Here is why I love movies and TV shows from the sixties: Towards the end of the movie, every time, there is a point when everything falls apart and goes crazy. Often this involves car chases, people shouting at each other, then people kissing, seemingly at random, but held together seamlessly. The best times are when laws of physics are defied, like when Scooby-Doo uses trash can lids to fly or when the cop car is sliced tidily in half by concrete in the original Freaky Friday. (That might actually be from the seventies. Who cares?) And it's marvelous when, on an unpredictable pretext, all of the characters are brought together and it turns out that everything up to that point has been a sham. It's just marvelous! Especially since, in a lot of these movies, the actors playing bit parts overact to a hilarious degree, so their performances are really the cherry on top of the mayhem sundae.

And now, here's why I like 1950's thrillers (a genre that I have recently gotten into): First of all, they're easily heckled, and they're easy to heckle well. They're like the MST3K version of pasta salad: easy to make, and hard to make badly. (From the heckler's point of view. Sometimes the production values are quite high on these atrocious movies.) It Came From Outer Space was a little like the MST3K version of Manos: Hands of Fate in that I repeated the title a lot, with variations, but because there was more to work with, it was much funnier.

Second of all, it's amusing to watch the terrible special effects. The best terrible special effects are probably in Them!, a real classic about invading alien species. I won't spoil what the aliens are or what they look like, but I promise you that they are worth seeing.

Thirdly, speaking of Them!, you never know who might turn up in these dreadful movies. Them! has Edmund Gwenn, who was Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street! It was quite funny, because whenever the Edmund Gwenn character said anything at all during Them!, it relaxed me visibly. Even when he was talking about dynamite! The human mind is a strange thing. That Pavlov fella was onto something, I tell ya what.

Fourth, it's interesting to see where all these horror movie cliches come from, and

Fifth, I don't usually like horror movies because the trouble with having a visual mind is that unpleasant images are indelibly printed on my brain and they take a long time to shake. However, 1950s movies are suspenseful, but because they date so obviously and are always just this side of ridiculous, it's basically impossible to be actually scared by them, but they do give you a kind of rush. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the best thriller I've ever seen, a real classic, and although it was slow-moving to me because I actually knew what was going to happen, it was really great. Suspenseful, exciting, and scary, but not petrifying. Just frightening enough to give you a good scare, but not excessive at all. Really great. I cannot advocate that genre enough.