Dedicated to RS. Missed you, kid.
2008 peaked early for me. A week early, to be precise.
You see, year in and year out, the absolute highlight of the calendar for me is always B-Fest, the 24-hour marathon of bad sci-fi movies, bad action movies, bad comedies, and sometimes social dramas which are, by custom, bad.
Usually, B-Fest is on the last full weekend in January, but it happened on the 18th and 19th this year. Which I’m both okay with and sad about: okay because I didn’t have to wait as long, and sad because I will have to wait longer next year.
This year’s fest was extremely good; not maybe so mindblowing as last year, nor as epic as my first year, 2002 (when Hieronymous Merkin was sprung upon an unsuspecting crowd of merrymakers). Notoriously, there was no throughline – the gag that crops in the first couple of films and is still getting beaten to death by the end of the fest (my favorite remains “_____ of the spiders!” from 2003 and Kingdom of the Spiders). But the audience kept its energy longer than I think I’ve ever seen. And that, after all, is what it’s all about.
First, a curiosity: the goofy trailer for James Toback’s 2000 picture Black and White. Not so very much bad, but decidedly shrill, and seeing names like Method Man and Raekwon warmed my nostalgia-addled heart.
Then it began! And with a bang, in the form of the star-studded English language Italian Jaws rip-off Tentacles. This is the perfect opening film, moreso even than last-year’s inspiring The Brain That Wouldn’t Die: that old-fashioned Italian schlockiness is easy to make fun of, it’s in color so the kids won’t get bored, and Shelly Winters is in it, so there was no end to the fat jokes, many of which suggested that the titular tentacles were in fat hiding in her ample bosom.
The plot of the film can hardly be recounted; there is a giant octopus that eats people with radios, and sometimes people without radios, and it’s all the fault of an Ee-vil Capitalist, except it isn’t, and there are orcas, though unfortunately it preceded Orca, so we can’t call it a double rip-off. Frankly, the audience energy during the first film is typically high enough that you can never make heads or tails of the plot anyway – not when Shelly Winters has children young enough to be her great-grandkids calling her “mom” and a giant straw hat.
In short, any film that can get a roomful of people cheering at a toddler’s death within three minutes of the opening credits is a masterpiece in my book.
7:50 PM
Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula is often called, erroneously, a good film, whereas it is a marvelous opening ten minutes stuck in front of one of the most static, anti-dramatic films to come out of the early sound era (think about that), featuring an extremely charismatic but absolutely awful actor at the peak of his charisma and his awfulness. The five-years-later sequel Dracula’s Daughter gets a few things right, starting with a director who is able and willing to move the camera around, and a plot that’s at least a few notches better than the original, but it, unfortunately, also sucks, if not quite in the same ways.
The Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), who may or may not be Dracula’s biological or metaphorical daughter, enlists the help of one of those new-fangled psychiatrists to help her find peace. Meanwhile, Abraham Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan, the only returning cast member) tries to convince the police that vampires exist. Meanwhile, approximately thirty years pass in the two or three seconds dividing the end of the first film from the beginning of this one.
A whole lot of nothing happens, unlike the first film, in which a whole lot of something happens off-screen, and only a shockingly forthright lesbian scene keeps the film from total pointlessness. There’s no central performance as commanding and weird as Bela Lugosi’s, nor any shots as creepy as Renfield grinning from the hold of a ghost ship. It’s about as bland as any ’30s horror film I’ve ever seen, which is a crying shame – if they’re going to have films of this vintage (and dear God, I’d like them to keep at it), it might be better that they go for actually good ones, or at least balls-out crazy ones. Dracula’s Daughter is boring, and came too early in the schedule.
9:00 PM
The shorts this year were unusually awful, starting with an essentially unwatchable Germaine Greer vehicle whose title I still haven’t caught, that last appeared in 2006. I fled to go to the bathroom, and returned for a short in which zoo animals are anthropomorphically personified as twittery music plays. I failed to notice this film’s title, as well.
9:15 PM
My private B-Fest highlight: Dino De Laurentiis and Roger Vadim’s counterculture science fiction sex romp Jane Fonda vehicle Barbarella, which I have somehow never seen. Inconceivable! This film was something like a masterpiece (LIKE a masterpiece, I said), so very self-knowing in its badness and it idiotic sexiness. I’d forgotten how much fun Fonda could be when she played for zaniness (as opposed to playing for zaniness in a rape dramedy).
