B-Fest 2001

An anonymous MC tells us two important things.  One, the schedule we were given may not be accurate.  To illustrate this point, he rips a copy in half.

Second, he asked people to behave responsibly with laser pointers.

We didn't get to hear the official penalty for irresponsible lasing.  Most of us were vocally suggesting a few of our own.

Girl in a bad home gets mixed up with the wrong boy.  Wrong boy kills a man in a traffic accident.  Girl takes the rap goes to reform school snake-pit.

One of the characters is a shell shocked girl.  Her line was "I'm going to have a baby."  She isn't, but she seemed to like to say it.  An innocent "I'm going to have a baby" became a running gag for the audience for the next twenty-four hours.

The slide-whistle dude was in the audience.  He matched an actor's overplayed disappointment with a descending pitch.  He'd be offering his restrained, carefully selected commentaries during other movies.

In the old west, a town is ruled by a psychopathic tyrant.  A man with a white sheet over his head secretly causes people to freak out.  Elsewhere, a traveling entertainer in a zoot suit called Jessy comes to earth via parafoil.  He goes to the town and works a few miracles.  Meanwhile, a woman survives the murder of her husband and child but is perpetually attacked by unseen snipers while a fatherly man watches in the distance.  Surreal and intentionally absurd.

[Most of the good one-liners I remember came from Andrew.  But then, I was sitting next to him....]

The audience was caught off guard by this one.  Sure, you get weird stuff at B-Fest, but not like this.  Many were expecting, per the title, that this would be about either Sha Na Na or auto mechanics.  Like it or hate it, you don't forget it.

Girl goes to a private school snake-pit.  Her chemistry teacher is doing secret experiments with hypnosis and a purportedly magical amulet.  Teacher sets it up so girl will turn into a vampire at the proper moment.

Story was interrupted by an unnecessary appearance of a young man singing a song called "Puppy Love."  Eureka!  Another running gag for the evening.

A Grace Jones built-alike is sent by her employers to Hong Kong.  She is to stop an evil female Caucasian's crime syndicate. Along the way, our heroine hooks up with a local girl and, eventually, two streetwise dudes.  Blaxploitation meets Hong Kong action.

Norman Fell played Cleopatra's boss.  Audience references to Three's Company ran rampant.

An awesome set up.  Andrew had been running the "pull my finger" gag.  That is, someone in a movie points at someone, Andrew shouts, "Pull my finger."  This time around, his "Pull my finger," was followed by "Dammit! Pull my finger!"  The other character grabbed the pointing appendage.  The audience loved that.

Short documentary presented by Herbert A. Philbrick (of I Led Three Lives and I Was a Communist for the FBI).  Philbrick tells the audience that Communists are tricky and cites various examples.

Meanwhile, many of us who were on active duty during the Cold War stepped outside for some air.

Various short presentations and recognitions.  

The prize?  A VHS copy of The Pit of Bloody Horror (1965).  Maybe I'll do a B-Note on it sometime.

[Uh oh.  According to www.ask.com, the distance from Evanston, IL to Los Angeles is 1751 miles; to  Chula Vista, CA, a mere 1731.  Aw, dammit!  Could the gentleman from LA please contact me?  It appears I owe him a videotape...]

Short subject about a man in wizard robes tearing across the country via the magic of Kinestatic animation (i.e., the actor is the subject of stop motion animation).  Features a musical finale with the wizard and animated camera equipment.  Awesome.  (The feature version by the same title is about the making of the short -- sort of.)

Aliens try to communicate with the people of Earth, but their attempts are thwarted by a government conspiracy.  They up the ante by buzzing Hollywood in flying saucers and reanimating some corpses.

The reason why the aliens must communicate with the Earthlings is to warn them about and stop them from using a new weapon called the "solonite bomb."  This device will explode sunlight in a chain reaction that would destroy the known universe.  Or so one of the aliens tried to explain.

Since this has become heavily ritualized, you rarely get anything new from the audience.  Sometimes you do.  For example, every time a character went through a sliding door, Andrew intoned, "Thank you for making a simple door very happy."  Good, obscure reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that.

The "B-Fest Players" is an unofficial name for an unofficial group who'll run small skits during the movies.  Two of them got up on stage.  One of them was holding a large stack of poster board cards.  During the explanation of the solonite bomb, the one with the cards started flipping through them while the other pointed to the pictures on the cards.  They'd done PowerPoint style presentation on the cards.  (Heh, like they say in communications classes, if you think your lecture may be weak, go with your visuals...)  You can read more about their adventures at The Wayfarer.

After a volcano opens up off the coast of Ireland, a large dinosaur type critter rampages.  It is captured and put in an amusement park in London.  Then the critter's Godzilla sized parent shows up and levels the town looking for its baby.  

(Cf. The Lost World (1925), wherein a dinosaur rampages in London, and The Lost World (1998) wherein a dinosaur rampages in San Diego while looking for its baby.)

