For this month’s spotlight on lesser-known but worthwhile streaming services, we’re showcasing our first advertising-based video-on-demand platform, or A.V.O.D., the model in which services make their money not via subscriptions, but through good old-fashioned advertisements. It’s a trade-off, to be sure; commercials were one of the reasons everyone got rid of cable. But now that Disney+, Netflix and their ilk have shoved ads back into their (paid!) programming, it’s not so hard to tolerate them from a free service.
Among those free services, few are as enjoyable and reliable as Shout! TV, the latest incarnation of one of the most beloved labels in all of physical media. Shout! Factory was started in 2002 by three of the minds behind the great music label Rhino Records, and both imprints carved out a niche for catering to those whose tastes are slightly off the beaten path. As a DVD, Blu-ray and now 4K label, Shout! has been dependable and admirable in both curation and presentation, restoring and releasing crackerjack titles from the realms of cult, horror, sci-fi, action, animation, foreign films and throwback TV.
Those genres also make up the backbone of the menu on Shout! TV. Their on-demand film selection includes a wide variety of movies, like Godzilla and Jackie Chan, Gene Autry and Elvira, with a frequently rotating library of entertaining titles from the silent era to the present. But their most impressive selections are in the label’s original specialties. The cult section is a delightful menagerie of Mario Bava films, biker movies, skin flicks, grimy indies, Roger Corman cheapies, contemporary cult items like “Donnie Darko” and oddities you’ll click only because of the inexplicable titles (“Dirty Duck”??). And Shout has enough horror movies to run a successful sublabel, Scream Factory, so the channel’s horror section is stacked with variety that includes “Night of the Living Dead,” “Alligator” and “Chopping Mall.”
On the TV side — where the ad spots are particularly unobtrusive (credit where due: Shout bothers to insert them in designated commercial spots, rather than at random intervals as some other A.V.O.D. services do) — viewers can find scores of classic television shows and comedy shorts. They also have variety shows, cartoons and adventures, but the crown jewels of their TV offerings are their expansive collections of old episodes of “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson”; those are not only available as à la carte episodes, based on your preferred guest stars or eras, but also among their 24/7 streaming channels, where you can just tune in and view whatever they’re running. You know, just like watching TV!
All of this makes Shout! TV one of the very best streaming values since it doesn’t cost you a single cent — just the time you’ll spend watching ads. Here are a few recommendations:
Mystery Science Theater 3000: “The Skydivers”: Shout has been in business for quite some time with the various iterations of “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” the uproariously funny cult TV show where an average Joe, marooned in space, watches bad movies with his robot companions while cracking wise. In addition to the original episodes, Shout also streams their “riffed” short films and episodes from “MST” alumni shows “Cinematic Titanic,” “The Film Crew” and “Rifftrax.” But if you’re looking for an entry point, I’d recommend this sixth season episode, in which our boys first watch the educational short “Why Study Industrial Arts?” (the titular question is not satisfactorily answered, frankly) and the technically incompetent and narratively incoherent 1963 film “The Skydivers,” from the writer-director Coleman Francis, a filmmaker so inept, he makes Ed Wood look like Martin Scorsese.
The Dick Cavett Show: “Hollywood Greats — Alfred Hitchcock”: Carson may be the big name and the shining star for viewers looking to stream a throwback talk show; then as now, however, Dick Cavett is the connoisseur’s choice, offering up brainy, far-reaching interviews with some of the wittiest folks in show business. Shout has a wonderful cross-section of full episodes, featuring candid conversations with music icons like John Lennon, Ray Charles, David Bowie and Janis Joplin; comic legends like Groucho Marx, Robin Williams and Lucille Ball; and Hollywood greats like Orson Welles, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and the Master of Suspense, who walks Cavett through his philosophies of terror, his methodology with actors and how he built some of his most signature sequences.
“The Decline of Western Civilization” (parts I-III): Before she directed “Wayne’s World” and made a mint, Penelope Spheeris was vibrantly documenting the various squalid corners of the Los Angeles youth and music scenes. The first “Decline,” released in 1981, captured the turn-of-the-decade punk and hardcore scene, warts and all; “Part II: The Metal Years,” showcases the scene seven years later but a world away, in the midst of its takeover by style-over-substance heavy metal. “Part III” hit screens a decade later, after Spheeris’s Hollywood success, focusing on wayward youths and gutter punks. All three films play now like cultural anthropology, deeply immersed and empathetic (and, occasionally, wryly funny).
“Fitzcarraldo”: He may be as well-known as a meme as he is as a filmmaker these days, but the German director Werner Herzog boasts a vast filmography of documentaries, shorts and narrative features, much of it represented in Shout’s “Werner Herzog Film Collection.” All admirers have their favorites, but the quintessential Herzog movie is this ravishing, brutal and picturesque 1982 epic, with Herzog’s frequent leading man (and sworn enemy) Klaus Kinski as an Irish immigrant in Peru who dreams of building an opera house in the middle of the Amazon.
“Smithereens”: You can’t go wrong in the aforementioned cult section — these people know their cult movies — but if you’re looking for a real treat, check out this 1982 indie banger from the director Susan Seidelman. In telling the story of a Jersey runaway who dreams of fame, Seidelman captures the New York downtown art scene of the early 1980s (and the various hangers-on therein) with lively verisimilitude and welcome cynicism.
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