Basically, I think this is one of the most fantastically ’60s films I’ve ever seen, even though it has the feel of something made by committee. I don’t think I can go on anymore in a short little space like this; but I have it in my head to someday review this and De Laurentiis’s equally memorable production of Flash Gordon as a double feature, once I’ve gotten this damn “52 masterpieces of art” project out of the way.
11:00 PM
Ohmigod, I lost at the raffle again! Then some shorts followed: a completely typical silent melodrama that appeared I guess because they could get ahold of it (not that bad, not that good, not that anything), and the now-annual appearance of Sarah Kuhn’s terribly meandering gender theory piece “Rap.” Oh well, it’s better than “Gavotte”.
11:45 PM
“The Wizard of Speed and Time”. As always, the heart and soul of B-Fest. Download the very large file here.
Saturday, 19 January, 12:00 AM
Plan 9 from Outer Space. As always, the spleen and kidneys of B-Fest. RATTAN!
1:30 AM
They found a real hell of a movie for the blaxploitation slot this year: Black Samson, wherein a ghetto bar-owner named Samson (Rockne Tarkington, which sounds like the name of a villain from a melodrama and not a grindhouse actor), who has a FUCKING LION IN HIS BAR and a GIANT STICK THAT HE USES TO LAY THE WRATH OF GOD DOWN ON A MOTHERFUCKER, refuses to sell out to the White Man.
Besides giving the Fest one of its finest semi-recurring riffs (“Justice Stick!”), this film had an amazing ending: Samson gets all of the black people in the ghetto to climb up on the rooftops and THROW THINGS ON THE WHITE VILLAINS including a MOTHERFUCKING REFRIGERATOR. I have never cheered so throatily or happily at the incredibly violent death of white people.
Downside: the lion never ate – or even menaced! – anyone.
3:00 AM
Another damn silent melodrama that wasn’t particular bad or interesting, but at least I got the title: “The Rocky Road”. I just learned right now that it was directed by D.W. Griffith in 1910. Okay, adding in its age, it gets a smidgen more interesting.
3:15 AM
Hoo, mama. Then came Zardoz.
Bad movies have no ideas, and crappy execution, and a general lack of ambition before and behind the camera. Zardoz isn’t a bad movie.
Zardoz is, rather, a travesty – a film made by people who, I am certain, were deeply convinced of the nobility of their scenario, an urgent feeling that it Meant Things, and about three times the drugs needed to turn that urge into a film where…well.
Imagine that it is some 400 years in the future. Mankind has divided itself into the barbaric Brutals and the elitist Eternals, the latter of whom have been alive and thinking so long that they’re bored out of their wits, and only crave death. Imagine further that they have created a giant stone head called Zardoz to fly over the land and dispense weaponry and food for the Brutals and their Exterminators, mostly as a means of amusment. Imagine that Sean Connery is the Exterminator who sneaks on board Zardoz and finds his way to the Eternal village where he teaches the sexless immortals what a good ol’ shagging looks like.
You have not imagined Zardoz, for I did not mention that Connery is earing naught but ammunition across his chest and a red diaper.
Written and irected by John Boorman, a man of noted variability in the quality of his output, and shot by Geoffrey Unsworth (that one), simply oozes ideas that aren’t one-tenth as clever as the filmmakers thought, full of ponderous and profound shots, grimly unerotic sex, and generally so much joyless pretension that I – I, who thanks people for calling me pretentious – found it so far up its own ass that I didn’t even see much to laugh at. I was in the minority. Maybe I need to see it again. Perish the thought.
On the other hand, Connery did wear a frilly wedding dress in one scene. That’s something.
5:00 AM
My stamina wasn’t enough to keep me up for all of veteran schlockmeister Burt I. Gordon’s The Magic Sword, though the forty minutes I saw were memorably gaudy (oh Gordon! You do love puppetry!). The big problem: the film was a 1.37:1 image stretched to 1.85:1, and the print had gone so far to magenta that I half wonder if it was a three-strip film missing two strips. The least pleasant experience of the Fest for that presentation.
6:30 AM
Griffith, Boorman, now George Cukor; it’s a regular master class at B-Fest ’08. If I were to tell you what The Blue Bird was about, you’d say I dreamt it, so here are the vital details: a remake of a Shirley Temple vehicle, this 1976 US-Soviet co-production follows two children and their friendly anthropomorphic personifications of inanimate objects and concepts like Sugar, Milk, Fire, Luxury (Ava Gardner, getting all nudge-nudge-wink-wink with a ten-year-old boy) and Light (Liz Taylor) vs. Dark (Jane Fonda; Barbarella jokes were made). Bonus moment we all went “eww!”: a fifty-year-old man playing the Dog tells that same poor ten-year-old boy “I must kiss you now that you’ve punished me.”
