That time of year again – the Christmas and New Year’s and Halloween and 4th of July for bad movie fans all rolled up into one. I refer of course to B-Fest, the internationally renownéd 24-hour marathon that just so happens to reside in the very same city I do.
This year was a particularly gratifying experience, as it was the first B-Fest in years to lack a pronounced focus on the 1980s (I alluded to this trend in my review of the fest last year). And a new ticketing policy led to, frankly, a much better audience than I’ve seen in at least a couple of years.
The rest below the fold, for those who don’t give a damn.
The first film was a doozy, one of the greatest bad sci-fi pictures of the 1950s, making its first B-Fest appearance: The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. This is one of the essentials, and if you care about bad movies in the slightest, you’ve probably already seen it (if you haven’t, change that immediately). It has a great, loopy high concept: Dr. Bill Cortner (Herb Evers) is a brilliant but mad scientist whose passion for reanimating dead tissue comes in handy when his fiancée Jan (Virginia Leigth) is decapitated in a car accident. Bill puts her head in a pan of juice in his basement laboratory, where she taunts his crippled assistant Kurt (Leslie Daniels) and forms a telepathic bond with the horrible failed experiment living in the closet. Many lengthy, wordy monologues are delivered; and Bill’s hunt for a new body is underscored by the most shockingly porny sax music ever recorded. It’s a sleazy, sleazy film…but more on that in a moment.
This is the perfect way to begin B-Fest: we’ve all seen it before, and it’s really phenomenally bad. The audience ate this one up with a knife and fork, and it launched a great catch-phrase. See, the first film always has something that we use as a call-back in future movies. The best one in my six years is still 2003, when the first film was Kingdom of the Spiders, and for the rest of the fest people shouted “[noun] of the spiders!” whether any spiders were ever actually present. This year, we had fun with a really over-the-top moment of acting when Kurt responds to one of Jan’s insufferable moral speeches accusing him of the devil’s work with the classic “I? I!?” So, for the rest of the film, anytime a person referred to themself as “I,” or any time an eye was seen, we all shouted, “I!?” Great stuff.
Now, the problem…and of course there’s a problem…this was the censored cut. Which means we missed a stripper cat fight and two of the goriest deaths ever put to film before 1968. That’s just not cool. It’s still a great bad movie, but it’s not as filthy an experience in this cut, and the B-Fest crowd is most certainly a filthy group of people.
7:30 PM
Next up, a barbarian epic I’d never seen: The Beastmaster from 1982. Perfect programming choice: move from sci-fi to fantasy, from black-and-white to color, and give us a gratuitous boob shot early in the night before anyone starts to tire out (ah, when PG was boob-friendly! I do not remember those days). This was a film of great historical significance; it marked the return of Slide Whistle Guy to B-Fest. See, every year, there’s this dude who brings a slide whistle, and last year he got locked out with the ticket situation. It was horrible, because his judicious use of the whistle is consistently the best riffing at the fest. The applause that met the first return of his glorious slide, used to signify star Marc Singer getting a hard-on from PG boobs! I feel warm inside just thinking of it.
This set a high bar for the audience energy. I even got a riff off, a rarity, and it was pretty good, even more of a rarity. The most engaging element of the film was clearly the pair of ferrets that Dar the Beastmaster carried around with him, ferrets that could do anything in the entire world. Thereafter, whenever any hero seemed at a loss, someone in the audience was bound to point out that this was because he didn’t bring his ferrets along.
9:30 PM
The first short: “The New Car,” a Flip the Frog cartoon from 1931. I’d never seen Flip the Frog, created by Walt Disney’s sometime right-hand-man Ub Iwerks, but the influence of early Mickey shorts on the style of the animation was obvious. Most of the audience did not share my fascination with early sound animation, and I felt that it was tolerated much more than enjoyed.
