So once again, late January brings the most perfect weekend of the year in the form of B-Fest, the 24-hour bad movie marathon graciously hosted by Northwestern University of Evanston, Illinois.
This year’s fest represented a particular personal milestone for me: for the first time in eight tries (I’ve come every year since 2002), I managed to stay awake through each and every minute of the 24 hours. I’d like to take credit, but it’s really thanks to the fine people at A&O who put the schedule up: with uncanny precision, every single time I started to flag, a movie would start up that really got me pumped up. This despite some other problems I had with the schedule (for which, see below), but in the main, I dug a lot of these films, certainly more than I can ever remember.
This was partially because, for the first time in my experience, there were a great many good films at B-Fest. Or at least, films that were interesting enough that I didn’t feel at all compelled to laugh at them. In a sense, this is perfectly contrary to the point of the thing, but once every seven years it’s actually a gratifying change of pace. Recall that the B in “B-movie” doesn’t stand for “bad.” And there have been some truly wonderful B-pictures that rank among the cinema’s finest achievements. None of those made it to this year’s B-Fest, but it was an unusually high-quality year, attested to by the fact that for the first time I can recall, there wasn’t all that much riffing in the audience for the great bulk of the movies.
We got started a bit late. And this would continue to be a problem throughout the night; I didn’t recognise the faces of the B-Fest coordinators, and I suspect that they were both relative newbies. Which certainly wasn’t reflected in the film choices, but wreaked merry hell on the technical accomplishment of the fest itself. The number of projection fuck-ups during the 24 hours hit what I’d consider an unacceptable figure.
Anyway, when it finally struck, the first film was a real triumph: Firewalker, a 1986 adventure buddy comedy slash Indiana Jones knock-off starring Chuck Norris and Louis Gossett, Jr. And, with a remarkably inconsistent accent, John Rhys-Davies. The recent glut of Chuck Norris films has been one of the best developments at B-Fest since I started going, and Firewalker proved to be one of the finest of his films they’ve shown yet: it makes no sense, and it is entirely predictable, and it asks much more of Norris in the acting department than usual, which of course equals Komedy Gold.
The film spawned not one but TWO gags that would recur throughout the fest: comparing any film that featured flames or smoke to Firewalker, usually with the result that the other film had more legitimate firewalking; and referring to just about every villain as “Red Cyclops”, after the one-eyed Indian baddie that Norris kicks to death. And yes, “Red Cyclops” is how he was described in the film by the requisite Mystic Old Wise Indian Man. Transcendently racist movie, this one. Did I mention that Rhys-Davies played a strongman hiding out in the jungle?
8:05 PM
The second year of what, if it turns out to be a tradition, will be a damn weird one: the second slot of the night is given over to a Universal monster movie. This year’s was Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, which I do believe to have been the first film to mix the studio’s venerable horror figures into one plot. It would very quickly become the dominant mode of their horror filmmaking throughout the 1940s, resulting in projects like the execrable House of Frankenstein; but I actually found this first go-round (which I’d never seen) to be a fairly entertaining entry in the Universal canon, certainly better than one of their films had any right to be in 1943.
It’s focused on Lon Chaney, Jr’s resurrected Larry “Wolf Man” Talbot much more than on Bela Lugosi’s monster (how Bela could overact in a wordless role amazes me – apparently it had something to do with extensive cutting, eliminating huge swaths of exposition explaining that he was now blind), which means we get a lot of the moaning about being cursed that marred The Wolf Man in the first place, but the first 40 minutes of the film are sufficiently atmospheric that it’s easy to ignore this problem, and only a bit harder to ignore the wanton illogic that plagues the film’s basic set-up (Talbot doesn’t want to be immortal, when there’s no real reason for assuming that a silver bullet to the temple wouldn’t do him just like last time). The second half – the part that gives the film its title – is significantly stupider, but it does contain an absolutely surreal song-and-dance number that got the audience all hot and bothered, and that is after all what one looks for in a B-Fest flick. A good choice, all in all: it was entertaining before it became stupid enough to mock. But I wouldn’t like to see what would have happened if it were even a little bit longer.
