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(Note: Mr. Muchoney’s views do not necessarily reflect those of the Management. Besides, he’s a lawyer, so if we’re to talk about ‘wasted’ lives, let’s start there.)

I am thirty-four years old. So when I found myself sitting at this year’s "B-Fest" trying to pick some lame dialogue out from the tumult of jeers and catcalls for the 7:35 p.m. feature film, Earth vs. the Spider, I realized that my life has been wasted.

I mean, this movie deserved every sarcastic and astounded proclamation that the audience heaped on it that evening. Yet it had somehow captured this entire theater-full of luckless viewers who had dared the cold and shunned the opportunity to spend Friday night in stimulating social engagements. In return, the movie offered up a gaggle of actors unconvincingly playing to a clumsily matted-on tarantula. I suppose that I should have felt sorry for everyone at the auditorium that night, but I was far too absorbed in feeling sorrier for myself. In fact, I felt as though my mere presence was the stamp of some irrefutable cosmological proof that thirty-four years of training and experience had been wasted on me, and that I was -- and am -- irredeemably stupid.

I guess that I should have come to the realization long ago -- when as a teenager, I had already watched Zontar, Thing from Venus for something like the twentieth time -- that any efforts to "better" myself would probably be futile. And I don’t mean that I watched a few minutes of this film on twenty different occasions. I watched it from start to finish, Empire carpet commercials, Earl Schieb (sp?) ‘we paint any car any color for $99.99’ commercials, and all. What a moron.

So, before I attempt to describe what I saw at this year’s "B-Fest," essentially twenty-four hours of some of the most incompetent cinematic efforts ever conceived, shown at Northwestern University (go figure), I would like to apologize. I would like to apologize to all of those taxpayers who contributed to my G.I. Bill educational benefits and to the college grants that I received. It was obviously all a huge waste of money. Sorry.

Anyway, I guess I shouldn’t be such a downer, and get on with the business at hand, briefly evaluating a few of the feature attractions. I suppose that I should also point out that I didn’t see all of the films since I arrived late and left early, at about 6 a.m. At some point during Reefer Madness, my brain started whining about not wanting to spend the next twelve hours having more stuff like Plan 9 from Outer Space crammed down its pie-hole, and how it hadn’t "transcended millions of years of hominid evolution to be demeaned like this," and bla bla bla bla. Well, you can imagine that I finally caved in, drove it home and tossed it on a pillow.

One of the movies that I saw before my brain started its self-absorbed harangue was Fearless Vampire Killers. Now, here’s a film about a couple of bumbling vampire killers, an older Van Helsing type and his young apprentice. The thing is, though, that they’re both really scaredy-cats... I mean they’re really not fearless at all... get it? Well, think about it, they’re not really fearless vampire killers at all. And the humor goes on like that.

O.K.!, now the next movie is Return of the Ape Man, one of many really lousy movies featuring Bela Lugosi. However, anyone who has ever sat through this flick would probably agree that it has one of the most memorable images in the history of pointless cinema. Namely, there is a scene with Bela Lugosi walking along a downtown street in Anytown, U.S.A., wearing a tuxedo carrying a lit hand-held blow-torch in the hope that he runs across his footloose thawed-out cave-man. And, of course, how can a plan like this not work? Hence, Bela is reunited with his aberrant anthropoid and shooshes him back to the lab. As if Bela wasn’t conspicuous enough before he was joined by his post-Mesozoic window-shopper. I would describe more of this film, but that scene is all that I can seem to clearly remember; I mean, it was boring the life out of me. Nor is this phenomenon unique to this particular ‘thawed-out cave-man’ movie, every attempt at which ends up hopelessly dull.

Regarding the next film which I examined, I remember once as an undergraduate having a teacher in modern French history who warned that no one should write a paper on the War of 1812, as it was a subject he had seen beaten into the ground by academics and students alike. I went ahead and wrote a paper on the War of 1812 anyway (because Napoleon is the coolest, igniting Europe with the Nationalist fervor which would galvanize Italia and reawaken the martial glory of Imperial Rome). Well, in the same spirit of flaying a dead horse, the next film I’ll address is Plan 9 from Outer Space. Although I’m sure that this film has been dissected numerous times by authors catering to the unfortunate few who would pay attention to its ilk, I have a few things to say if perhaps nothing to add.

We all know the plot... kind of. Well, it’s about a plan to conquer Earth conceived by aliens who act and look remarkably like lazy, pasty-skinned, flabby humans. You guessed it... plan nine. What I can’t figure out is what happened to the first eight plans; were they scrapped because they weren’t as good as plan nine?; if so, they sucked. I mean plan nine apparently involves bringing an anemic old guy (Bela Lugosi), a really weird-looking woman (Vampira), and a morbidly obese policeman (Tor Johnson), back from the grave by remote control to... somehow take over the world for three of these really lazy aliens. If you think about it, those other aliens who published that book, To Serve Mankind, had a much better plan. So, it should hardly surprise us when the flagship of the invasion is set ablaze during a truly girlish fight between the main alien guy and the main protagonist.

What does come as a surprise, however, is that the huge strings visibly holding the wobbling saucer aloft during its final flight are not severed by the flames (my guess is that the strings extend from the mother-ship hovering further above the Earth and are fashioned out of some sort of alien high-tech-flame-resistant material). What also does not come as a surprise, however, is that this is not one of those movies where there’s a big question mark on the screen at the end of the film, like "is it really over?;" yeah, right, these guys are coming back; I mean, this must have been like their Gallipoli or something. Flabby aliens on the home planet are reading about the plan 9 fiasco in the papers and saying, "We spent how much?" Ironically, after the film, audience members are thinking the same thing.

Well, the next film I would like to discuss is a personal favorite, a sort of ‘Holy Grail’ of atrocious cinema, Zardoz. Zardoz is not one of those casually bad films like Plan 9 or Earth vs. the Spider, which are bad because they are done almost thoughtlessly on a shoestring budget without much ambition or direction. Something like Zardoz soars to the peaks of unwatchability because it is so intellectually ambitious, so well-funded, so seemingly fortified against failure by talent like Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling; yet, it is s-o-o-o-o pretentious that any semblance of a coherent movie is devoured by the ravenous ego of its maker (John Boorman’s in this case); the product is then regurgitated as a jumble of nonsense to anyone but the director who is too busy crafting scenes to celebrate his cinematic acumen to realize that just because he is stupefied by the depth of his vision, doesn’t mean I will be. This approach lacks the true genius of, say, a Michelangelo Antonionio whose work occasionally reveals a playful absurdity which negates any pretense other than a revelation of the, often absurd, condition of human nature. It is therefore as pleasant and interesting to watch The Eclipse as it would be to project one of the dream scenarios from Interpretation of Dreams onto a screen for analysis. In short, the difference between The Eclipse by Antonionio and Zardoz by Boorman is that the former is showing us one vision of the human psyche, take it or leave it; Zardoz, on the other hand, is so impressed with itself and its instructive value for the untrained masses that it is not only intellectually offensive but it is really really boring. Did I mention boring?

