B-Fest 2000

Splotches in Time

God knows we need another description of B-Fest 2000 like we need another Blair Witch parody.  (Perhaps a new one of those will be called Who Wants to Be a Blair Witch?)  This year's event has gotten more web attention than previous incarnations.  For good or ill, I suspect that next year's event will start to draw more respectable media types.

So, here we go again.

Contents

• Prologue: Through the Ashes
• The Blathering of the Fellowship
  • Many Meetings
  • On Cloud Eight
  • To Sleep. Perchance to Deem.
  • Sheer Wool Gathering
  • The Condemned
  • Just Before Showtime
• The Three Towers
  • First Leg: An Easy Start
  • Interlude: Apostic Loses His Cool
  • Second Leg: Into the Swamps
  • Interlude: Apostic Almost Loses His Cool Again
  • Third Leg: Rounding the Halfway Mark, and It's Uphill for Most
  • Interlude: Apostic Keeps his Damn Mouth Shut
  • Fourth Leg: The Last Stretch
• The Return of the Thing
  • The Party Continues
  • The Scourging of the Mire
  • The Westward Journey
• Epilogue: The Ashes Settle

Prologue: Through the Ashes

I can't remember who said it.  Maybe it was Whitman.  Our lives are spots in time.  We have singular, defined moments that we remember, and the life each of us remembers is a collection of these spots. 

Of course, some spots are sharper than others.  Others are blurred to the point of uselessness.  (For example, forgetting who said that our lives are spots in time.)  And not all spots are recalled in chronological order.  And, unfortunately, when recalled, they seem egotistical because they're from the point of view of the person recalling them.

Such are my memories of an odyssey called B-Fest 2000.

The Blathering of the Fellowship

Many Meetings

I arrived in Chicago from Sandiegoland on Thursday night.  By previous arrangement, I was met at the gate by Sue, who had flown in from Florida.  She was waiting for me as a convenience to Ken.  Now it was time to call him for a ride.

This didn't go very well.  Not the phone call, you understand.  That went well.  We were told to wait outside, where there were signs for the various airlines.  We stepped outside into the brisk night and found ourselves standing under an Air Jamaica sign.  We quickly moved away from that opportunity for wishful thinking to the America West sign, which is where Ken would be looking for us.

Ken didn't show up immediately.  I grew up in southwestern Indiana, so I knew the cold like an old friend that I hadn't seen for a long time.  Sue used to live in one of the great northern states, but she was in a more assertive mood than I; this chill running down our memory lanes wasn't getting us to where we were going.  After about twenty minutes, she was on the phone to Chateau Ken.  Someone told her he had left and we should be seeing him by now.

A few minutes later, I was on the phone.  The voice on the other side answered, "Hello, Ken's Taco Shop."  Andrew Borntreger (Mr. badmovies.org) was running the help desk.  He told me Ken was probably still looking for us.

A few more minutes passed.   Followed by a few more.  Followed by another call to the home of our host.  Ken had called there to let them know that he didn't see us.

Sue and I accepted the obvious conclusion.  The terminal had two levels, and we had been waiting on the wrong level.  After splitting up for some more waiting on the two separate levels, we called our apologetic host, who had given up looking for us after forty minutes.

We took a cab.  That went about as well as picking the right place for our ride, but that is another story, one that Sue should tell.

On Cloud Eight

Chateau Ken is a trailer.  Humble, you may say, but it had three things going for it.  For one, it was decorated as a B movie museum.  Two, it was warm and comfortable.  And three, some of Ye Olde Gang was already there.

I quickly recognized Sgt. Andrew Borntreger, USMC; he was the one with an excellent physical condition and a high-n-tight haircut.  And there was Alan and Rob (or is it Rob and Alan) from Oh, The Humanity!  And there were the von Roeschlaub's; I knew Kurt as a longtime veteran of the discussion board at Ken's web site.  His wife was there, too.  (Made me wish Mrs. Apostic had come along, but she doesn't do cold weather.)  And there was Jeff, who goes way back with Ken; he'd flown in from Phoenix for this event. 

The living room seemed more crowded than that, so there were probably others.  On the other hand, since most of us are bad/cult movie experts, we tend to fill a room with fewer people.