9:25 PM
I am not certain which of multiple possible shorts from the ’30s and ’40s came next, but it is about the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female musical company in Japan. For 20 minutes, we watched as Japanese women sang (without subtitles, which is part of why identification was a bitch) various traditional Japanese songs and some Tin Pan Alley standards. The response was split between amazed confusion and irritated boredom, trending a bit towards the latter I suspect. Not maybe a super great B-Fest film, but a rarity that I think I’m glad I saw anyway.
9:45 PM
The fourth and final of the Brass Bancroft thrillers starring a certain Ronald Reagan, Murder in the Air. Much delight was made out of the fact that no-one was murdered, and the film wasn’t airborne long enough for the murders to not happen there.
Of course, more delight was made out of the presence of our 40th president in the lead role. A number of supply-side jokes were made (either B-Festers are all politics wonks, or supply-side jokes are easier than I’d thought), and much fun was poked at Reagan’s… shall we say, “reductive” approach to patriotism and foreign affairs.
But the most delight came when a spider (or what looked very much like one) got itself caught on the projector lens, and stayed there for a long time, hovering its giant legs over Reagan’s face until OH MY GOD, THE SPIDER’S BODY JUST RIPPED OFF AND THE LEG IS STILL THERE ON THE LENS GROSS. A balloon spider was batted around the audience for a time. Good fun.
10:45 PM
The raffle, as always. I lost, as always. One of the tickets numerically adjacent to mine won, as always.
11:15 PM
A repeat of the short “Comics and Kids” from last year. It’s a really heavy-handed metaphor for Vietnam and how something something desensitivity to violence yada yada soldier comics make children turn evil. It’s enjoyably overwrought, but this is mostly just an annoying bit of ham-fisted sociology that I for one could do without in future years.
11:30 PM
My notes say “Flash Gordon thing?” without further explication. Not that any explication was to be had: basically, the visual tropes of the Flash Gordon serials were redone with intentionally appalling cheapness. Like, “a hand carries the spaceship through the frame” cheapness. It was surely not something I’d ever seen before, but I – and everyone within earshot – would have been just as happy never having seen it ever. Inscrutable.
11:40 PM
“The Wizard of Speed and Time”. If there is one single reason to go to B-Fest every year, this is it.
Saturday, 31 January, 12:00 AM
Followed as always by Plan 9 from Outer Space, which I get less and less joy from every single year. Rattan.
1:30 AM
It’s blaxploitation time! And they got a massively wonderful one this year: Scream Blacula Scream, with William Marshall reprising his role of the African vampire Mamuwalde, and Pam Grier as a Voodoo priestess. I’ve never seen Blacula, but I really want to now, because its sequel is, in all honest, a masterpiece. It’s not been that long since I was subjected to the grisly sight of Hammer’s Dracula series with Christopher Lee struggling to find a way to stay fresh by bringing the vampire to the 1970s; in all the way those films epically failed, Scream Blacula Scream is a triumph – possibly the single best vampire movie I’ve seen from the whole entire decade.
It is not, however, as good a blaxploitation film as it is a vampire film (Grier is entirely miscast), except for a few scenes in which Mamuwalde pokes exceedingly dry fun at the black pride party he arrives at by happenstance. Nor is it a particularly satisfying ’70s time capsule except in fits and starts. For this reason I can’t call it the equal to the best B-Fest blaxploitation films (I’d still take last year’s Black Samson over any other entry in the genre I’ve seen), even though I was honestly very pleased to see the film, for wholly unironic reasons. At least some people would disagree with me on that point, though; Scream Blacula Scream got some of the best riffing of the whole Fest.