9:40
For the second year in a row, we were graced with a 3D feature, Revenge of the Creature, the sequel to last year’s 3D item, Creature from the Black Lagoon. What a difference a year makes – despite the return of director Jack Arnold, this is a complete failure as a movie, compared to the near-classic status of the original. Which actually makes it a smarter choice for B-Fest.
This is the highest grossing of the Gill Man Trilogy, which is a profound shame, because it is stupid: the Gill Man is captured, taken to a marine zoo in scenic Ft. Lauderdale, and after a brief moment where he tries to escape when being put in his pool, spends most of the movie eating fish. When I first saw this film, I didn’t realise that it was 3D, and so the many instances of fish swimming right in the middle of the frame confused me. Now I understand that this was just 3D porn, and I do not forgive it, because it does not work, and one of the greatest elements of the original Creature is how effectively the dimensionality is incorporated into the staging.
Not a great moment in the Fest, largely because it’s so boring yet competent, and I also wonder how many people in the audience were turned off by those nifty red and blue glasses. I loved them, if just for the kitsch, but everyone I was sitting with was complaining of headaches by the end of the second reel. I’d love to see the third and final film, The Creature Walks Among Us, next year – not only to complete the arc, but because it wasn’t filmed in 3D, and I think it might be a little more popular because of it.
This film, notoriously, was the acting debut of one Clint Eastwood, and there were all of the expected jokes about his recent Oscar nominations and wins.
11:45 PM
“The Wizard of Speed and Time.” The heart of B-Fest, now available online, and yet still magical. If this was all I got for my $35, it would be worth it. New tradition this year (so they threaten, I hope they’re wrong): the first time is muted, the second time is upside-down and backwards, the third time is normal.
1/27, 12:00 AM
The other heart of B-Fest: Plan 9 from Outer Space. Every year I come a wee bit closer to skipping it; I’ve seen it more than anything else that ever plays here, and there’s precious little room for new riffing with all of the various traditions that have accumulated over the years. As is my custom, I sided with rattan.
1:20 AM
I ran to the bathroom quickly, and returned to find “Gavotte” playing. This is a somewhat notorious B-Fest semiregular: a “satire” about pre-Revolutionary French midgets. It’s psychotically dull for 7 minutes, then the midgets fight, then it ends. If Jungle Hell and Hieronymous Merkin can be put on the permanent ban list, I don’t see why this one can’t be as well.
1:30 AM
The women-in-prison genre usually guarantees some soft-core T&A and a bit of light lesbianic action, so maybe we just got a bowdlerized copy of Savage Sisters. It’s got one hell of a plot, tits or no: a group of female revolutionaries on an island banana republic get captured by the government, and end up helping to fight the even worse revolutionaries led by the ubiquitous Sid Haig, in his sole appearance this year.
It’s pretty awesomely bad, including my favorite line of any film on this year’s slate – “I used to want to let you pee in my face, just to see where it came from, but not anymore” – but the audience wasn’t hugely into it. I think the sleep break happened a bit early this year. Also, when you deprive B-Festers of the naked female form in the immediate post-Plan 9 slot, they get really ugly.
3:00 AM
Another short: “Rap,” an avant-garde piece by Sarah Kuhn, from 1968. It’s boring more than bad, and it sports the noble theme that gender equality can only be achieved when women are complete assholes. Maybe it was satiric, but by that time in the morning, my satire sensors are bit fuzzy.
3:15 AM
Oh, God. Everyone’s asleep, which means it must be time for the annual Shitty B&W Comedy, in this case Invasion of the Star Creatures. It features the lowest-rent Abbott & Costello knock-offs you ever did see as two bumbling army grunts who accidentally prevent an invasion by beautiful female aliens by introducing them to the joys of post-Eisenhower male chauvinism (second-best line of the night: “Married is when a boy and a girl get hitched, and she belongs to nobody but him.” “You mean, like slaves?” “Yeah, like slaves.” It’s not parody, so don’t suggest that it might be).