During the story, a man enters a diving bell.  A commentator in the audience parodied the man by putting on a thick berserk brogue and declared the bell to be his mother (as in returning to the womb).  After a bit of this ranting, the commentator-in-character shouted that he wanted to, "take seven gallons o' milk down wit' me an' suckle all day."  Commentator dropped this shtick after that; he'd even weirded himself out.

Short subject about two little people, dressed in 18th century finery, fighting over a seat. 

This is the sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man (1957).  Giant with half his face missing goes on a rampage in Mexico.  He is captured, taken to America, and goes on another rampage.

Two vintage cartoons, probably not seen by many back then, and definitely not for the kiddies.  The first showed puffs of smoke drifting into various pornographic images.  The second was about the penile misadventures of one Mr. Eveready Harton.

Government agent is sent to investigate the death of a physicist.  He discovers a pattern of male death during sex and an unusual conspiracy of a group of women.

E.T. meets Mad Max meets Oliver meets Xanadu.  Children at an orphanage in a dystopian future find a living orb of light.  Evil people want the orb for their own nefarious purposes.  The kids can skate real good, so they save the world by skating real good.

Directed by Alan Johnson, who was a choreographer for Mel Brooks.  (Cf. Prayer of the Rollerboys (1991))

A pop music icon manipulates a few politicians and the media.  The voting age is lowered to fourteen.  He becomes president.  Groovy fascism follows, baby.

(Cf. "Returned for Regrooving" on Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him (1968) by Firesign Theatre.)

[Dr. Freex of The Bad Movie Report has reviewed this one.]

Maybe the cafeteria is serving coffee now?

Hypnotist accurately predicts a series of murders.  He also has a young woman in his thrall, and has been causing her to revert to a primal crustacean creature (with breasts).  Naturally, said creature's rampages are in line with the hypnotist's predictions.

[Yours truly found an unused corner of the theater (gently lit by the glow-in-the-dark cups the StompTokyo crew provided as promotional items) and watched the back of his eyelids.]

Early gory-story about a Mickey Spillane detective wannabe trying to find out who killed and mutilated his secretary.  Meanwhile, the local greasy spoon has discovered an alternative source for meat.  Comedy.

Despite the poor quality of the filmmaking and humor overall, we did find one joke we did like - it blatantly parodied "offscreen teleportation."

In the future, commerce relies on submersible transportation traveling under the polar icecap.  After several submarines are destroyed, a super-sub (with a super-crew) is sent to investigate.  Eventually, they see a saucer shaped craft and....

Audience was amused by this poor attempt at merging Destination Tokyo with flying saucers.  Or is that swimming saucers.  Ah, well....

[Dr. Freex at The Bad Movie Report has reviewed this one, too.]

Sherlock Holmes type detective called Coke Ennyday is hot on the trail of drug smugglers.

[Based on the comments I heard after the fact, I doubt this is the movie they showed.]

Young lady needs a good reputation to win an inheritance in probate, but she runs afoul of those dangerous, brazen, evil, psychotic, paranoid hooligans who smoke marijuana.

Recurring scenes feature an elderly woman (the town gossip) on a motor scooter.  At first, maybe one or two audience members accompanied these scenes with the "wicked witch" theme from The Wizard of Oz.  By the fourth or fifth time, the whole audience was into it.  References to Waking Ned Devine could not compete.

One of the Hammer series.  A nervous priest accidentally revives Dracula.  Meanwhile, a minor domestic problem arises when a monsignor's niece starts dating an atheist.  It all comes down to the atheist to thwart the supernatural menace, which is a bit of problem, him not believing in crosses and prayer and all that.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Entertainment entrepreneurs discover two Polynesian fairies living on an isolated island and kidnap them.  The wee folk are put into a show.  Unfortunately (for the bad guys), the guardian of their race is a caterpillar so big, it'd put the Goodyear blimp to shame.  The big bug rampages through Japan looking for the fairies...

[Liz at And You Call Yourself a Scientist has reviewed this one.]

By the time the last feature at a B-Fest rolls out, the audience is remarkably silly and easily amused.  Case in point.  As this movie ran, the projector kept losing the soundtrack.  That'd be bad enough, but then the projector lost the frame; that is, the frame as projected was off by about one fifth from the bottom.

One of the audience members ran up to screen, put his hands on the offending line, and acted like he was trying to push it down.  Someone ran to the opposite end of the screen and did likewise.  Naturally, the frame didn't correct itself.  I shouted, "We need more people!"  Several members of the audience obliged.  There were about six or seven people trying to push the frame down into place.

Then the soundtrack died again.  This was going badly.  I (and probably a couple other people) shouted, "Clap your hands if you believe in fairies!"  And the audience clapped their hands, with a few shouts of "Live, Tinkerbell!" thrown in.

Heh, by this time, the projectionist corrected the problems.  But it was still a spiritual moment.  Like I said: remarkably silly and easily amused.  (Cf. "No rain!" at Woodstock.)