Anyway, enough of how and why I think that Zardoz is epically bad in theory, let’s see how that translates on the ‘nuts and bolts’ level, emphasis on the ‘nuts.’ For starters, the film centers around a giant floating head. The very first scene of the film is a side-splitting depiction of this giant stone head just kind of floating around; what makes the scene so hilarious is that Boorman tries to shoot the floating head like it’s the obelisk from 2001 or something, and, man... it’s a giant floating head. As soon as that giant head came floating across the big screen, my disbelief came running up to the front of my brain with a ‘val-u-bucket’ of popcorn yelling like a maniac, "don’t even think about suspending me, not for a second!," and plopped itself down for the duration. And that was just the beginning.

As nearly as I could gather, the giant head was controlled by some race of super-beings who had learned in the post-nuclear apocalypse to control time and space; these super-beings apparently used the giant head to act as a makeshift god to control -- and supply weapons to -- a group of savages called the Exterminators, who in turn predated upon a large slave population to keep it in check; this slave population, if I have the story-line right, produced goods for the super-beings; of course, the basic plot was even more convoluted than this, to the point that I may not even have it right as to the relation between the super-beings, the Exterminators and the laborers the giant head told the Exterminators to predate upon. The trajectory of this film is difficult to plot because it seemed to induce a kind of logic narcolepsy, inducing the brain’s higher functions to keep passing out uncontrollably. This condition was probably induced by the skillfully crafted isolation of each scene from any connection with any other scene, and of each line of dialogue from any connection with what the last actor had just finished saying. In short, Zardoz was one big ego trip for Boorman and one long painful descent into movie-hell for its audience.

The next feature I’d like to discuss is the last one I watched in its entirety (coincidence?), namely Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Like Zardoz, Beyond The Valley of the Dolls (hereinafter referred to as Beyond) is an exercise in self-indulgence by its author. Unlike Zardoz, however, Beyond makes no apparent attempt to convey a ‘message’ in any conventional sense but rather seems to be simply an outlet for a bizarre and depraved personality set against the backdrop of a stunningly unimaginative underlying plot. That this movie was apparently written by Roger Ebert, who survived Gene Siskel, seems to validate the axiom posited by Billy Joel that ‘only the good die young.’

Well, as I suggested, Beyond is pretty much a generic story-line ornamented with disturbingly numerous and profound fits of ‘sick and wrong-ness.’ As for the generic story-line, the film is apparently about this really naive [and talentless] songstress who comes to the big city full of hopes and dreams [but did I mention no talent?] with eyes as big as saucers but who ends up graduating from the School of Hard Knocks summa cum laude with a degree in tough-as-nails-I’m-a-big-female-rock-star-but-I-paid-my-dues-and-nobody-better-ever-get-in-my-way cynicism. Man, what’s Ebert gonna write about next, a really naive prize-fighter who comes to the big city full of hopes and dreams with eyes as big as saucers but who ends up graduating from the School of Hard Knocks summa cum laude with a degree in tough-as-nails-I’m-a-big-heavy-weight-boxer-guy-but-I-paid-my-dues-and-nobody-better-ever-get-in-my-way cynicism?

Now for a sample of the ‘sick and wrong’ ornamentation which bedecks the foregoing and insipid backdrop. Right out of the box, the movie starts with a woman from the female protagonist’s band being awakened from bed with a pistol shoved in her face and having her brains blown out... with the whole scene shot in really graphic and gross manner. This scene is apparently good enough to be shown again later on in the film. But it is revealed during the re-screening that the assailant is the female protagonist’s agent, who goes nutzoid, discloses that he is "Super Woman," and proceeds on a killing spree with his shirt open to expose his false breasts. Need I say more? Come on, film critics across the country should have risen up with one voice in the wake of this film’s first previews and banished Ebert from their ranks forever, after having branded or tattooed him with some kind of identifying mark of shame.

As an added bonus, this film somehow also manages to cram in a bounty of baffling scenes. Just for instance is one scene during the montage of the up-and-coming songstress’ watermark gigs where she seems to be playing to the patrons at some kind of up-scale black-tie restaurant. And these people appear to be digesting their food. Given the starlet’s slavish devotion to superficial trends in technical presentation, devoid of any genuine lyrical content or individual creativity, it is as easy to imagine a contemporary banquet-hall-full of sophisticated diners patiently abiding the musical stylings of the Spice Girls without rocket-launching their guts. My solution for this enigma is that the scene means to depict a restaurant which caters exclusively to the well to-do of the (happily) hearing impaired.

Suffice it to say that Beyond was the most unpalatable movie of the evening (morning?), which is saying something powerful, given its adversaries. In fact, I honestly believe that it was this film which finally broke me, my Chateau de Hougoumont, before which I hesitated, then faltered, and then finally broke ranks and fled. Shortly thereafter, a few minutes into Reefer Madness, after 6 a.m., my brain started into its ‘evolutionary scale’ tirade; I had no energy left to resist its seemingly irresistible pleas for sleep. All in all, however, I’ll probably be at B-Fest next year, when I’ll be...35. Oh well, maybe they’ll show Zontar, Thing from Venus.

Douglas

(note : discussion board aliases will be retained, to preserve a sense of mystery …)

What one word would I choose to describe B-Fest ’99 ?

"Zardoz"

Which eight words would I choose to describe B-Fest ’99?

"Okay, enough with the bloody laser pointers already!"

Other than the Great Laser Pointer Tribulations, the only thing I can complain about in regards to the whole event is the weather – that is, it was too warm. Ken’s joking prediction of an unseasonable heat wave rocketing temperatures up to 40 Fahrenheit actually came to pass that weekend, and little ole SoCal me was free to walk about without the need to stuff myself into any clothing trimmed in fur, or ominously named after mountains people have met their deaths upon.

Why is this a complaint, you ask? Simple : I had previously worked up what I thought was a clever little intro for my eventual B-Fest recap which revolved around me having a schizophrenic break with reality due to the extreme cold I was sure I was about to endure. Ah, well, there’s always Fest2K …

Before I go any further I have to again state my appreciation for AoJ Ken’s hospitality for the event. From transportation to/from just about everywhere, to picking up the B-Fest ticket cost for Yours Truly, to providing the single largest supply of drinks and foodstuffs I’ve ever seen collected in one location outside of a supermarket or Red Cross disaster relief operation, Ken really knows how to make someone feel welcome. Not to mention the extreme simplification done to the logistics of things for us out-of-towners.

As a pre-Fest warm up, Ken’s friend Jeff and I were treated to (read : subjected to) a viewing of the immortal Mega Force, courtesy of the AoJ himself. All I’ll say about it is this : Ken, if you’re ever out in Laguna Niguel, I’ve a copy of Hellgate sitting here. Waiting …

While Ken headed off to pick up Loyal Reader SusieQ, I washed the taste of MegaForce out of my mouth by inflicting highlights from Divine Enforcer on an unsuspecting Jeff, thus ensuring that he couldn’t possibly form a favourable impression of me at any time in the near future. Don’t look for this little gem to appear on the site at any point ever, by the way. It's one of the ugliest, most morally repellent bits of cinema this side of I Spit on Your Grave. Sitting through Showgirls again would be a cakewalk compared to DE.

After Ken returned with the aforementioned Ms. Q, we all made our way to the Fest proper. Whilst waiting for the doors to open and admit the Eager Throng, I suddenly felt like Lorraine Bracco from Goodfellas – Ken knew everybody, and everybody knew him. To cope with being merely a shadow in the footlights of another’s fame I amused myself by playing Tourist Boy with my new digital camera (pictures will appear in a separate article sometime in the near future).