They were waiting for Sue and I to get there to Start the Movie.  It was The Giant Claw (1957), that fine feature about a guy, a gal, and monster bird bigger than the Spruce Goose.  While it was running, you could tell we had different writing styles because of the way we reacted.  Ken savored it.  Andrew was easily distracted from it, but when it had his attention, his comments were sharp and to the point.  Alan and Rob made good, clear references to other movies.  I made a lot of obscure, lame jokes.

It's a bad movie, but it didn't break us.  We took that cinematic blow to the face, smiled at it, and shouted, "C'mon!  Is that all you got?"  And then Ken put this…thing into the VCR and pushed play.  We saw a very youthful Timothy Dalton singing (?) a duet (???) with a sexy (????????) Mae West.  The song was Captain and Tennille's "Love will Keep Us Together" (!) and the movie was Sextette (1978).  (&#*%!)

Have you seen The Producers (1968)?    There's a scene in that movie where the opening song of a bad musical turns an entire audience into gaping, horrified statues.  That was the scene at Chateau Ken.  Afterwards, Ken observed that grizzled veterans of bad movies are rarely shocked anymore because they've seen it all.  And then, he said, sometimes you find something that can still do it.

To Sleep.  Perchance to Deem.

I had been awake for thirty-six hours.  (That's not a great feat for anyone who'd been on active duty in the military.)  By prior arrangement, I slept at Chateau Ken.  It's not that I'm a cheap bastard.  (Actually, I am a cheap bastard, but that wasn't the reason.)  When I came to B-Fest 1999, I crashed at Ken's place, where Ken and Douglas Milroy (one of Ken's contributors) and Jeff and I had a spirited discussion into the wee hours of the morning.  It was one of the things I was looking forward to on this trip.

Too bad Ken was too exhausted from playing chauffer for everyone.  And he was aware that he'd be doing it again the next morning, followed by The Event.  He did the responsible thing and called it a night immediately.  But it's just as well.  We all had a long, sleepless run ahead of us.  It didn’t take long for the REM's to visit me.

Sheer Wool Gathering

Friday morning.  Some of Ye B Movie Faithful began to arrive.  Most of them were staying at a nearby motel.

We wrote cute things on paper plates.  And we watched Sextette.  And we watched Lou Ferrigno battle some tacky monsters in The Adventures of Hercules (1985, a.k.a. Hercules II).  And we watched Ticks (1993), which was beginning to look like Citizen Kane by comparison.  We suggested putting Sextette in again, but Andrew said, "Nononononono!"

Sometime during this, Joe from Opposable Thumb Films arrived.  Nice guy.  It would take a nice guy to invent the Hasselhoff scale to rate movies.  And sometime during all the above, or maybe it was later, I got to meet Joel Mathis, who I know from his postings at the Jabootu board and tend to perpetually confuse with regular Jabootu contributor Jason MacIsaac for some odd reason.  Sorry guys.  Perhaps if Jason had been able to make it this year, I could've stood the two next to each other so I could sort them out in my feeble mind.

The Condemned

It was time.  We loaded three cars with provisions.  We even had room for the people.  And we were on our way to…a hot dog place.  It would be our last meal.

We filed into a simple dining area with our orders and began to talk about the stuff you'd expect us to talk about.  There were other patrons there when we arrived.  It wasn't long until we had the room to ourselves.

While we were consuming some healthy nitrates, Joe was kind enough to ask me about the recent slowness on updates on my web site.  I was flattered.  So I explained that my backlog was due to post Y2K hassles at work.  And my mother-in-law had been visiting; my computer is in our guest room, so I didn't get to spend as much quality time with my word processor as usual. 

And then I gave away the Big Secret.  I said I was being gobbled up by one of the other web sites and busy trying to fix my old stuff so it would look right in its new environment.  I looked at someone else at this indoor hotdog stand and said, "Do you think I should tell them?"  This person, who was instrumental in this acquisition, gave me the go ahead. 

But that is yet another story.

Just Before Showtime

We hustled our provisions into the building, bought our tickets, and ran everything to front left of the auditorium.  I was getting too old for this.

Andrew was looking for Santa Claus.  I saw him come in with the rest of the Stomp Tokyo entourage.  Some call him Freeman Williams.  Others call him Dr. Freex.

