Psychotronic Review is an offshoot of Frankly Curious, a blog about everything that Frank Moraes started back in 2009. It’s mostly about politics, but over the years, he wrote almost 500 articles about different films and filmmaking in general. But they weren’t normal articles, “Oh, I saw Popular Entertainment XXI and I Thought It Was Really Keen.” His interest in film has always been on the extremes: liking low-budget idiosyncratic and art films equally. And since Frank thinks that everyone is like him, it made sense to break off his film writing from his other writing. Hence: Psychotronic Review.
A Money-Making Enterprise
This is a labor of love, but it’s also a commercial venture in one small way. The website is part of the Amazon Associates program, which means that if you buy anything from Amazon through a link on this site, we get paid 6 percent. It doesn’t change what you pay. It’s just the way that Amazon does advertising. But have no illusions about this. Frankly Curious is a fairly successful blog and it doesn’t come close to paying for the cost of hosting the site. But you should know.
Where we can, we provide links to films you can watch online for free. But there’s a problem there. Films are often on YouTube for two weeks and then get taken down. Then we have an embedded video that is broken and we have to fix it. This has been a big problem on Frankly Curious. So we have a solution here. If we can find it on Archive.org, great! We can depend upon that. If it’s on Dailymotion, we feel pretty good about that. And if it’s been on YouTube for at least a couple of years, that’s okay too. But if none of those options are available, we will link to Amazon. We’ll also link to Amazon when we think you really should own the DVD. For example, My Name Is Bruce is a great DVD to own — lots of great extras and a movie you’ll want to watch many times. Or another one that every psychotronic film fan must own, The Criterion Collection version of Godzilla, with two great audio commentaries by David Kalat.
But I’m not trying to hock things here. And in many cases, sadly the films we discuss here won’t even be available on DVD.
Write for “Us”
Right now, everything on this site is written in the first person plural: we did this and we think that. But that’s affectation, because now it’s just me, Frank Moraes. But my hope is that I will attract other people who will be willing to write about their favorite films. There are just a couple of things you have to keep in mind:
- Unless this website takes off in a way that I can’t imagine, I can’t pay you anything. I do provide gifts to people who write for me regularly on Frankly Curious. But writing for me is something you do for pleasure; it isn’t a job. (On the offhand chance you are a technical writer, I am the editor of a fairly large tech website and I’m always looking for good people and the pay isn’t bad.)
- You need to read the site before you can write for it. I’m not interested mainstream insights about mainstream film. And the overall style is positive. If you don’t love the films, don’t try to fake it.
- I edit everything that gets published. But there’s only so much time I can work on your stuff. So you need to be a decent writer. If I’m spending more time editing you than you are writing (and I’ll know), it isn’t going to work out. I’m also a savage editor. But if I’m editing you at all, take it as a compliment.