Soon the doors were open, and we staked out a significant chunk of real estate in the first two rows on the left. Fate found me seated on the aisle, next to the amiable Ms. Q and in front of a gentleman who introduced himself as none other than Apostic of discussion-board fame (who, it turns out, has one of the coolest voices on the planet – you should really be doing voice-over work, my Brother). We were at some point joined by TechMaster Paul and Andrew Muchoney

(see Ken’s previous Fest articles). One row behind and a few seats to my right were Al and Rob of the Oh, the Humanity site, and Ken had a front row seat next to SusieQ, and beyond that I couldn’t tell you any more.

Things got off to a great start when one of the Fest coordinators, during his welcoming speech, asked the crowed politely not to discuss the line up of films, as there were some in attendance (such as our entire group) who were playing Stud B-Fest, and didn’t want to know what was coming up ahead of time. The lights dimmed, cheers went up, and the grand spectacle began …

6:00 – 7:20 Fiend Without a Face

This was the first time I had seen this little gem, and I’m glad I had resigned myself to not hearing a word of the film early on. Time for an embarrassing admission : prior to the Fest I had concerns about my conduct. I was wondering to what extent those seated around me would ask me to shut the heck up so they could watch the movie. Quite silly in retrospect, but hey, how did I know?

The actual soundtrack and dialogue of the first few entries at the Fest were drowned out by the enthusiastic riffing of the audience, and I suddenly realized that my own wit wasn’t so quick, and my turn of the phrase not as exceptional as my home viewings of Bad Movies had led me to believe. From now on when I write my articles I’ll remember to employ a person to sit behind me and whisper "Remember, thou art mortal" in my ear the entire time …

Fiend is a fairly standard genre pic – a U.S. Airforce base and its surroundings in Canada are menaced by initially invisible brain-creatures who propel themselves with their attached spinal cords a la an inchworm in stop-motion. To be accurate, the title should have been Several Fiends Without Faces (Or Bodies For That Matter, When You Get Right Down To It), but that’s not quite as snappy on the marquee.

Things to watch for : stop motion brain deaths (complete with brain-spooge), the Cottage in the Middle of Nowhere, the "Oops, didn’t realize you were nude and in the shower, miss" scene.

7:25 – 7:30 Short Subject – Candy For Your Health

You’re going to think I’m putting a spin on things to make the film sound inherently goofy, but the point of the short honestly is that fine, quality candies are good for you. ‘Nuff said. Things to watch for : dentists everywhere shaking with barely contained ecstasy as they thumb through the new BWM catalogues.

7:30 – 7:3? Short Subject – Species II trailer

Odd choice, but the first empirical proof that this year’s Fest was graced with a 35mm projector. Natasha Henstridge finds lots of excuses to run around in tight clothing, for those who find that sort of thing an acceptable substitute for plot and characters.

Things to watch for : <insert lewd joke here>

7:3? – 8:40 Earth vs. the Spider

Carol : "Dad?"

Audience: "What?

Carol : "Dad?"

Audience : "What !?!"

Carol : "Dad?"

Audience : "WHAT !?!?"

Many will remember this Bert I. Gordon yarn about an embiggened (and very vocal) spider causing havoc with a few townies stupid enough to go crawling about in a cave clearly marked "Do Not Enter" from its showing on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that, while I’m sure it is on the regular viewing list for most attendees, few (indeed, if any) resorted to parroting the quips they’d heard on MST3k, but threw their own bon mots at the screen instead. It may sound odd of me to point out, but that made the whole experience that much more enjoyable for me.

As this was only the second film in the line up, the only original dialogue that could be heard was the heroine’s plaintive wailings of "Dad?" in the inner recesses of Carlsbad Caverns (as realized via process shots of postcards – no kidding).

Things to watch for : the oldest high school student in the world, the roaring of an embiggened spider, some of the most Freudian rock formations this side of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.

8:50 – 11:00 Fearless Vampire Killers

I still question why this film was shown. Though it is rather non-eventful (contrary to the title, not a single Creature of the Night meets its end during the course of the film), it hardly seems like a follow up to Earth vs. the Spider. While I was wondering aloud why I was staring at Roman Polanski’s quirky European gob (the man’s face was designed to be the prow of an ice breaker) Ken, ever the veteran, pointed out the wisdom of showing such a film early on while the audience was still measurably conscious.

Things to watch for : lots of bosoms in bodices, Roman’s truly unfortunate (and pointy) visage, the feyest vampire this side of Tom Cruise.

*** The times get fuzzy here, so I’m skipping them for a bit ***

??? - ??? Return of the Ape Man

This was another first-see for me, though I had heard much about the film. John Carradine and Bela Lugosi find a prehistoric ice man near some stock footage of Antarctica, and mayhem ensues. Bela apparently does some brain swapping with Ice Man and a few others via a rigged throw rug in his lab, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you much more. The audience was settling down a bit at this point, but this was offset by the truly poor quality of the sound on the print. I’m sure there was dialogue, but I could be mistaken.

Things to watch for : John Carradine before most of his wrinkles set in, the "painted brick" house, a few reasons why you shouldn’t let creepy loners play the piano at your dinner party, Bela’s Carpet of Doom.

??? - ??? Short Subject – What is Communism?

Ken has written the definitive protest of this short. While I’m not quite as politically incensed as he, there are far better choices when it comes to 50’s cultural shorts. Regardless of how you feel about Communism or patriotism during the Cold War, it's an understatement to say that I was hard pressed to find anything funny about shots of actual mass graves.

??? - ??? Short Subject – Man Made Monster Compilation

I have no idea where I was for this one. Skip ahead to …

??? - ??? Short Subject - Wizard of Speed and Time

One of B-Fest’s mascots, and the entry which inspires the most audience participation. It's not really about anything – its just a man running really fast.

Things to watch for : a man running really really fast.

12:00 – 12:15 Break

Some attractive young woman shoved a tape recorded in my face and started asking me questions about the appeal of Bad Movies. I have to assume either that she was a reporter for the school paper, or that Random Wandering Journalism is far more commonplace in Chicago than out here on the West Coast.

I’m not sure if she selected me because she had been told I’d flown all the way from California for the Fest (though I think Apostic’s trip beats mine by a few dozen miles), or because of my brazen support for Heidi Fleiss (evinced by the Heidi Wear sweatshirt I wore proudly that night), but I found myself suddenly on the spot, twisting in the wind to the merriment of the Fourth Estate. I

sincerely hope something nasty happened to her tape recorder on the way home, as I think my commentary had all the wit and coherence of Collin Ferguson’s closing arguments.

12:15-1:35 Plan Nine From Outer Space

Hang your heads in shame, oh my Brothers, if you’ve not seen the magnum opus, the Citizen Cane, the Cappo di tutti Capi of Bad Moviedom. For the benefit of those who hadn’t seen the film before, the crowd enthusiastically shouted out "Tor!", "Bela!", and "Chiropractor!" when the appropriate personage was on-screen. Those phobic about paper plates should find some excuse (any excuse!) to leave the theater.

Things to watch for : each and every frame of this Meister Werke.

1:35 – 1:40 Short Subject – Wizard of Speed and Time (again)

Same thing, only upside down and in reverse. It made some sense to me at the time.