We went up and introduced ourselves.  I owed this Stomp Tokyo crew a lot.  It was from them I heard about Dr. Freex.  And it was from Dr. Freex I heard about Ken's World of Awful Movies, which is now Jabootu.  It's always important on the road of life to remember who gave you directions to the path of your obsessions.

It was time to take a few pictures:

Web celebs.  From the right, Sgt "badmovies" Borntreger, (back) Opposable Joe, Chris the Stylin' Tuber, and (showing what he will probably call his good side) Dr. Freex.	We had on hand each of the essential B-Fest food groups: sugar, deep fried, carbonated, and miscellaneous.
Sue gives Ken a big hug.  Who knew Mardi Gras beads would make such an effective fashion statement.  (Thanx, Crystal Guillory of the New Orleans Worst Film Festival, for sending us some.)	The von Roeschlaub's.  They looked so happy and wholesome, many of us wanted to throw up in envy.  (Note to self: show this to Mrs. Apostic as proof that normal people go to these things.)

I also scored a few artifacts.  Along with a prized Oh! The Humanity! bumper sticker, I snagged a couple of Stomp Tokyo cups.  There was also the DVD Club's flyer:

• Cardboard Gravestones: $14
• Wicker, er, Rattan Patio Furniture: $49
• Angora Sweater: $32
• Chiropractor: $75
• Ed Wood's Warped Vision: Priceless

It was nearly showtime.  I tried to find a seat with Ken's Jabootu camp, but it was too crowded.  I drifted back to the Stomp Tokyo camp.  Fortunately, they didn't kick me out immediately.

The Three Towers

First Leg: An Easy Start

You don't want to start a marathon at top speed.  We began at a gentle trot with Daddy-O (1959).  Organized crime, fast cars, pop singing, hip lingo, and over aged teens ran rampant.  So did the insults hurled at the screen.

The scenery didn't change much when we hit the next stretch of the run.  Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), like Daddy-O, was another feature from the early years of AIP.  This meant more organized crime (from three BEM's, maybe more, but you only saw three at a time), fast cars, pop music, hip lingo, and over aged teens.  (Note to self: Do research into the hypothesis that a Paul Blaisdell monster would've improved Daddy-O.)  Fortunately, the presence of Frank Gorshin made it easy for us older viewers to occasionally mumble, "Riddle me this," while younger audience members wondered what the hell we'd been smoking.

Then we started hitting the hills.  It's debatable if you can really call Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) a B movie.  Sure, it was using leftovers from the first movie.  Sure, James Franciscus has been called a poor man's Charlton Heston.  However, it still had the support of Twentieth Century Fox, and at the time it came out, it wasn't that bad of a movie.  At least the print we were shown was scratchy and the color degraded, so we did get a requisite level of production tackiness.

And we hit the gentle stride of a downhill trot.  William Castle's House on Haunted Hill (1958) isn't a great movie, but we've all seen worse.  As many of you reading this know, this is the one with "Emergo" gimmick, which meant that at an appointed time in the story, an inflatable skeleton was supposed to slide on a string at the audience.  This didn't happen at B-Fest, but I noted that some people had brought an inflatable Godzilla.  (Actually, it was a Deanzilla, the kind from the American movie.)

Time to pick up the pace.  A lot.  The short subject The Wizard of Speed and Time is one of three perennial features at B-Fest.  I saw this a long time ago on PBS, where it was one of the few independent shorts that didn't involve twenty-minute close-ups of tin foil or nasal hair or landfill decorations or such.  As a B-Fest essential, it gets audience participation.  Known as The Wizard Freak Out Ritual, energetic audience members run up to the screen, hit the deck on their backs, and rapidly kick their feet on the ground while a Kinestatic wizard tears across the countryside.  Running the film backwards and upside down immediately followed this.

A B-Fest wouldn't be complete without a coming attractions reel.  We were treated to trailers for Tron (1982), The Black Hole (1979), and the original Flash Gordon serial Rocketship (1936, a.k.a. Rocketship to the Unknown).

During a break, someone said, "Quick, get a picture of this guy!  He's a living legend!"  And so, at the center foreground of this picture, we see Matt Bradford, B-Fest organizer and living legend.

Interlude: Apostic Loses His Cool

They started giving away door prizes.  This year, they were giving a prize to the person who'd traveled the greatest distance.  As a San Diegan, I felt like I had a pretty good chance.