8:15 AM
A nifty little anti-drug PSA, “Marijuana” from 1968 stars an apparently-stoned Sonny Bono, who informs us of all the bad things that drugs can do to you, telling perhaps not one true fact about drugs in the process. The amazing performance by some random dude as the heroin junkie with eyes like a German Expressionist monster was worth the price of admission.
More shorts: “Comics and Kids,” in which a whispery narrator tells a group of boys to “kill, kill, kill.” My synopsis for my seatmate: “Reading comics makes you a complete asshole.” Followed-up by a reprise of the evergreen “Wizard of Speed and Time”.
9:00 AM
The Mummy’s Hand. God almighty, do I hate the Universal mummy movies. This one is particularly heinous, due to one of the most odious Odious Comic Relief characters ever. I had a stomachache and was mostly lying down and listening; the audience seemed to be pretty quiet on this one.
(My notes say we had breakfast here. I do recall being massively ahead of schedule all day).
10:15 AM
A curio: The Undying Monster, a straightforward murder mystery in which the killer is a werewolf. Slow as molasses, and the hour flew by like 180 minutes. The audience turned on this one something fierce, and I can’t say I blame them.
11:15 AM
“A place, where nobody dared to go
The love that we came to know
They call it Xanadu
And now, open your eyes and see
What we have made is real
We are in Xanadu.
A million lights are dancing
And there you are
A shooting star
An everlasting world
And you’re here with me
Eternally.”
YES! The disco musical came roaring back with the year’s objective best 105 minutes, Robert Greenwald’s legendary boondoggle Xanadu. I’ve seen it too many times to have the same sense of awe that I did in watching Barbarella, but the audience devoured this one whole. It came at a perfect time – the sleepers had re-awakened, and the die-hards like me who don’t sleep were getting their second wind.
What is there to say about this movie? It is essential viewing.
The two best moments of the whole fest occurred in the same scene, in which Michael Beck followed Olivia Newton-John to the neon-tinged Olympus: first, as he argues with Zeus, Olivia pouts, “Doesn’t it matter to anyone how I feel?” and the whole entire audience screamed “NO!” as one. Moments later, as she sings her “now I know that love is better than immortality” song, a few people busted out lighters (I had purchased one for this very purpose the day before), and within 30 seconds, everyone in the theater with a cellphone had whipped it out and held it above their heads in a pale blue glow. Communal moviegoing doesn’t get any better than that.
1:15 PM
After being ahead of schedule all day, they of course went over on Xanadu and of course didn’t extend the lunch break, so I missed about five minutes of The Creature Walks Among Us, third entry in the Gill Man trilogy. I love Creature from the Black Lagoon, despise Revenge of the Creature, and found this third entry, which I’d never seen before, a bit pokey but nowhere near as dull as the middle film, which makes that mid-90s aquarium screensaver look narratively dynamic. Obviously, with food in our bellies and Olivia in our hearts, the audience was cool on this one.
2:45 PM
The last short: “Dante’s Inferno”, a little black-and-white number that was all production design, no plot. I don’t believe a single person in the audience actually paid attention for more than about 90 seconds.
3:00 PM
Replacing Empire of the Ants in the schedule, and doing a damn fine job, was Chuck Norris’s 1983 Lone Wolf McQuade, easily the best Norris film I have ever seen. Why? Because it is about only one thing: Norris being Norris. I.e. a fight every ten seconds or so, no plot worth mentioning, and lots of incredibly ludicrous gunfighting that doesn’t even mus Our Chuck’s shirt. Very little liberal-bashing, easily-ignored racism. I got my two favorite jokes off during this one – bear in mind I’d been awake for some 34 hours:
My friend MK (as Norris kisses a woman): “She better be careful, Chuck Norris can get a girl pregnant with just one kiss.”
Me (as he kisses her again): “Yeah, but then the second one gives her an abortion.”
MK (as Norris ignores due process): “I think he’s not very liberal.”
Me: “He hearts Huckabee.”
4:30
It ends as it ends with Godzilla: here, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. Screened in perhaps its only extant 35mm print (not a DVD in sight all year, saints be praised). This is to me one of the truly great Bad Godzilla movies, but I was starting to fade out by now; I am aware that I enjoyed it (as always), but I don’t really recall what happened.
And thus it ended. Brilliant as always, one of the best I’ve ever been to, accolades-upon-accolades. Only 368 more days ’til the next one!