Things to watch for : .esrever ni tsaf yllaer yllaer gninnur nam A

1:40 – 3:30 Zardoz

This is, quite possibly, the single finest motion picture ever crafted by anyone at any time in the history of cinema. Sean Connery, adorned in a red diaper and shotgun shell bandoleers, climbs inside the floating stone head of a god which bellows out phrases like "the Gun is Good, the Penis is Evil" while dispensing mass quantities of firearms and ammunition to Sean’s cohorts, and finds himself surrounded by lots of semi- and fully nude British women who are immortal and make him dress up in a bridal gown. And that’s the sensible bit of it.

But the most important part of the film for Yours Truly : Charlotte Rampling!

Ken’s criticism of my vampiric-looking countrywoman in his Orca review notwithstanding, Ms. Rampling filled every scene she graced with that creepy repellent eroticism only the vacantly psychotic can carry with such numb sensuality.

One might guess at this point that I have a "thing" for her. One would not be mistaken in this. Prior to the Fest I had even made a comment on the message board that there should be some sort of prize for the person who traveled the greatest distance to be at the Fest, and I humbly suggested an escort to the Fest by Ms. Rampling as being a fit reward. This was almost as good.

As I had recently finished my Exorcist 2 review, seeing director John Boorman’s previous offering (which he maintains was much closer to his vision than the film I reviewed <shudder>) alone made the whole trip worth it for me. Anyone who tries to explain what goes on to someone who hasn’t seen the film is destined to fail. You have to see it to disbelieve it. I’m not sure if it was the wee-hour timeslot, or the sheer oddity of the film playing, but the theater was quite hushed, with only a few confused whimpers breaking the silence.

Things to watch for : Charlotte Rampling, the "Nooo! I will not go to second leveeelll!" scene, the flying stone god head spitting out rifles and ammo to his "chosen ones", Charlotte Rampling, Sean Connery’s Sasquatchian hairy back, a smile that had to be chiseled off the face of Yours Truly.

Charlotte Rampling also stars, by the way.

3:30 – 3:40 Short Subject – Blue Hawaii (musical short)

I was still in the throes of ecstasy from Zardoz, so all I remember is that there was a good deal of bad singing about what a cool place Hawaii is. The main song found itself being invoked throughout the rest of the Fest, in the strangest of places, as a defense mechanism.

Things to watch for : the longest ‘follow the bouncing ball’ musical number coupled with the most a-rhythmic sing-along ever conceived by anyone.

3:40 – 3:45 Short Subject – Slaves in Bondage trailer

Standard titillation fare, with slight dollops of spanking and implied B&D thrown in to give me an excuse to stay awake. For those in the know, I think I’d use the phrase "vanilla" to describe its pretence at being racy.

Things to watch for : women spanking each other (its not funny, just very interesting [at least to me]).

3:50 – 5:40 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

"Its my scene, baby, and it freaks me out!"

Just as the shadow of Piranha II : The Spawning looms menacingly over James Cameron’s shoulder on the set of each new multi-quadbillion dollar production, so Roger Ebert has this distasteful little sword of Damocles perched precariously over his head, waiting to slice off a thick slab of self-important ego-mania the next time he has the gall to stomp on the cinematic vision of some up-and-coming film maker. The Ebster actually wrote this monstrosity, which pretends at being a morality play (Sheya! As if!) on the decadence of stardom (specifically rock music).

The one thing that really stands out in my memory is the way it was shot : with the exception of the obligatory montage scenes, I don’t think that any one camera angel was kept for more than ten seconds at a go. Seriously. Cut to a shot (any shot, it doesn’t matter), and inside of ten seconds the camera would cut to another angle. It's like the editor was a speed addict who accidentally downed a bottle of Jolt Cola instead of the beer he thought he was knocking back

to calm down from the Scarface portion of cocaine he had taken the night before so he could cobble together Roger’s celluloid vision.

Things to watch for : if you value your sanity - not a bloody thing.

5:40 – 6:50 Reefer Madness

The film that did for the anti-marijuana movement what Showgirls did for Joe Eszterhaus' bid for the presidency of N.O.W. Teens are drawn into a dark world of pain and suffering (accompanied by a few frenzied riffs on the piano) by the demon "narcotic", "marihuana" (sic).

Things to watch for : nicknames for marijuana even Cheech and Chong never heard of, the "oh how the nerdy have fallen" bit, the "Faster! Play it faster! Faster!" bit.

7:00 – 7:10 Short Subject – Mime Sex

I am not going to talk about this short, you can’t make me. Go ahead and cut my ear off or set me on fire ; I will not re-visit this abomination for any reason. Go away now.

7:10 – 8:20 Terror From the Year 5,000

Another "as-seen-on-MST3k" entry, this about some scientists (and their attendant Lonely Pervert handyman) who bring things back to the present from, well, the year 5,000. As I had seen this quite recently, I started to drift in and out of consciousness at this point.

Things to watch for : why does Angelo spray paint out the Swimsuit Areas on his nudie pin-ups?

8:20 – 8:35 Break

I’m sure things happened, but I don’t remember them too clearly. At some point SusieQ and I each won a door prize during the breaks (SusieQ the last remaining ’98 Fest T-shirt, and I a tape of Piranha II). Since I don’t recall which one’s these happened during, I might as well list them here.

8:35 – 9:45 Viking Women and the Sea Serpent

Roger Corman. Seen it. Slept through most of it.

Things to watch for : "Don’t you underssstand?! I’m a prinssss!"

9:45 – 10:45 Robot Monster

Time to wake right the heck up and give my undivided attention to the film which proudly sits at the right hand of Plan Nine. Ro-Man (a guy in a gorilla suit with a space helmet), at the direction of the Guidance Ro-Man, wipes out all of the planet Earth with his Calcinator Death Ray, save for a small group of Hu-mans living about two miles from his own base of operations. My favourite line has to be Ro-Man’s decisive statement to Al-lice : "I must do it with my hands". Make of that what you will.

Things to watch for : the Billion Bubble machine, stock footage of dinosaurs (read : iguanas with fins glued on their backs) fighting for no good reason, Al-lice’s sign language foreplay with the last eligible bachelor Hu-man on Earth.

10:45 –12:15 The Tingler

One of William Castle’s gimmicky productions, where electrodes in the theater seats would give random audience members a slight shock at the appropriate time. Vincent Price plays the first scientist to discover the now well known fact that extreme fright causes a little beastie to grow at the base of the frightened person’s spine, which can only be driven away by screaming.

Apparently the film made enough of an impact on me to give me my own Tingler whilst sleeping on Ken’s couch later that night – the next morning Jeff told me I had given a quick shout in the dead of night, which I don’t recall at all, but wish I could, as it sounded funny as hell to me. Talk about effective film making. Things to watch for : the one scene done (for reasons still a mystery to me) in a garish proto-colour, my 65,535th double-entendre involving a Tingler or Tingling, SusieQ’s unflappable politeness in not telling me to shut the hell up with the Tingler jokes already.

12:15 – 12:30 Break

One more life-sustaining infusion of caffeine, a quick stretch of the legs, and back at it.

