:30, and when I got old enough to watch TV that late I was thrilled.
After the show, though I was scared. I thought someone was on the porch looking in the window. I thought someone had crept into the house and was under my bed. My older brother helped get me wound up, so he got to enjoy the movie and also my fear.
With me, it wasn’t so much late night as it was Saturday or Sunday afternoons on UHF channels.
And it wasn’t always just B or horror movies (I remember catching some of Hammer’s Horror of Dracula–specifically, the staking of Lucy–one afternoon.) Sometimes it would be old kids’ movies like the Russian-animated Snow Queen (the best Disney movie Disney never made) or The Three Worlds of Gulliver, or maybe Japanese monster movies. Or even minor classics like Houdini with Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. Nice ways to while away a rainy weekend afternoon.
TNT’s Monstervision…good times.
Now you guys are talking. I grew up just outside the zone where one could pull in WIIC with rabbit ears. My dad, for some reason, resolutely refused to get a roof-mounted antenna, so during most of my childhood we could only get one local channel. Fortunately, however, we had relatives who lived in one of Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs, and during the annual three-week summer Kid Exchange that passed for a vacation in our cash-strapped households, we’d go nuts watching that stuff.
I remember having the willies scared out of me by the original, 1930s Invisible Man, the British(!) monster movie Gorgo, my first viewing of Forbidden Planet, and oddities such as First Space Ship on Venus. Good times.
Oh, and my relatives lived a couple blocks from Bruno Sammartino’s place! I always hoped we’d catch a glimpse of him mowing the lawn or something, but no such luck.
I well remember staying up to watch such horror (I guess that’s what they were supposed to be; they made me laugh more than anything else) movies as Night of the Lepus and Blood Beach.
But it wasn’t just schlocky horror movies that we got late at night. It was also comedies like Drive-In, westerns (The Cheyenne Social Club), and thrillers (They Came To Rob Las Vegas).
Lots of variety, and good times!
I also was a proud Sammy Terry fan! Caught him in one of his last appearances before he retired & passed the character on to his son.
Out of Cincinnati was Bob Shreve’s Past Prime Playhouse- he’s stretch a 90 minute movie to three-four hours with his routines, songs, jokes & ads, probably getting drunker as the wee hours of the morning went on. As a child, I really did not understand why he got sillier as the night went on. Nor why during his occasional few months hiatus, my Dad would say he was probably at the hospital drying out. Did he get wet?
Back in those days, EVERY station almost had late night movies or afternoon movies. Mostly horror & sci-fi stick in my mind, but it seems social satires like The Magic Christian, Wild in the Streets, Love-Ins (a Tim Leary-esque professor becomes a hippie cult messiah) and the recently found & restored Privilege (the British Establishment creates a Pop Star Messiah to get youth support) were also in heavy rotation.
Oh, God!
Growing up in MPS/SP during the '60s and early '70s, I saw most of the great flicks of the '40s and '50s on late night TV (and weekend TV, now that I think about it): Mildred Pierce, Captain from Castille, The Sea Hawk, Treasure of Sierra Madre, just to name a few.
When UHF took off in the '80s, I watched Elvira, Mistress of the Dark religiously on KITN 29, and caught my share of crappy SF/Horror movies: Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde and a movie about two lesbians seduced by vampires while camping in Portugal stick in my mind.
Nowadays, a lot of this stuff is available on TCM and AMC, but it just ain’t the same. I loved the randomness of each weekend’s selections.
Speaking of old cheesy B movies, has anybody else ever heard of “El Mundo Del Lundo”? Because it was awesome. El mundo del Lundo (TV Movie 1996) - El mundo del Lundo (TV Movie 1996) - User Reviews - IMDb
Not quite the same thing, but there was an era when a friend and I would curl up on the couch and watch the Saturday night movie on the Spanish station - La Super Pelicula. Since the movies were mostly modern B-fare and we spoke just enough Spanish between us to catch about every third line, it was a really bizarre experience we always called “the super peculiar.”
We also watched some really odd things on the night a local indy channel ran Asian programming - a Japanese soap opera set in a small rural hospital. The two things I remember are the doctor/anesthesiologist, who had the only basso profundo Japanese voice I’ve ever heard, and the sponsoring local bank’s cheesy ad, which rattled along in a high-pitched Japanese woman’s voice over un-color corrected still photos and ended with the hilarious, “Mem-Bah-Eff-Dee-Aye-See.”
I lived near Detroit growing up. We had the Groovie Ghouly on Saturday nights who showed all the B horror from the 50s and 60s.
Then channel 7 had the afternoon movie every day at 4:00. Every few months they would put on a “Giant Monster Week” with Godzilla and all of its ilk.