A surprisingly large number of attendees were up and about for this one, mostly moaning in pain. There was actually a lot of bad-movie fun to be had, especially at the expense of the plant-like alien henchmen, who were basically tall guys in burlap body stockings.
You’ve got to have the bad comedy, no matter how unpleasant it may be.
4:25 AM
A Fleischer Out of the Inkwell short, “Koko’s Hypnotism.” It would have made more sense to put it a wee bit later, but them’s the breaks. Anyway, I’ve never cared for the Inkwell series, historically important or not.
A re-screening of “Wizard,” as happens when they get ahead of themselves. Can’t never have too much.
Lastly, a Norman McLaren short, “A Chairy Tale.” I love McLaren, have since I was but a pimply teenage animation buff, and I’d never actually seen this one. It was pretty well made, involving a stop-motion chair that refuses to permit a man to sit down. McLaren doing stop-motion of people is always awesome, and if you get a chance to see this one, don’t hesitate.
4:45 AM
This time of the morning is still strictly for napping, so it was not surprising that The Hypnotic Eye wasn’t much of anything – just a typical ee-vil hypnotist movie, with a baldly obvious twist. It did make a late break for really fantastically loopy in the last reel, when Desmond the Hypnotist (Jacques Bergerac) hypnotises the entire audience – that is, the people watching the movie – and it doesn’t come measurably close to working. Fun fact: I actually know how to put people in a light hypnotic state & so I could go into some detail about why Desmond sucks; but that’s better kept for another time.
Anyway, the audience was totally checked-out on this one.
Full disclosure: I did drift into sleep for about 15 minutes early on.
6:15 AM
The Troma slot was filled with a non-Troma film, thankfully: Street Trash, and the best part was the letter the writer sent along with the print, one of two in existence. The plot couldn’t be simpler, or more awesome: a cranky liquor store owner finds a crate of old hooch, sells it to the local homeless population for $1 a pop, and anyone who drinks it melts disgustingly. For the budget, there were some breathtakingly wonderful gore effects, but not enough of them, and the middle third of the film was taken up with a totally unengaging plot about power struggles in the homeless community. Not in a pretentious “social significance” way, more in a “jeeze, we need filler” way. There was a lot of nudity, and it was all tied to rather unpleasant rape-type scenes, and that is one of the things that really bothers me in exploitation films. I’d rather see death and boobs in a joyful, sex-positive context.
When there wasn’t gore, the audience was real quiet on this one.
8:00 AM
The second Jack Arnold film from 1955 with John Agar in the lead ad Clint Eastwood in an uncredited cameo: Tarantula. No question, you need a big bug movie around this point, but this one is not the best at anything: it’s a pale shadow of the previous year’s Them!, but it’s far too competent to get any really snotty riffing out of it. It does have Leo G. Carroll, but you can only take that so far. And there’s a giant guinea pig, which is one of the most ineffable things you will ever see in a movie. I was still having a bit of trouble staying awake, and caught another 20 minutes; I’d seen it before, so I didn’t mind. The audience mostly just watched this one.
9:15 AM
Talk about reversals: I do declare that Krull had the best audience response to any film at this year’s fest. A little bit surprising, honestly: there had already been an ’80s fantasy, and not a lot of people stay for very long at this time of the morning (good to beat the breakfast rush, you know). But it’s so damned warped: aliens who would rather use their laser guns as swords to attack the primitive rebels of a colonial planet (this is vintage Star Wars ripping-off, of course), with small appearances by pre-fame Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane, and a whole lot of set pieces that can only be called batshit insane. Plus, the second- and third- from the end reels were flipped, and it didn’t noticeably affect the story at all.
I can’t say why everyone was so into this; maybe just because they were waking up. But this gets my pick as highlight of the fest: oh-so-bad in so many ways, and so much fun to mock.