12:30 – 12:40 Short Subject – Dr. Coke Eneday

For the benefit of those who haven’t had my 6th degree black belt training in Symbolism and Artistic Conceits, the name of Douglas Fairbank’s character, Dr. Coke Eneday, is a sly reference to … wait for it … the fact that he uses cocaine. A lot of cocaine. More cocaine than the editor of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. You might think it’s a lot of cocaine when you watch that DeLorian video, but that’s just peanuts compared to this. Listen …

Anyway, the white powder not only serves as our hero’s fuel, but as one of his weapons at one point, when he throws a double-handful at some Chinese men bent on doing him harm (which would have caused a certain ex-girlfriend of mine to spontaneously combust at the scale of his waste of the drug). In the end, it turns out that he’s some sort of detective, but I think it's all just a cry for help.

Things to watch for : Dr. Eneday having the same reaction to a mouthful of opium as a snootfull of coke, the woman cryptically referred to in the film as the "Fish Blower", proof positive that cocaine wasn’t invented at the same time as junk bonds, despite what the media would have you believe.

12:40 – 2:15 Creeping Flesh

The Creeping part I get, but the Flesh doesn’t really enter into it until the last few minutes or so. Peter Cushing thinks it would be a good idea to inject his prissy little daughter with the Essence of Evil which he extracted from an odd looking skeleton he came across somewhere, which causes her to dance around in a pub, show off some cleavage, stab a guy in the neck with a broken bottle, and go on to make a general nuisance of herself. Portions of the film had to be skipped over due to some technical problems with the sound. Truth be told, an enjoyable little film.

Things to watch for : Instant Evil (just add water), Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee together again, one of the few effective "bookend’-ings (the end brings you back to the beginning) in horror movie history.

2:?? – 3:?? Girl’s Town

Given the extended problems with the previous film, the Fest was running over schedule and we had to choose between seeing this and War of the Colossal Beast. While I would have been happy with either one, the clear preference of the crowed was for the Mamie van Doren flick.

Both Mamie and her extensive collection of bullet bras get tossed into a Catholic nun controlled version of Jonestown by way of events which make one wonder if local law enforcement have the power to suspend civil rights on a whim. My former education in Sociology had me wondering throughout the entire film what could have possibly possessed American culture at that point when it found grotesquely top-heavy (and conical breasted, I might add) physiques sexually attractive. Mel Torme and Dick Contino partake in the stupidest version of "chicken" ever conceived, and Paul Anka sings mercilessly at a mentally disturbed young girl named Sarafina, eventually driving her to join a nunnery <insert Hamlet reference here>.

Things to watch for : the opening death, which takes place at Leo Carillo beach (where a young Douglas Milroy has spent far too many drunken nights carousing with friends to count), Mamie van Doren spiking all the Slang-O-Meters™ in the audience in each and every scene, Mel Torme trying to play a hip punk (watch for this just for the Schadenfreude of it all)

3:?? – end Destroy All Monsters

Talk about ending things on a high note! And in the original TohoScope, no less!

This is what most consider to be the most exciting Giant Rubber Suit Monster film, if for nothing than the sheer number of monsters (and attendant city-stompings) it features. Well known beasties like Godzilla and Rodan romp about alongside lesser-known (at least to most) entities like Manda (and an incorrect reference to Barugon, thanks to the American cut of the film, but never mind that).

As the movie opens, narration helpfully informs us that all the giant monsters have been rounded up and dumped on an island somewhere under guard of various high-tech security measures which you just know are going to fail big time at some point real soon. As it turns out, a mob of invading alien chicks who dress like disco versions of the girls in Robert Palmer videos sabotage the security systems on the island in order to free the monsters and cause some serious world-wide mayhem. This does somehow help their cause, but frankly I couldn’t tell you how, or what their cause was in the first place (I assume it’s the standard ‘take over Earth’ thing). I was far too entertained by the spectacle of it all to care about silly things like plot.

Yes, this film is one of the few that I can be happy with just sitting back and watching all the purty things going ‘boom’. While I myself would have slightly preferred War of the Gargantuas (it’s a sentimental fav of mine), I still think it was a great way to end the Fest, and the crowed went absolutely wild over it. Some of the B-Fest Players even made a few ‘cities’ on the stage out of used paper cups and what not, and went a stompin’ along with the movie, kazoos and Silly String doing a great job of simulating monster roars and breath-weapons.

Things to watch for : cities other than Tokyo getting the Monster Stomp for a change, astronaut uniforms which could get the wearer mistaken for a member of The Cramps, more Giant Monster Whup-Ass in one place than just about anywhere else.

Afterthoughts

This was an event to remember, oh my Brothers. I still have a hard time believing how well everything worked. From the little things, like being able to unload the cars right in front of the entrance and then park (Ken says this was blocked off last year), to the big things like the selection of films (Zardoz !!!), everything came together to make it a great first Fest for Yours Truly. The people I was with only made things that much better.

But, sadly, there was one small blight on the Fest. Those bloody laser pointers. Here’s the deal – at some point recently a Fest tradition started up where audience members would shine flashlights onto the screen for comic effect. For example, in one film shown this year a character is stuck inside a large tomb and has only matches and a small candle for illumination. These of course give off an impossible amount of light, so a flashlight-toting audience member would shine the beam up on the candle flame to draw attention to this. It's actually more amusing than I’m making it out to sound. Also, the flashlights were used to indicate a post-coital glow on characters (when appropriate, of course) every now and again. Sparingly used, and always within a certain context, so there was humour in it.

The laser pointers, however, were a different story. We estimated that about four people in the audience were toting these bad boys, and there were only a few scenes throughout the Fest that weren’t plagued by their presence. What’s worse is that there was no ‘bit’ behind their use – it was nothing more than some guys waving red dots around on screen.

Once or twice they did elicit a chuckle. What comes to mind by way of example was during Girl’s Town, where the dots were used to indicated characters staring at the Swimsuit Areas of other characters. Those were, admittedly, moderately amusing. But the near-constant spastic twirlings of red dots on screen for no reason at all … well, I just didn’t get it. Neither did most of the audience, given the very vocal complaints that rang out. But the pointer operators seemed

to feel they were on to some higher level of humour which we the groundlings just couldn’t appreciate, so they persisted.

It may sound strange to complain about being distracted during fliks like Return of the Ape man and Dr. Coke Eneyday, but it really got on a lot of people’s nerves. Since I’d hate to see any kind of audience participation banned at B-Fest (even those that annoy me), consider this a plea to reason – friends don’t let friends bring laser pointers to the Fest.

To end things on a happy note, here are some pointers for any prospective first-time Festers next time round :

Bring caffeine and bottled water in roughly equal proportions. You’ll want both at different times.

Pillows are your friends

If you’re considering toting a laser pointer with you, ask a friend to smack you in the head, and reconsider

Antacids are your friends, even more so than pillows

The first row is the only way to go – plenty of room to spread out your gear

Stud B-Fest is the only way to go

Uncooked chocolate frosted Pop Tarts are your friends

Clean up after yourself ! This is just common courtesy, you know.

I said it once, but it bears repeating – antacids are your friends

Beware roving reporters with tape recorders ...

To the gang I went with, thanks for a great time. Hope to see you all there next year.

Ken

It’s Wednesday, January 27^th, 1999. Or, as it’s known around the globe: B-Fest, Day -2. I’m off work, having taken today through next Tuesday off to both prepare and recover. I’ve just returned from snack shopping for our group of attendees. Now, rather than deal with all the stuff I’ve bought, I thought I’d start this year’s Diary.

