Hi, welcome to Hidden Films! My name is Sam Weisberg, and I’m a regular movie reviewer for Screen Comment and The L Magazine.

Hidden Films is an in-depth guide to films not currently available on Netflix, which is now the dominant service for film lovers. It is not intended as a critique of Netflix, which indeed has a stupefying collection of movies (many of them rather obscure) available through mail-order or streaming online video. If anything, Hidden Films is a supplement to Netflix; it is meant to raise awareness about movies that, for whatever reason, did not receive the long-standing distribution deal, cult status, widespread fan base or other accolades necessary to save them from obscurity. (However, a significant number of what I call “non-Netflix films” aren’t obscure; they are widely discussed and analyzed works, often made by celebrated directors, which makes their exemption from Netflix and/or relegation to VHS-only format a little puzzling).

Not surprisingly, many of these films were box-office and/or critical failures, and much of my reason for starting this site is to discover new camp classic champions (will anything ever replace “The Room”?) Some are long-forgotten 1970s and ’80s movies I’d read reviews of in the second and third grade, when my mother bought me the Jay A. Brown collection Rating the Movies. The vibrant negative phrases contained within those reviews–”unmitigated fiasco,” “creaky clunker,” “total washout”–still fill me with a morbid curiosity to find these films, to see for myself if they are hilariously bad or just painfully bad.

But this site is not meant to be a mere homage to trash. There are a plethora of good movies, ranging from critically praised in their time to never theatrically released, that deserve an overdue revival or discovery. For that reason, the movies discussed on Hidden Films will run the gamut from small to large, from relatively well-known to completely unknown, from classy to asinine, from near-perfect to godawful. When possible, I will feature interviews with/excerpts from the directors, actors, screenwriters, set designers, dolly grips or anyone else I can find that is associated with these films–as well as  film scholars and aficionados–to shed light on why, exactly, they either were swept under the rug or never saw the light of day to begin with.

My idea for this site came from a rather self-centered and aimless exercise, in which I compiled a list of every movie I’ve ever seen in all my 31 years of existence. (If there was an aim, it was to inherit bragging rights). I used the Internet Movie Database’s list of every movie ever made, in alphabetical order, to ensure I didn’t leave any truly forgettable movies off the list. In the process of plumbing through some 250,000 web pages of titles, of every film ever registered with the IMDB (straight-to-video slasher pics, NYU Film School projects, thirty-minute silent films from as far back as 1898), I decided to keep a separate file of films that intrigued me. There were big-name director films I’d never heard of, films with insanely offensive titles (“Why We Had to Kill Bitch,” “Women are Devils”) that could only have been released without irony in their era or country of origin, films that looked amazing because of their title or cover art alone. After that, I looked up every film I wanted to see on Netflix, and the resulting 1,000-or-so movies I couldn’t find were placed on my “Movie Wish List,” AKA, the movies I am writing about on this site.

Because of the obscure video store memberships, Amazon gift certificates and individual films I’ve generously received as presents from my family and girlfriend, I have begun to accumulate these “hidden movies,” and finding the rest via Amazon, e-Bay, film school archivists and random, often foreign DVD retailers will be an ongoing process. I have purchased a multi-region DVD/VHS player to view films never released in NTSC format. I will also eventually be attending little-publicized film festivals all over the country, so that this site stays as  current as it can and helps new artists get some notice.  I hope you enjoy this site, that it gives you many campy and/or insightful nights of movie-watching, and I welcome any and all suggestions from readers about additional rare films I should seek out.