11:50 AM
Great way to come back from breakfast: a Golan-Globus vehicle for Chuck Norris, Invasion U.S.A. Even by Norris standards, this is a bent movie; steeped to the brim in mid-80s’ xenophobia and giving Chuck an armadillo sidekick for the first half. What’s there to do besides cheer ironically and chant, “USA! USA!” every time he kills a suspiciously white-looking foreigner? Nothing that I can think of. Golan-Globus films are such trashy grabs for money. I hope that they keep bringing them back – this is the third year in a row. Ain’t nothing easier to make fun of than stoopid action films.
1:40 PM
Not nearly enough Roger Corman films make it to B-Fest, which makes me surpassingly happy that Teenage Doll was a late replacement to the schedule. It has an elegantly simple teensploitation plot: the nasty girl gang The Black Widows has just killed a girl, and the one who did it finds herself on the run from her friends. The set-up is a classic exercise in “ooh, this is all horrible stuff, boys & girls!” while titillating the audience as much as humanly possible.
The audience was not titillated. They were frankly bored, except for the odd West Side Story gag. Which makes me very sad indeed, because this is the sort of bad movie I love the most – deadly straitlaced and without any sense of who it’s being made for, and from the 1950s. And produced by Roger Corman. I guess we won’t see too many like this, but such is democracy. I thought it was a hoot.
(If you guessed that the teenagers all look suspiciously like twenty-somethings, you guessed correctly).
2:50 PM
Now, here was a swell little treat: horror film historian Cortlandt Hull with “Rendezvous,” a short film set to “Strangers in the Night,” featuring clips from a whole host of classic horror pictures, stressing the degree to which they’re all about monsters wanting sex. It was a lovely little thing, reminding us all of why we love genre films. I don’t know how the B-Fest coordinators found this, but my hat’s off to them – it was a genuine surprise and delight, and probably the best five minutes of the whole weekend.
3:00 PM
And then came the crap: a terrifically gaudy monster movie from the late ’70s with a through-and-through 1950s sensibility: The Incredible Melting Man. There is not a whit of sense in this project, made during the death-throes of American International. An astronaut (Alex Rebar) on a manned mission to Saturn experiences something awful and undefined, and when he is revived on earth, he melts. In order to avoid melting away completely, he must eat human tissue. Because his brain melted first, he has no moral compunction against this. And…we’re off!
This was a grand choice to end: the script is hopeless, the effects are mostly okay, but in service to such an apeshit idea that they seem bad. And it’s cannon fodder for the B-Fest audience. This might well have been the stupidest screenplay at the fest, although there was a lot of competition this year. I loved it thoroughly, and so did everyone else.
5:00 PM
Got to end with a Godzilla film, and this year it was King Kong vs. Godzilla, one of the most hacked-apart films of the series. I saw it once, ages ago, and I forgot just how bad it really was – one grows accustomed to having a sneaking love for the series, or even not-so-sneaking for the best ones, and it’s easy to ignore just how bad they could be. Here, for example, we have a truly terrible Kong suit and as brainless a script as any of its brethren; how else to describe a film that posits that giant gorillas and giant lizards are natural enemies, and that is why Kong and Godzilla both gravitate towards Japan? Not the “best” end to B-Fest in my memory, but one of the most fun.
And this was another historic moment: the first DVD screened at B-Fest ever. With the promise of more to come, and like I said last year, that kind of has to be the case. Too many great films (for this sort of thing) are in really clean DVD editions, and impossible to find on film, and given how awesomely this year returned to form (eight of the 14 features were from the 1950s or ’60s, and seven were in black and white), and I don’t want to return to having 3/4 of the slate come from the ’80s. The whole decade was camp, and the movies, though they are certainly bad, are not as much fun bad as Teenage Doll or King Kong vs. Godzilla or especially The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Newer movies are a great palate cleanser, when they’re used like they were this year. And if maintaining that means we move to three or four DVDs per year, I for one can happily suck it up. Here’s to the best B-Fest since 2002. May there be many more.