I don’t know how many of these I’ve attended over the years. At least a dozen. Yet, I still look forward to each new B-Fest. Indeed, I honestly believe that the one before us may prove to be the most enjoyable ever, at least for yours truly.

To be totally candid, there is one way in which B-Fest is now at a disadvantage compared with the glory days of yesteryear. That is in the selection of films available. Unfortunately, the video revolution has largely decimated the repertory film market. Back when I was in high school, in the late ’70s and early ‘80s, Chicago still sported two revival theaters. These were the Parkway, downtown, and the Varsity, located in Evanston (not far from Northwestern, in fact). These venues offered new double bills of older movies every day of the week. Between them, you had almost thirty different flicks a week to choose from.

Unfortunately, even in Chicago, there was a fairly limited audience of those who preferred to see older movies where they belonged, on a big screen. Then video arrived, offering a much inferior film experience but one available to be conveniently enjoyed in the home. The repertory film audience dried up even further. Today, only New York (that I know of) has a thriving repertory cinema culture. Even Chicago’s Music Box theater, the beautiful descendant of the Parkway and Varsity, now largely plays new foreign and art films.

As revival theaters across the country died away, the companies that supplied them with films were also weakened. It costs thousands of dollars to strike a new print of a film, and more to negotiate rights to distribute that print. With the repertory market at such a low (mostly consisting now of college film programs), it took far longer for the investment of a new print to cross over into the black. This meant, in the long run, that less popular films were generally rented out until the prints were frayed and generally unwatchable. Then, when the quality of the print became untenable, it was simply removed from the market, rather than replaced.

Therefore, folks like the inestimable Matt Bradford and Christy Gilmore of Northwestern’s A&O Film Board, the current organizers of B-Fest, have a job that becomes more difficult each year. The first sign of doom was perhaps six or seven years ago. That was when we attendees learned that The Creeping Terror, a film second in B-Fest popularity only slightly to Plan Nine from Outer Space itself, was no longer available for rental. And so it goes, with fewer and fewer films available every year.

This puts organizers like Ms. Gilmore and Mr. Bradford in a tough spot. As weird as it sounds, once you’ve started attending B-Fests regularly, they cease to seem a year apart and begin to run together. Variety is crucial. Yet, because of the above factors, you end up having to run more and more of the same films from year to year, or every two years.

A perfect formula for the, say, sixteen film line-up would be (in my opinion), say, perhaps two perennials, three or four favorites that get rotated in once every two or three years, five or six others that pop up every four to six years, and four or five ‘new’ movies. Obviously, such a formula is increasingly difficult to achieve, no matter how passionate Matt and Christy are about creating a great line-up. (Actually, I underestimated them: More on that later - Future Ken, Five Days Later.) They are simply handicapped by the time in which they live. Who knows what glories they might have come up with even ten years ago? In this one way, and one way only, it is possible to have a better mini-B-Fest at one’s house, with all the thousands and thousands of rental tapes available to craft a near perfect schedule of movies.

This, obviously, should not be read as in any way a criticism of the A&O folks or the programs they put together. Indeed, I mean it as a compliment. Despite a handicap that’s far more severe than the one faced by their forbears, they soldier on. However, it seems only logical to assume that they would like to have two or three times the film titles to choose from when putting the schedule together.

Still and all, though, by dint of a massive amount of hard work and an obvious love for B-Movies, they put together an impressive line-up that more than satisfies their audience. They’re also willing to push the envelope. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t (Let My Puppet Come!!). Indeed, if it wasn’t for Matt, Christy and the others, there would be no B-Fest at all. And the world would be a sadder, lonelier place.

I know that that all sounds pretty grim, but it’s really not that bad. I just wanted to get the one thing that’s less than perfect about B-Fest (other than the McCormick Auditorium’s less than fabulous sound system, the only flaw in an otherwise peerless venue) out of the way.

So, why I am especially looking forward to this year’s event? Because B-Fest is ultimately about the people. Over the years, I’ve done everything from attend solo (not as fun) to badger maybe five other people into coming with. This year, I’m somewhere in the area of 15 (!) people who are more or less in our group:

• Me, a name I call myself.
• Paul Smith, co-founder and architect of Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension and its predecessor.
• Jeff Witham, an old friend and yearly attendee, who comes in from Arizona (!) every year.
• Douglas Milroy, esteemed contributor to Jabootu’s realm, coming in from California (!), a first timer.
• Sue, fan, coming in from Minnesota (!), a first timer.
• Mark, the fan known as Apostic, coming in from California (!), a first timer.
• Andrew Muchoney (supposedly, see last year’s diary), Old Chum and fellow Bad Movie Aficionado.
• John Dudlak, a former co-worker of mine and a fine fellow, now an attendee of Northwestern.
• Andrea, same status as John. (First Timer.)
• Lori S., a co-worker and cute as a button, and her friend Tom. (First Timers.)
• Karen Wallace, a former co-worker, and her lessor half, Mark (First Timers.)
• And last, but in no way least, Al and Rob, founders of the great Bad Movie site, Oh the Humanity.

Rob and Al last year (see my 1998 Diary as well as theirs, posted on their site) came for half the show and swore to return for the whole schmear. I became panicked when they fell out of communication last fall, fearing the absence of their enjoyable presence (and that they were dead). Then, like in a cheesy movie, just a week before B-Fest they e-mailed me and told me to stop harassing them with panicked e-mails. Oh, and that they were coming to B-Fest.

The one black cloud? A major one. Our other Jabootu associate, Jason MacIsaac, the first person to write articles for the site besides myself, had to cancel due to work problems. He’ll be missed.

Of the non-locals, Jeff will fly in with his wife on Thursday (amazingly, she’s opted not to attend B-Fest). He’ll come over to my place Friday morning. Douglas is due to arrive at O’Hare Airport, about twenty five minutes from my trailer, on Friday afternoon, circa 1:00. I’ll pick him up, bringing along a coat, hat and gloves for the poor guy. (California!)

Sue is arriving, meanwhile, at Midway Airport around 1:30. For logistical purposes, she’ll take the Orange Line El train from the airport to Chicago’s Lake/Clark station, where she’ll transfer to the Blue Line. This will take her to the local Rosemont Kiss ‘n’ Ride station (hey, I didn’t name it). She’ll call and we’ll (Jeff, Douglas and I) pick her up. That should be, hopefully, somewhere around 3:00. We’ll then head out and I’ll treat everyone to authentic Chicago deep dish pizza, after which we’ll continue on. If all goes well, we’ll arrive at Norris University Center at around 5:00, an hour before the show starts.

After B-Fest (a bleak thought), I’ll take Douglas back to O’Hare for his Sunday return flight. He’ll stay at my place, along with Jeff, for the Post-B-Fest Coma. Susan, who will be leaving Monday from O’Hare for a trip to South Africa, has a room at a local Motel 6 for Saturday and Sunday. I’ll take her to O’Hare on Monday. Jeff and the Mrs. have their own plans.

As of this point, I don’t know if Paul can get off work early. (I’d think not.) If so, it’d be great. He could take one person with him, and the second car would be fabulous for carrying some of the gear.

Anyway, you can see why I’m excited. Keep an eye out, for I’d like to get everyone above to write their own B-Fest Diary piece for us (except Ral and Ob, who have their own site, those bastards.)