3:15 AM
The first wave of sleepers is asleep. Time for a disposable bit of ’50s crud that nobody will mind missing, right? Except that Don’t Knock the Rock was, for me, one of the big finds of the year. It boasts a bog-standard plot about a rocker named Arnie Haines (Alan Dale) who wants to spend some time relaxing at home, only to find that the local adults view him as Satan incarnate; the natural response to such libel is of course to bring a whole bunch of famous rocker friends into town for a rousing show that proves to everybody that rock & roll is all in good fun. Yet within that entirely clichéd frame lies one of the most fascinating time capsules of teenaged life in the 1950s that I have ever seen. Not just because the soundtrack is mostly great (anything Dale sings is terrible, but Little Richard blows the doors off the film), but because of the bits in between, where Arnie seduces the daughter of one of his greatest foes (natch) and the tired old arguments about hip kids vs. square parents get taken for a surprisingly passionate workout. It’s not A Hard Day’s Night-style art, but it’s far more interesting and entertaining than most of the ’50s youth culture movies I’ve seen.
Bonus questionable thematic content: if the film has a clear-cut moral, that moral is, “When an underage girl demands to have sex with you, you’d damn well better comply or she’ll try to destroy your life”.
4:45 AM
Donovan’s Brain, one of the many “disembodied brain lives & is evil” films from that period, this time starring future First Lady Reagan, Nancy Davis (gags were free-flowing). After the goofy fun of Don’t Knock the Rock, I wasn’t completely up for a bid of ditchwater sci-fi, but the film was silly and melodramatic in the way of all deliciously bad mad scientist pictures. I think the film might have benefited from a slightly earlier placement, when not so many people were asleep; because those of us who were awake had not much to do besides watch the film passively. And Donovan’s Brain is not a film that rewards passivity – it’s ludicrously wrong-headed in its science, and the climax is a wild combination of luck and idiocy.
6:25 AM
William Castle’s The Tingler! I’ve expressed my love for this film in great detail elsewhere, but it was a real treat to see it in a roomful of people, all of whom also love it, love Vincent Price, and love acting like sugar-addled kids in a movie theater. A great jolt of energy for the midway point of the fest, even though it suffered from the worst projection fuck-ups of the whole schedule. It’s a crying shame this wasn’t scheduled for earlier, when more people were awake – it’s a natural for the second slot.
8:00 AM
One does not expect an Edward Dmytryk film at B-Fest, but nor does one expect an Edward Dmytryk film like Captive Wild Woman, one of the most joyfully trashy 1940s films that I think I’ve ever seen. John Carradine plays a mad scientist doing research on glands, and he decides that if he shoots a gorilla up with human tissue, the gorilla will become human. So he steals a female gorilla from the local circus and proves himself right.
Captive Wild Woman is easily the stupidest movie from B-Fest 2009, in a generally playful, exciting way. This is a film where the male lead was cast because he looked somewhat like the guy in the circus animal stock-footage that the filmmakers had to work with. How can you not respond to that kind of thing? People had begun to trickle out for breakfast, so there wasn’t much in the way of an audience response, but the film is simply, enjoyably bad, and that is after all what B-Fest is about.
Still, I could definitely have done without so many black-and-white mad scientist films in a row – add in the rock & roll movie, and it works out to six hours of ’40s or ’50s cinema. I love it, but that’s overkill, and you could feel it in the room.
9:05 AM
I am god-damned if I know the title of the next short (possibly “Visible Fill’m”, but it was frame-for-frame the worst thing at B-Fest, and the hungry, tired crowd was not in the mood. An avant-garde piece that was, I think, supposed to be about the tacitility of art. What about the tactility of art? I have no idea. Maybe if you were high and saw this in grad school in the ’60s, it would have been as rancid as it was in hour 15 of 24 at a movie marathon.
9:30 AM
Two trailers: one for Bug, which isn’t fair because it’s a really great movie, although admittedly the trailer doesn’t begin to explain why; and Black and White, which trailer opened the fest last year. Oh, Raekwon!
Then came American Ninja 2: The Confrontation, from 1987. I’m pretty sure that every single person in the room liked this one more than me, and it is certainly a quintessentially B-Fest film: a Cannon production that has no plot to speak of, standard-issue military tough-ass characters, and one overbaked, underchoreographed fight scene after another. I feel bad that I didn’t engage with it more, honest – it was surely a good goofy time. I think that my lack of sleep was catching up with me.