Then they asked for places of origin.  Some were shouting "Mongo!" and "Barsoom!"  It drowned out my shout of San Diego, but it didn't seem to drown out someone from Seattle.  They asked if there was anyone from farther away than Seattle, and I shouted San Diego.  A girl sitting in front of me tried to support my shouting.

They gave the prize to Seattle.  I jokingly shouted, "Fix!"  Then I realized that I had been cheated out of this one.  Sometimes you have to make a stand for what you know is right.  Everyone knows that San Diego is farther away from Evanston than Seattle.  After all, San Diego is on the southwest corner of the continental United States; Seattle, the northwest corner, and Chicago is pretty far north.  I shouted it again.  "Fix!  Fix!"

Later, I made lame jokes to cover my rude behavior.  But being swindled like that continued to haunt me.

[Side note: According to www.ask.com, the distance from Evanston, IL, to San Diego, CA, is 1729 miles; to Seattle, WA, 1730 miles.  Ah, well.  And to think I had recently moved from Chula Vista (1731 miles).  Maybe next time, I'll come in from Auckland, New Zealand.  Yeah.  And that'll probably be the year Aussie Liz from And You Call Yourself a Scientist? shows up.]

Second Leg: Into the Swamps

I climbed over Dr. Freex to get to my seat.  (The man has the patience of a saint.)  They started the next movie.  Criswell was on the screen.  It was time for the second perennial show at B-Fest.  I crawled over Dr. Freex again (a saint, I tell ya!) and ran to the head of the theater.  Andrew, who had the good sense to take an aisle seat, was already there.  We grabbed up the paper plates (remember them from that morning?) and started passing them out along the aisles.  Someone asked me, "What do I do with this?"  "You'll know when the time is right.  Take a couple and pass the rest down."

By the time I crawled over Dr. Freex (someone canonize him, already!) to get to my seat, the opening credits and staccato score to Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958) were finished.  Bela Lugosi smelled a flower while the ritual aware audience shouted, "Bela."  (Later, when his double did scenes, they shouted, "Chiropractor!")

And then, while airline pilots in their shower curtain cockpit were startled by hubcap shaped flying saucers on strings, the audience Knew What to Do.  The air was filled with flying paper plates.

[Side note: Afterwards, we heard about the injuries.  Sue got a paper cut from one of these dreaded missiles.  And someone had brought some Chinette plates; man, those things sting.  (Note to self: Make a head injury prosthetic with an imbedded paper plate for next year.)]

And then we hit the marshes.  Plan 9 is a hard act to follow, so many were not impressed by the next movie.  I've got a weakness for Hammer Studio's Dracula series, which is probably why I don't consider Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972 – well, duh!) to be a particularly bad time.  However, since it was an attempt to move the setting from a Victorian era to (then) modern times, the resulting effect was, shall we say, shagadelic, baby.  At least you get Peter Cushing's van Helsing going toe-to-toe with Christopher Lee's Dracula, even if someone from Stomp Tokyo camp kept admonishing the hollow cheeked Cushing to "Eat something!"

Interlude: Apostic Almost Loses His Cool Again

It was about 2:30 in the morning.  I was on my way outside to give my lungs a protective coating of tar and nicotine.  I didn't make it.  At a certain hour of the night, they lock the doors to Norris Center.  Like an inverse of a roach motel, I could check out but not check in.  I asked the security type at the desk if they had a smoking area.  Nope.  I didn't push it, but they did last year.  The doors would not be unlocked until 7:30 the next morning.  I had a long nic fit ahead of me.

I went back to the theater.  Jungle Hell (1956) was starting.  I'd already read Ken's analysis of this stock footage hell.  It was time to spend some quality time with the back of my eyelids and pray for a tolerable nic fit when I woke up.  I grabbed some floor in the wings by the screen.  I had to do this carefully, since a couple had already claimed a piece of this territory.  (Couldn't see them in the dark, but it looked like the von Roeschlaub's.)