Anyway, as most, if not all, of these folks are attending because of my invitation, I always think the least I can do is get snacks. Of course, I always get too much, but B-Fest is that kind of event. This year, I bought the following:

Thursday: B-Fest, Day - 1:

I dropped by Paul’s house last night (Wednesday). He was working late, as he does pretty much every night. So I took his wife Holly, an old high school pal, out to dinner. Holly loathes B-Fest (I know, I know…obviously some obscure mental condition), but her brother Dave is coming into town this weekend. He might decide to swing by B-Fest for a while, in which case Holly might also deign to appear. The body count heightens.

And how: Paul (when he got home at 9:30 - this should help to explain why we’re a little slow sometimes getting things posted) gave me a copy of an e-mail that came in from a Julie Quandt (I think that’s right). She indicated that we’d met, and she and her husband and a friend, Mark Petri, were going to come also, having learned of the event from our website.

I didn’t, in fact, know who she was (I’m the worst person in the universe for remembering names and people, a cause of much embarrassment over the years). Then Holly explained that she was Julie Quandt née Sheets, the younger sister of one of the group of people I hung out with in high school. In point of fact, her older sister, Lisa, now in Seattle, is one person I would kill to get to B-Fest. She’d be hilarious. Anyway, Julie had some general questions which I e-mailed answers to. Then she decided to go anyway.

Paul spent a good hour and a half restarting the message board on our site. Apparently, it crashed because we had too many messages on it. We’ll have to be more diligent in cleaning out the old stuff. So we lost almost all the messages (probably because of Joel Mathis), but now have a shiny new slate. Then Paul started laboring on work stuff. Even though I had today off, I abandoned him at 12:30 a.m., when he was still going strong. This should help to explain why we’re a little slow sometimes getting things posted.

Before I left, I asked Paul (who, obviously, is probably not going to get off of work early) to do me a favor. While I can fit Jeff, Sue and Douglas into my little Ford Escort wagon, I would not possibly be able to take all the gear. So I requested that he stop at my place on the way to B-Fest and pick up a pile of the above listed supplies (probably the bedding stuff) and haul them to Northwestern with him. If he does manage to get out early, and we can both drive down together, all the better.

I got home and a message was on my machine. It was from Karen Wallace. I’ve somehow succeeded in talking her and her husband Mark into attending, at least for a while. I’m going to try to bully them into staying for at least four movies (the minimum amount required to get even the merest taste of the B-Fest experience).

This is amazing. I think, once, I maybe got six people to go to B-Fest. Now, we’re talking almost twenty, and maybe even a couple more (if hanger-ons materialize). At an event like B-Fest, where the average attendance seems to range in the two to three hundred area, that’s a significant number of people.

Also on Thursday, after some last minute running around (including getting my traditional B-Fest haircut), I arrived home to learn that Jeff and his wife Randy had arrived in town. They left me their beeper, but due to a Luddite quirk, I keep one of those clunky black rotary phones. Jeff eventually called in, and we arranged to meet the next morning.

FRIDAY: B-Fest!!

This is being written Post-B-Fest: Monday afternoon, to be precise, after I’ve finally caught up on lost sleep. This is the first chance I’ve had to write since Thursday night, as you might have guessed. Now, having finally caught up with my sleep, and with all our guests either at home or continuing on to other locations, it’s time to resume work on this record.

Jeff and Randy and their friend Robin came over Friday morning. We went to breakfast at the Carriage Inn, a local spot. Then we went across the street to a gaming shop, a hobby Jeff indulges in. We then returned to my trailer, and the women went off on their own.

Jeff and I took off for O’Hare about ten minutes before Douglas’ plane was due. I’m usually a worrier, and would have normally left earlier. However, we figured that that would be about right. By the time Douglas collected his gear, we would be right on time.

However, this area is notorious for the many train lines that intersect all the main streets. And indeed, not only did we get stopped by a train, but in the only time I could remember (Murphy’s Law), the train was literally stopped upon the tracks, with no sign that it was about to resume traveling. So we turned around and tried to go around the train.

However, it was cutting across the next three streets down. Even having gone miles out of our way, we never got around it. The most we achieved was ending up closer to its end. Luckily, in the ten or more minutes since we had first spotted the train, it had finally restarted moving. As we were near the end, we still probably saved at least five or ten minutes over had we stayed where we first found the train. Still, we must have lost a total of around twenty minutes.

Finally, we got to the Airport, and found Douglas pretty quickly. Also luckily, we were experiencing a minor heat wave, with temperatures up in the ‘40s. I’m not sure that Douglas, who lives in California, thought it was so warm, but it could have been much, much worse. We exchanged introductions, Douglas kindly gave me a gift (a tape upon which he had copied both cuts of Exorcist II), and we headed back to my trailer. We grabbed ice on the way for the coolers, and then went home to finish packing.

Sue called in a tad late (about 45 minutes), but hardly catastrophically so. Paul had called too, indicating that he had left work, but was still a while away (he travels an hour or more to get to work every day). My original plan was to take Jeff and Douglas with me, get Sue when she called from the Rosemont Kiss ‘n Ride, and then head straight down to Evanston, maybe getting some pizza on the way.

However, when she called, circa 4:00, Paul hadn’t arrived yet. Feeling we should give Paul a chance to catch up with us, I left Jeff and Douglas behind to wait for him. I would pick up Sue and come back home, where hopefully Paul would have arrived. Then we could also leave Sue’s luggage at my place instead of in the car.

I got Sue, and was freaking out a little about the time (as I said, I’m a worrier, mostly because I’m a poor planner, so I like a lot of leeway). To my disappointment, Paul had failed to arrive when Sue and I got back to my trailer. Still, I thought it imperative that we leave (it was maybe ten to five, a little more than an hour before B-Fest started. Getting there too late to grab all the necessary seats would have been disastrous).

Paul, in any case, was due to come by my place to grab all the gear (mostly bedding stuff) that I didn’t have room to haul. This is where I was dastardly enough to take advantage of a friend. I asked Jeff to stay behind, so that Paul would have someone to travel with, and to give him a hand with the gear. Being a kindly, good natured fellow, Jeff agreed rather than head-butting me.

Sue, Douglas and I headed out. Traffic was pretty good, and due to some ‘getting to know each other’ conversation, the trip went by quickly. We arrived at Norris a good twenty minutes before the show started. Luckily, a chain cutting off the path up to the door (which is reached by a semi-circle path that rises at a fairly steep angle) was down. This allowed us to drive up to the door and dump the coolers and stuff off, rather than hiking back and forth for half a block from where I parked the car.

However, when I reached the top of the path, another car was there, facing us. There was no room to go around, so I started back down backwards. Unfortunately, visibility was poor, as it was dark and my windows had fogged up. I ended up hitting some snow to the side of the path, and almost running down some students. One of these, coincidentally, proved to be John Dudlak, scholar and gentleman. We said hey, then I continued down the path. We made it and found the opposite entrance to the path, and finally was able to dispose of our gear. Douglas and Sue watched over it while I went to park the car.

I did so (and got a good spot, too) and returned. We started moving the stuff into the lobby. Inside, a number of people were waiting, including Rob and Al. We procured tickets and Douglas and I got T-shirts and we waited for them to open the doors. John (who’s a great guy) asked if we needed any help with the gear, and I told him he could help more by running down and grabbing us a bunch of first and second row seats. Which he did (thanks again, dude).