11:10 AM
The infamous 1938 midget Western, The Terror of Tiny Town. All of the short jokes you’d expect and more flew around the auditorium for 60 minutes, and the general consensus was that professional midget procurer Jed Buell (who also provided Wizard of Oz with its Munchkins the following year) was evil even by Hollywood standards. Short enough that it wasn’t painful such that I could tell, but everyone was clearly ready for it to be over.
12:15 PM
Lunch break! And man, did it feel good to poke my head outside, if just for a few minutes – the weather hopped up into the 40s just for B-Fest (seriously, by the time I woke up on Sunday it was already ass-cold again). Waste of a nice weekend? Nah. But I am anxious for spring.
12:50 PM
Oh, the hopes we had for The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant. A Bruce Dern vehicle! With Casey Kasem in a supporting role! And an honest-to-God Faulknerian manchild! What’s not to love?
Almost everything, in fact. We all spent the whole film waiting for the expected gaudy delight to kick in, and it never really did. Oh, there was some fun to be had with Dern’s mad scientist treating his wife in the most oulandishly shabby ways you could imagine, but mostly it was a giant exercise in frustrated expectations. Made much worse when the projector broke at the very end, and we had to wait ten minutes for the conclusion of a film we weren’t very excited about in the first place.
2:30 PM
Thankfully, the flavor was quickly washed away by “The Concert”, an Oscar-nominated short film from 1974 that is, honestly and objectively, a magnificent work of cinema. Julian Chagrin, a comic-musical artist, plays piano on a crosswalk behind the Royal Albert Hall. Literally, in the fashion of Big from 14 years later – the white spaces are his keys, a good-natured bobby is his conductor, and the stopped traffic is his appreciative artist. One of the most fun shorts that I have ever seen in my life, and quite probably the greatest movie in B-Fest history.
3:00 PM
It took ages to get the projector to work – the next movie was on VHS – but it was so worth it; because it was time for Megaforce, the undisputed champion of B-Fest 2009. It’s a 1982 action film about Megaforce, a multinational strike team made of the best soldiers in the West and the most advanced technology, and God only knows what they’re doing, because the script is a complete shambles. It either takes place in Africa or South America, next door to Britain. Someone double-crosses somebody else, and I have no idea why. Starring Michael Beck of Xanadu as a southern boy with a Confederate patch where everyone has their national emblem (the crowd amiably shouted “CSA! CSA!” in place of the more typical “USA!” during his moments of triumph), and Persis Khambatta of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, boasting a full head of hair.
What pushed it from “excitingly bad” to “earth-stoppingly, brilliantly bad” was Barry Bostwick in the lead role, as a man who wears incredibly tight pants that show off his junk in a way that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination, and just about the most blatant homoeroticism in the history of action cinema (the super awesome mega-motorcycles emit rainbow-colored smoke). It is strongly indicated, for one, that Bostwick and the foreign army leader played by Henry Silva are ex-lovers. Anyway, you want to get an auditorium full of punchy bad movie lovers to operate at their finest capacity, confront them, in scene after scene, with Barry Bostwick’s ginormous penis. This film must be released to DVD as soon as humanly possible.
4:45 PM
Things end as they end, with a Godzilla film. This year’s was Godzilla vs. Megalon, famous for the one and only appearance of the friendly robot Jet Jaguar, and for one of the most wickedly annoying Kennys in Japanese cinema (to the uninitiated: a Kenny is the ubiquitous precocious kid in Japanese sci-fi movies who is meant to be clever and resourceful, but whom the audience just wants to suffer a painful death). And the underwater kingdom that built the Easter Island statues three million years ago. It’s one of the goofier Godzilla films, though hardly the goofiest, and we were all still in a warm enough post-Megaforce glow that it flew by with much spirited riffing. Really, though, what can you say about a Godzilla film?
I mostly enjoyed this year, with some complaints mostly about the order of the films, rather than the films themselves, but it’s not that big a deal. The last two years were clearly superior, but it can’t always be an A++ slate. It’s still the best 24 hours of the year.
Onward to 2010!