Occasionally, I caught snatches from Jungle Hell.  And I was awake to see a stag reel about a midget (or, if you prefer, a vertically challenged person) discovering some erotic dancing mummies in the short (no pun) Tomb it May Concern (pun).  And I was awake for Gavotte, which was another, uh, short about a vertically challenged man trying to gain seat precedence at a party while a harpsichord played a (duh) gavotte.  Since it had two midgets, shouldn't it have been called Two Part Invention or Fugue?  If it were violent, would that have made it Blood Fugue?  (Note to self: We get midgets in short features.  Fortunately, this trend didn't seem to happen in the other direction.  For example, the Shaquille O'Neal feature Kazaam (1996) would've run for six hours.)  And I saw The Quest (1996) begin.  Somehow, it seemed out of place.  Time to close the eyes again.

I started moving again at about 5:30.  van Damme's Quest had ended.  I was out of the theater on another quest.  There was someone else at the front desk.  He had no problems with allowing someone to block a door open to smoke.  Life can be good sometimes.

Rounding the Halfway Mark, and It's Uphill for Most

We were back in AIP country again.  Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) was on.  I'm a lot more forgiving than most about this Corman sortie into oddball comedy.  (Remember, these are the words of someone who has some respect for Beast with a Million Eyes (1955)).  And it's hard to totally dislike a movie with odd humor, like the one character that figures he'll go unnoticed in Havana because he's an American.

Then we saw I Want a Job.  This was an old short about how to present yourself when looking for work, including some examples of what to do and what not to do.  There were some snickers in the audience at this dated reel, but in the passing of two generations since this thing was made, personnel departments have not changed that much in their expectations for prospective employees.

And then they rolled out the third perennial event.  What is Communism? is a short presentation by Herbert A. Philbrick, who wrote the original I Led Three Lives and became a household name during the '50's when Richard Carlson portrayed him in the TV series by the same name.  As an educational presentation, it's effective; people watching it remember what the author is saying.  On the other hand, as a Cold War propaganda piece, it's veracity is questioned.  Philbrick asserts that Communism is a "lying, dirty, shrewd, Godless, murderous, determined, international criminal conspiracy."  (Well, regarding the Leninist branch, they were.  But no one seems to remember that anymore.)  The ritual for this piece is to shout "U-S-A!"  Someone passed out several small U.S. flags.

[Side note: A couple of years ago, a lady was trying to convince me the current economic growth in the United States was due to effective management by President Clinton.  I disagreed and said it was because we were living in a post-war boom.  She asked, "Which war?  The Gulf War?"  "No," I said, "The Cold War.  Did you miss it?  Sometimes I do…."]

And then we had an experiment that didn't work out so well.  The movie: The A classic It Came from Outer Space (1953).  The hypothesis: 3D.  The result: It hurts.  They presented it in "red/cyan" stereovision, but the red component on the screen was either too dark or the wrong shade.  I'd seen a similar presentation of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) without the red headaches.  Most of our audience quickly gave up on this one.  I stuck it out, and after a while my red eye adjusted.

While we were adjusting back from our color set eyes, we were shown a short version of The Raven (1935).  As Dr. Freex once commented about Shogun Assassin (1980), it's like The Princess Bride; this is all the good parts.  As a testament to how forgettable the full version is, I saw it when I was a teenager and forgot everything about it.  There's a scene in the short where one of the characters is lead away, and I'm making jokes about a pendulum.  In the next scene, he's under that swinging blade.  Yes, I'd completely forgotten about it.  Ah well, at least it gave members at the Stomp Tokyo camp a chance to make Poe wise comments, like "Nevermore!" and "For the love of God, Montresor!"

Next up, Son of Blob (1972).  This was a satire of the Steve McQueen vehicle of 1958, so instead of over-aged teens from the '50's, we get over-aged teens from the early '70's, and ending with its predecessor's "The End?" title.  I was really dreading this one, which I'd seen before and hated.  Nowadays, given the kind of crap I watch, this one doesn't look so bad.  It also brought back memories of those damned annoying "clack-clack" toys.  For those of you who don't remember them, this toy was a pair of one-inch acrylic balls attached to the ends of a foot and a half line, with some type of handle or loop in the middle of the line.  The object was to get the balls to bounce off each other in rhythm for as long as possible.  (Think of it as a new age yo-yo.)  People who were really good could get these things to collide on both sides of the hand.  On the whole, they were better used as bolos or saps; my high school outlawed them.

Time to eat.

