Five Years of Simulwatch

Five years ago today, on March 19, 2020, we were only a week or so into the COVID lockdown. In an attempt to stay connected and bring some relief to a chaotic, confusing new world, my college friend Dave and I started a weekly tradition that would come to be known as “Simulwatch.” When we started, we fired up a video chat and started a movie simultaneously on our respective televisions after a “1, 2, 3…” countdown. It worked well, even when we had to re-sync after each commercial.¹ There was something immediately comforting and familiar about watching a goofy movie with a friend, even if we were 50 miles away.

Ninja Terminator (1985)

Our first film was Miami Connection, a low-budget 80s taekwondo action film that has everything you want in a movie: fantastic fashion, plenty of fighting, stiff acting, and blatantly 1980s songs about how great taekwondo is. We followed it up the following week with The VelociPastor, about–what else–a priest that gains the ability to turn into a dinosaur. For the first few weeks, we just took turns picking movies. Before long, though, we switched it up and each week one of us would present three potential movies and the other person would make the final choice. The unpicked movies then went onto a placeholder list. We eventually started throwing “Roulette Choice” weeks into the mix where we let fate decide what movie from our backlog to watch.

Miami Connection (1987)

After almost a year we added two more college friends when Alex and Andrew joined the mix. Our selection process stayed mostly the same. One week, someone would present three movies and the other three would vote (the presenter breaking the rare three-way ties). Every other week, we’d spin the roulette wheel since movies were piling up pretty quickly. And thus it’s continued to the present day.

Infra-man (1975)

Often, but not always, we’ll choose themes for the three selections we offer up. Some past themes include:

• 70’s farm horror
• Movies that never got a DVD/Blu-Ray release
• Massacre on YouTube (movies with the word “massacre” in the title, available on YouTube)
• Neon cover art
• Movies with six words in the title
• Tribute to the Shat(ner)
• Mexican horror
• Before we were born
• Movies from ____ (specific year)
• Hairy nipples
• Two-Word Movie Titles that start with the letters S and I
• Random crap on Tubi
• Nature is Trying to Kill Us… Again
• Lesser Known Michael Crichton Movies
• The works of Bill Rebane, Wisconsin’s answer to Roger Corman
• Schlock from Three Decades
• Vansploitation
• Weird Foreign Cinema of the 80s.
• Eat the rich
• Movies with Lesser Known Siblings in them
• Horror-Westerns on Tubi

Though we all enjoy a wide range of films, we each tend to have our niches that we tend to recommend. Andrew, for example, tends toward B- and C-grade 70s/80s slasher and action movies. I gravitate towards oddball obscurities from those same decades. Alex loves his horror-westerns and swordplay films. Dave leans towards foreign sleaze and weirdness. When December hits, we go to Holiday Roulette mode, choosing a random movie each week from our separate holiday-themed list.

After we finish each week’s movie, we log our movie in a Letterboxd list of everything we’ve watched and write our individual reviews. Dave also posts to Facebook a separate summary and we add select screenshots to the comments (chosen during the movie when someone yells out “screenshot!"). The detail view of the list includes the date each film was watched, the theme of the week (if applicable), and eventually a “chest hair rating,” something we realized was necessary with how many 1970s movies we watch.

There’s something about watching a movie that very few people have bothered with in the decades since its release. Same goes for films by directors that only ever made one. Or newer movies that got buried among the glut of other straight-to-streaming releases. I’ve always enjoyed the types of movies we watch during Simulwatch, but there’s no denying that they’re much more enjoyable when watched with friends who also appreciate them. Yeah, sure, we laugh at the acting, the primitive effects, the dialogue, the less-than-stellar captioning, and the fashion choices (oh, the fashion), but we also recognize and appreciate the drive (and sometimes the gall) it can take to make movies like these. Anyone can make a movie when given tens of millions of dollars, but let’s see what you can do when you live in Florida, only have $50,000, don’t know anyone that really knows how to operate a camera, and have to throw together a monster suit that allows the actor breath underwater. I mean, could you make Zaat?

Zaat (1971)

Stats from our first five years

• Movies watched: 247 (245 unique)
• Of those, movies watched twice: 2 (Creating Rem Lazar and Miami Connection, both because either Alex or Andrew had missed them from early in Simulwatch)
• Five movies with the wide variance² in our ratings (with 3 or more viewers): Thumbs (2), Samurai Cop (1.546875), Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1.171875), Christmas Slay (0.921875), tie: Space is the Place and Ebola Syndrome (0.796875)
• Three most popular years: 1988, 1977, 1989
• Top three directors (3 movies each): Ruggero Deodato, Bruno Mattei, Godfrey Ho
• Top actors: Corey Yuen Kwai (5), Chiang Tao (5), Danny Lee Sau-Yin (4), Donald Pleasence (4), Alida Valli (4), Ken Foree (4), Yuen Shun-Yi (4)
• Most popular non-North American countries of origin: Italy, Hong Kong, UK
• Most popular Letterboxd “nanogenre”: “Blood, Silly, Cult”
• Our universally loved (highest rated movies that all four of us watched): Who Killed Captain Alex? (4.5), Violent Night (4.375), The Seventh Curse (4.25), The Super Inframan (4.25), Eega (4.125), Visitors from the Galaxy (4.125)
• Our universally hated (lowest rated movies that all four of us watched): The Covid Killer (0.5), Ax ‘Em (0.5), The Body Beneath (0.5), Midnight Movie Massacre (0.75), The Amazing Bulk (0.75)
• Movies that all four of us rated the exact same way: Stone (3), The Covid Killer (0.5), Alienator (2), From Beyond (3.5), The Antichrist (3), Ax ‘Em (0.5)
• Number of movies that at least one of us rated 1/2 a star (the lowest possible rating): 22
• Number of (unique) movies that at least one of us rating 5 stars: 5
• Number of movies we’ve quit before the end: 0

A nice side effect of the virtual viewings is that it’s also resulted in annual IRL get-togethers as hop in the minivan and head up to the Mahoning Drive-In in Lehighton, Pennsylvania where they regularly show cult, horror, and other classic drive-in fare via 35mm film projection on their giant screen. It’s the perfect drive-in experience. (We do not include our drive-in movies on the official Simulwatch log. Here are the movies I’ve seen at the Mahoning.)

The Simulwatch weekly ritual was not only a great way for us to keep contact during the pandemic, but has kept us in frequent touch even after quarantine was lifted. At various points over the last five years, all of us said how it was our favorite part of the week and those rare weeks we had to miss, it felt like something was missing.

Here’s to the next five, fellas!