Your mom watches TV.

I'm finding more and more over the past few years that film is really starting to get some seriously proper treatment on television, namely cable television, but television nonetheless. When I was a kid, I watched and usually taped any cool horror movies that I found on cable since due to my young age, I had no other way to watch these films. Those are some fond memories of course and that was really my only chance of sneaking a "bad movie" past ma dukes which was kinda fun in a bad kid kind of way. But since I've had the power to control my own VHS (and eventually DVD) purchases and rentals, I lost the love for watching movies on cable. But over the years I have noticed a trend, things have gotten much better in many ways for movies on TV, especially if you have decent digital cable and even more great, is if you have HD capability.

One of the biggest components that had hurt cable movie watching for me is the most obvious one…censorship. "Flip You!" is funny as "flipping snot," but at times it can get pretty annoying and take you right out of a film. Of course, violence, gore, boobies, and any sort of sex are dropped for bad edits and/or strange commercial break choices that can really throw off the rhythm of a good movie. And oh, those wonderful commercial breaks, an issue as equally bad as censorship when it comes to cable movie viewing. I HATE commercials and I can probably blame that on a short attention span (or crystal meth), but I just cannot leave commercials on…no matter what I'm watching.

Now even getting passed commercials and the censorship issues, over the past decade home theater technology has hit amazing heights of…amazingness? Starting with how great DVD looked compared to VHS, moving on to TVs becoming better and better every year. Why would you want to watch a movie on cable when it will just look…mediocre? Especially when you could watch a DVD that looks clean and crisp, and having the choice to change the audio to fit your taste and the set up you may have. Plus, you can pause DVDs, rewind and fast forward wicked fast if need be and just pop the movie in whenever you feel like.

The answer to the censorship and commercial problem has come in the form of digital cable channels such as, Sundance, IFC, FIVE (!) different Encore channels, and my personal favorite…Retroplex. All of these channels show some great films that are uncensored, commercial free, and sometimes are even director's cuts of movies! I was very surprised once to see on IFC, the original Director's cut of Mallrats. Park Chan-Wook films make rounds on some of these channels from time to time and you can often find the not yet released to DVD "complete" Grindhouse film with faux trailers and all. Now that to me…that is just awesome.


Now, even though you still get censorship and commercials when you watch movies on regular cable channels, they still have really stepped it up quite a bit. For example, I was flippin' through the channels a few nights ago trying to find something to watch, I was lucky enough to find that the "male swamp tits" classic, Rambo: First Blood part II was playing on Spike TV. Now, Spike doesn't actually have a High Definition channel (which is a bummer for any channel in my opinion) and usually programming on it isn't exactly great looking from my experience, but I was very surprised to find that Rambo II was looking quite proper when I put it on. First off, the ever-important Widescreen format was in use (and looked great I might add) and secondly, it even almost looked like it was actually playing on an HD station, as it looked really friggin' good considering it was on a regular old cable channel. This really took me by surprise…in a good way of course. Even a few channels like, TNT/TBS, FX and AMC have HD options and have been showing some pretty great movies (especially AMC!) that can be seen on there HD stations (usually) in Widescreen.

Some of these aspects are reason for me watching more and more movies on cable again and I am continually surprised by what I can find to watch at any given time on any one of these channels. Sure, some of them have commercials and lack the boobies I find so endearing, but the quality of the movies shown and how they are treated in there presentation are just getting better by the year. Nowadays you even have the power of DVR or Tivo to help wipe out the commercials if you really don't want to sit through them. Plus, like DVD, you can watch a movie whenever and pause, rewind and fast forward to whatever spot you want. All of these functions can also be found on On-Demand, which has a pretty impressive library of free movies that can be watched and even has a good amount of their films available in HD. Sometimes I find Director's cuts make appearances and even unreleased to DVD HD versions of movies pop up from time to time (like BLOOD GAMES!).

So, now you have a plethora of choices when it comes to cinema viewing from your cable provider and it seems that more than likely you can now find a cool flick to watch at any given time, that will also happen to look great on top of it. While my preferred choice of film viewing is still DVD, I know for myself that I find that I watch a lot more movies on TV than I did a few years back. However, I do wonder if I'm alone in these thoughts...what do "you" think about movies that are shown on cable? Maybe you have satellite…what about satellite movie viewing do you love, or hate? Do you not have either formats and don't care to have them at all? I'll be watching something on FearNet while waiting for your thoughts!