Interlude: Apostic Keeps his Damn Mouth Shut

While Sue and I were making small talk, someone hawking a movie he'd made approached us.  I'm not going to embarrass this man by naming his name.  On the other hand, sir, if you knew who some of us were and what we wrote about movies, you would've been wise not to bring it to our attention.  (See also, tugging on Superman's cape.)

The Last Stretch

After some burger and coffee action, and touching bases with Paul Smith (Minister of Propaganda, Nation of Jabootu), I was late for the next film, Red Nightmare (1962).  I saw this one in sixth grade, courtesy of one of those clubs named after an animal.  (Eagles?  Elks?  Lions?  Can't remember.)  I'd comment on this, but, well, since I haven't seen the whole thing in about thirty years, I'll keep my Commie-bashing mouth shut.  However, I suspect this may remind some of the ABC miniseries Amerika.

By this time, I was able to get a seat near the front with Ken and Andrew.  The next film started, got jammed, and began to burn on a frame.  I mumbled, "There goes the deposit on this one."  Andrew shouted, "Fire!"  I think everyone in the audience knew what he really meant, but there is that prejudice against shouting that sort of thing in a theater unless the theater itself is on fire.  (When I had a paper route, one of my stops was at a firehouse.  When I walked in one day to collect their subscription, several firemen were crowded into a break room while watching a movie on a VCR.  I pointed at the screen and shouted, "Movie!"  Guess I got it out of my system.)

Anyway, they got it going, and we were treated to a good, clean print of Five Million Years to Earth (1967).  I know a lot of the audience was too tired to enjoy this sort of thing at this point, but, as I said earlier, I'm a sucker for Hammer horror flicks.

And we went back to AIP land for Teenage Caveman (1958).  It's difficult to lampoon this, not because of lack of opportunities, because it was done fairly recently on Mystery Science Theater 3000, so it was hard to think of jibes that weren't on that episode .  And then we saw The Slime People (1962).  Some people are trapped in a city when things that look like Doctor Who's Zygons invade from underground.  This movie is remarkable.  Just as people are driven to do stupid things in haunted house movies, these characters make some of the dumbest moves I've ever seen.  They can get away with it, though, because they're protected by Duex Ex Poor Continuity.  For example, they leave behind weapons that reappear in their hands a couple of scenes later.  (Never mind counting bullets; try counting rifles.)  I can't remember who said it on an online review, but someone noted that the youngest female survivor is, given the circumstances, quite chipper and downright frightening.  Now that I've seen it, I can say it's true.

Somewhere in this, we were treated to the trailer reel again.

But then, they rolled out the last film for us.  Last year, the second to last feature was Girls Town (1959), and my brain had been so badly jellied that I absolutely loved it, especially after enduring mean spirited crap like Zardoz (1973) and Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970).  This year we got Russ Meyer's spin on the bad girls genre.  The last film was Faster, Pussycat!  Kill!  Kill! (1965).

Now, this is going to be a tough one for me to call.  As I said, toward the end of a B-Fest, I'm remarkably easily amused.  I thought it was great.  Tura Satana's cleavage aside (which brought to mind Bronson Canyon), they showed us a good, clean, crisp print that featured some pretty darn good cinematography, and the story moves at a good clip.  Compare this to Thelma and Louise (1991), which was also about strong female characters, defective men, and desert scenery; somehow, I thought this Russ Meyer's film was much better.  Maybe it's because Meyer wasn't as pretentious as Ridley Scott about his subject matter.  Furthermore, this is an honest B movie, unlike many of the features we were treated to this year.  I'm going to have to get a letterbox copy sometime.

The Return of the Thing

The Party Continues

After doing our part to pick up the mess in Norris Theater, we adjourned to Ken's mom's house for a combination post-fest party and crash out.  It began to snow, and Ken began to suspect that the brakes on his car were beginning to stop working.  We all made it there alive.

Ken's mom had already set up the house for our arrival.  She'd left little notes on things like a tray of donuts ("Eat"), a large coffee percolator ("Ready to go.  Plug in."), and one of the cabinets ("Cups").  We ordered pizzas and settled in for the evening.  Crowded, but comfortable and worth it. 

The party fell into two camps.  The Stomp Tokyo crew jammed into the living room while everyone else crowded into the kitchen.  I shuttled back and forth between the two groups.  The edge of the Stomp Tokyo crew I joined was hotly debating the relative intellectual merits of the Alien series of movies.  The kitchen crowd, which included the Jabootians, was being entertained by Andrew's stories about his Marine training.  (Note to self: Your Navy tales from San Diego RTC do not compare.)

