Turner Classic Movies has launched its TCM UNDERGROUND program, hosted by Rob Zombie and beginning Friday, October 13th with a double feature of Ed Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and BRIDE OF THE MONSTER.

The website offers critical insights, trivia, background information and quotable dialogue from all of the featured films, compiled by yours truly and other lucky bastards who actually get paid to transcribe stuff like "Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the sun. Now, you spread a thin line of it to a ball, representing the earth. Now, the gasoline represents the sunlight, the sun particles. Here we saturate the ball with the gasoline, the sunlight. Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily travel around the earth, back along the line of gasoline to the can, or the sun itself. It will explode this source and spread to every place that gasoline, our sunlight, touches."

The TCMUnderground website also has sendable e-postcards and downloadable wallpaper. Proceed at your own risk!

Is this underground for old folks who've never heard of these flicks?

I read about this in their viewer guide, but there's one thing I'm not clear on: Is this going to continue past October? If so, how long?

Films are lined up through the end of December and I expect it to continue indefinitely. The only thing I would want to if for Rob Zombie to pick out more films that are not available on home video.
I think the series is for lovers of cult and exploitation movies young and old, and expresses a desire on the part of TCM to widen their appeal a little bit. It does stretch the definition of the term classic a bit, but in a good way ( for me ).
I listed the titles for the first three months in a post now resting at the bottom of this page.

While I'm still very excited about this addition to the station, I couldn't agree more. For instance, I know they have a copy of NO BLADE OF GRASS.

Except that the copy of NO BLADE OF GRASS they ran last year, while 2.35 letterbox and very attractive looking, was a hacked up censored print for TV, missing hunks of several scenes and bits of serveral more. This is impossible to see uncut except for a bootleg available on Ebay that uses the letterboxed print and inserts full screen bits from an uncut Italian language tape.
It's worth going to the TCM site and requesting NO BLADE and ask that they replace the censored copy thay have run in the past.

Now that's my definition of a dream job!

Especially since my wife & I can just about perform most of Ed's movies off the cuff!

When TCM in Europe originally screened SHAFT IN AFRICA in the mid-nineties it was an uncensored fullscreen print but later replaced it with a nice 2:35:1 scope print which was missing all the nudity and much violence. Also the opening credits were not the original English titles ("SHAFT EN AFRICA") although the closing credtis were. Until the DVD came along it was the only way to see the film in this ratio which was unfortunate. About ten years ago the channel showed all kinds of weird and obscure films, such as WICKED WICKED, CHANDLER (with Warren Oates) and NO BLADE OF GRASS, the latter was shown at least once in fullscreen but cannot remember if it was cut or not. They still play the fullscreen American edit of THE GREEN SLIME these days.

Is this really what it was called!?

It might be worth adding that TCM's policy is to show all films completely uncut and in the original aspect ratio. (TCM US; I have no idea about the European channels.) As most people know this wasn't necessarily true in the early days but has been for several years now. This of course doesn't mean that cut films don't go through by mistake but that's pretty rare. There are sometimes additional challenges with the letterboxing if an outsider company supplies the film. If you ever notice anything please feel free to email me directly (I've done regular freelance work for TCM since it went on-air) and I can usually get it to the right people.