Then we had channel 62, waaaay up the UHF dial that showed “Movies 'til Dawn” every day of the week. Most of their films were B movies from the 30s and 40s. Saw some great old stuff on there. Lots of films starring ex-vaudeville performers doing their characters, etc. No doubt some of those movies are completely lost by now considering how poorly we are preserving that part of our heritage. I lost a lot of summer days from playing, “just one more” with that channel.
If you have a Roku and you love B movies I strongly recommend getting the Pub-D-Hub channel. Its a channel put together by film lovers where they format public domain movies for the Roku. You can see some content for free. There is a fee to get full access, but I think it is $1.99 per year. All kinds of B movies and other great stuff ranging from silent movies filmed in the late 1800s to stuff that was released under Creative Commons Licenses right up to this year. They have sub channels for horror, mystery, adventure, etc. Best yet, if you are a “member” there is a “New This Week” section. Its like opening presents every Sunday morning.
I remember watching Creature Features on some Chicago station and a local monster movie host on some New Orleans station but I have no memory of what the movies actually were.
I too grew up watching Detroit TV (and Toledo, and Windsor Ontario). I distinctly remember one night in the early '70’s staying up to watch two black & white movies on 62. For some goofy reason I remember they were both written by Sydney & Murial Box - the name made me giggle at the time.
Huh, I think that’s probably it. Hair not skin? Dean Stockwell? The origin of the song “Nature Boy”? It wasn’t a dream then? Huh.
WAGA in Atlanta had The Big Movie SHOCKER! on late Friday nights. It was my introduction to the classic Universal horror movies. I can still remember diving behind the sofa when Lon Chaney Jr. changed into the Wolfman.
Growing up in southern WV in the 60s/70s, we had a local version of Chiller Theater (out of Bluefield, I think). I think I was 10 or 11 when I convinced my parents to let me stay up all night on New Year’s to watch a whole night of horror and SF movies, and I kept doing it every year until I left home for college.
I just rewatched one of those old cheesy movies, The Deadly Mantis, at Blobfest. Brought back memories, it did.
Another great late-night movie – The Incredible Shrinking Man. In fact, an article in the New York Times once picked it as one of “the all-time best B-movies”
I don’t include the Chiller Theaters, Creature Features, Supernatural Theaters, and Million Dollar Movies in here, because in the New York Metropolitan area when I was growing up, these all ran much earlier on Friday or Saturday nights, typically starting about 8 PM. They knew who their audience was. (Zacherle was on Chiller Theater on WPIX at that early time, but I gather that he had previously been on CBS late at night, pulling the same schtick. But i never saw that)
There were lots of really wonderfully awful films on the old Chiller Theater (which started out with a movie montage for several years, before they changed to the animated 6-finger hand erupting from the red pool under the dead treee). They showed them so often that I think they must have owned perpetual rights. I don’t recall MST3K making fun of most of these (except for The Indestructible Man)
**The Cape Canaveral Monsters
Voodoo Island** (with Boris Karloff)
The Ape Man (with Bela Lugosi)
**Man-Made Monster
Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman
The Cyclops
The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake
The Indestructible Man** (with Lon Chaney Jr.)
The Monster of Piedras Blancas (with its cut-rate Creature from the Black Lagoon)
**The Hideous Sun Demon
The Neanderthal Man**
Actually, they did show one good SF film – **The Creeping Unknown[/B (which I refer to upthread), called The Quatermass Xperiment in Britain, and based on the first of Nigel Kneale’s “Quatermass” serials. It’s actually pretty good, although the next two were better. It wasn’t until I got a copy of the script, years later, that I learned that they’d significantly changed the ending from the original serial.
They ran a completely different, generally higher-class, set of films on the other stations. <illion Dollar Movie had
**King Kong
Son of Kong
Mighty Joe Young
The Giant Behemoth
Godzilla
Gigantis the Fire Monster
Rodan
The Crawling Eye**
Million Dollar Movie always started with a teaser, either the beginning of the film, or something exciting snipped from the middle of the film. Then they would go to the title card, looking like a Hollywood clap-board, rising over a city skyline, and with the theme from “Gone with the Wind”. It was years before I learned what that music was, and to this day associate it with cheesy flicks.
{scene: an alpine slope. Two climbers are roped together, with the rope extending upwards, apparently to a third climber]
Third Climber, off: There’s someone coming through the mist!
(Weird, eerie, jingling music)
Second Climber: Who is it!
Third Climber: I can’t see! It’s…it’s …AAAAAiiighieee!
(Body falls past them, but is restrained by the rope. The other two pull it up.)
First climber: A little higher! A Little Higher! I can almost grab him…
(second climber lets go. Rope cuts on edge, third climber falls.)
First Climber: You fool! I almost had him! Why did you let go?
Second climber: Didn’t you see? His head – it was Torn Off!
(Music from Gone with the Wind as the clapboard rises over Manhattan)