I also fell into fanboy mode and asked Dr. Freex to autograph a new copy of Forever Evil (1987), which I had bought for this event.  He put his tongue to his cheek and wrote, "When you think action, think Williams."

As the party continued, it looked like we had the elements of a B movie of our own.  A house full of over aged teens (at heart).  A home set up by a mysterious host.  Bad weather outside.  Fortunately, dead bodies didn't start showing up; just the sleepy ones.

The Scourging of the Mire

Sunday morning, Chateau Ken.  Ken was already out playing chauffer.  (He'd borrowed a car from Paul.)  I got up and shoveled his porch and sidewalk.  Been a long time since I'd shoveled snow, so it was kind of fun.  Unfortunately, the snow in Chicagoland has a finer, easier to melt quality than the kind I grew up with in southwestern Indiana.  I looked at the little puddles of water on the porch and prayed my host wouldn't slip and break something later.

After I gathered up my luggage, Ken took me back over to his mom's place.  Several of the revelers were up and moving.  Ken fired up the VCR and treated them to that musical (?) scene from Sextette.  Andrew crawled under the coffee table, but it didn't seem to affect the Stomp Tokyo crew as much as it did the group at Chateau Ken on Thursday night.  After B-Fest, you pick up some numbness and a few calluses.

"Sextette, huh?  (Yawn)  Very nice."

While Ken continued to play chauffer, and Jeff went out to get us some food, and after the Stomp Tokyo crew made their departure, we debated about what to put into the VCR next.  We decided on Starcrash (1979), another fine feature by the same man who'd brought us The Adventures of Hercules.

You hear stories about how the mind closes off pain after a while.  I saw this movie when it was first released and forgot how truly bad it was.  Back then, it was a painful kind of bad; now, a laugh to the point of tears bad.  I also remembered how Starlog magazine gave this thing a big, positive, behind the scenes write-up.  One of the producers of this movie suggested that George Lucas ripped them off when he made Star Wars.  The justification: The makers of Starcrash had an idea for their movie before George Lucas made his.  OK, fine.  You watch Starcrash and decide who was ripping off whom.

During the movie, Andrew kept pointing out the "J" shaped star pattern that kept appearing in the lower left corner of the screen during the space sequences.  Andrew had found a "Nut o' Fun" for this one.  Meanwhile, we were brought to tears of laughter at lines like, "You will be blown to dust!  Forever!"  (Forever, as opposed to…?  Maybe like in a Dracula movie.)  Either way, Joe was happy to see David Hasselhoff in this movie, even if he is starting to get tired of being called "That 'hoff guy."

And what could follow this up but a visit from Drunken Wu-Tang (1997?)?.  If you've seen Andrew's page on this, let me tell you something.  That clip he has of "The Watermelon Monster" does not do it justice.  Must be seen on a large screen.

The Westward Journey

Ken took Jeff and I to the airport.  He noted that it says something that no one seemed concerned about the Super Bowl.  Of course, in my own case, I couldn't care less.  I didn't even know who was playing.  The Tennessee Whosits vs. The Rams from Wherever?  I lost interest in pro sports when I could no longer remember who was in which city.

We all made our simple good-byes.  As Mrs. Apostic can tell you from when I was a sailor, I don't do good-byes very gracefully.  Nor do I end this section gracefully, either.

Epilogue: The Ashes Settle

As I write this, it's 3 a.m. on a Friday night/Saturday morning, exactly one week later.  I am indebted to Stomp Tokyo for quickly publishing a description of the event, because I couldn't remember what movie played at what time.

The movies at this B-Fest weren't too bad.  Compare the features running this year with those running, say, last year.  On the other hand, maybe I've picked up my own bad movie calluses.

And I feel energized.  After running my own web site for a few months, I was getting burnt out.  Hanging with some of my favorite web-celebs was a positive experience, and kicking around a few bad movies with other quick on the draw wiseacres is a rare event.

So, here's to all of you, regulars and first timers, which I met at B-Fest 2000.  Hopefully, I'll be able to make it to B-Fest 2001, see you all again, and see some of you who weren't able to make it this year.

Published 5 February 2000