In the lobby, a very strange thing happened as I waited by the gear. A fellow came up (dammit, I can picture him, but his name [as usual] eludes me) and asked if I was Ken Begg. I said yes, and he responded that he was a "big fan." Having never had a stranger come up and say anything like that, I was somewhat weirded out (I certainly don’t think of myself as someone who has ‘fans’).

He was very kind, and it was, of course, immensely flattering. Still, it was also my first, miniscule taste of something celebrities talk about: How people will approach you who, in some way, have knowledge of you that you’d don’t share in return. After all, I had at least conversed with Douglas, Sue and Mark Hurst via the computer before I met them. This, however, was the first time I had someone I’d had zero one-on-one contact with come up and ‘know’ me. (And it will likely remain the only time. Except for next year, when, likely, the hot female groupies will start showing up.)

The doors finally opened. Sue went to help grab seats, while Douglas and I alternated carrying stuff down and standing guard in the lobby (I think this is when my fan came up.) I ended up with the biggest one at the end. Before my heart exploded in my obese torso (I’m really in quite the most pathetic shape), I managed to flag John, who came and gave me a hand. Downstairs, we lined up in our seats: Douglas, Sue, me, two saved seats for Jeff and Paul, and John and his party. Meanwhile, Mark Hurst (a.k.a. Apostic) came up and introduced himself. He sat behind Douglas, down from Rob and Al.

I didn’t really keep track of when the others arrived. Andrew indeed showed up, sitting next to Mark. Lori and Tom came, sitting back in the third row. Julie and Tim appeared, sitting in the fourth row. I must admit, looking back at it, that I should have made an effort to move around and hang out with the others more, especially as I invited them all. I apologize to everyone for my rudeness and hope they’ll forgive me. I’ll do better next year.

Paul and Jeff showed up in the middle of the first show. However, Andrea didn’t show, and neither did Karen and her husband Mark. Which, considering the amount of people we already had, probably wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened (in other words, three less people I’d have mostly ignored).

Matt Bradford came out to give his opening spiel, and to take a well deserved moment in the sun. He also brought down Christy Gilmore for a well deserved hand. (Hey, Christy, no ‘Adam Sandler’ jokes!) And let me give them the credit they deserve. After all I wrote earlier about how hard it was to find new (for B-Fest) movies, the great majority were flicks I’d either never seen at B-Fest or haven’t seen there in a long time. As well, it was a simply great line-up. Kudos! I’ll never doubt them again.

In fact, let me record, for posterity, all the folks who helped bring B-Fest alive this year: Matt Bradford, Christy Gilmore, Eric Miller, Justin Valdez, Mike Lietz, James Cormack, Sarosh Syed, Winnie Hui, Ajay Easo, Dana Schwartz, Lauren Burke, Mark Arszman, Mike Glenn, Sophia Hinshelwood and Mitch Wu. People, I’m all in your debt.

A final word: This year, I kept track of the line-up better, but didn’t strain to remember or record audience jokes, bits or stuff. Instead, I merely enjoyed the show and the company. As I hoped, I think this was the best B-Fest I’ve ever attended. And so we begin:

6:00 Fiend Without a Face. This was a great choice. FWaF is one of my favorite B-Movies. It’s not a Bad Movie, but rather an atmospheric cheapie with a simply knock-out ending. Up in Canada, people are mysteriously dying, all in proximity to an American Air Force base doing radar experiments. The Base starts taking the blame for these events from the increasingly hostile locals. Instead, a scientist performing telepathy experiments has created living thoughts. These invisible beasties, living on power from the base’s reactor, are literally sucking the brains out of their victims. We see them invisibly pushing things around, and their attacks are accompanied by terrifically gross sound effects. Ultimately, the cast ends up besieged in the Professor’s house. Having absorbed a huge amount of energy, the monsters turn visible. They prove to be absolutely marvelous stop-animated brains, propelled along by their spinal cords. Being brains, they are also surprisingly smart. They invade the house, leaping around and getting shot down while killing both unnecessary characters and their creator (wow, there’s a shocker). Unlike most ‘50s monsters, the fiends prove incredibly vulnerable to gunfire, spouting goopy gore and gross sputtering sound effects when shot. However, they’re quite a lot of them, and the reactor must be blown up to kill them (please ignore science here). The one running gag that came from the film involved the American hero, Major Cummings (wasn’t that the name of a porn star in the ‘70s?) walking in on the busty heroine right as she was coming out from the shower (wearing a towel, of course). A very strong start.

7:25 Short: Candy for your Health. An old time silent short showing how the ‘healthy’ (as we are informed by title cards) candy bar ‘Love Nest’ (5¢) is made. We are told how great these are for you, recommended by doctors and sech, while we watch tons of sugar and chocolate being added to the mix. As Paul noted, their product name came dangerously close to my old idea for the Orgasm candy bar. (I long ago had a commercial written out for this, around the theme that "Nothing satisfies like an Orgasm." This revolved around two people caught in a traffic jam. The cranky passenger complains about the situation, leading the driver to explain that when he’s in a frustrating situation, "I find that nothing relaxes me like an Orgasm!" The passenger reacts with shock, until told that he means an Orgasm candy bar. I also thought the "Multiple Orgasm" fun size pack would be a hit.)

7:30 Short: Species II Preview. The theater’s new 35 millimeter projector makes its first B-Fest appearance, with the preview of last year’s monster flick.

7:32 Earth vs. the Giant Spider. This Bert I. Gordon (B.I.G.) flick is a ‘50s favorite. Teenaged sweethearts, searching for the girl’s father (who we saw get whacked), enter a cave and find the title menace. A tanker truck of DDT later appears to off the beastie. However, it’s moved to the auditorium of the local high school (!) and a practicing rock ‘n’ roll band revives it. After killing the janitor, played by Mr. Ziffel from the Green Acres TV show (apparently John Carradine, for once, wasn’t available), it goes on a rampage. After numerous other deaths, it hightails it back to the cave. After the locals seal it in, they learn that our young lovers are trapped with it. An electrical arc finishes the big bug off in the (*snicker*) ‘shocking’ conclusion. Amusing bits: The local movie house, where our hero works, just happens to be showing a double bill of, yes, Bert I. Gordon flicks, The Amazing Colossal Man and Attack of the Puppet People. There’s also the obligatory thirty year old high school students. And I liked that fact that the teens’ ‘hot rods’ seem to have borrowed from Archie and Jughead.

8:45 The Fearless Vampire Killers. This was, by general consensus, probably the least successful selection at this year’s show (out of, mind you, fourteen films). The work of director Roman Polanski (who apparently realized that no one else could play the lead, and so cast himself), who stars as the bumbling assistant of a rather unsuccessful elderly vampire hunter. It’s supposed to be a comedy, but other than a Jewish vampire nonchalantly waving off a cross, it’s not particularly funny. Certainly, it’s no Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. The movie also features a gay vampire (har har) and an appearance by future Polanski wife and Charles Manson victim Sharon Tate, who shares her talents (both of them) with the audience. Although not a favorite choice, it was strategically placed early in the show: A later timeslot, after everyone had started to get crabby, might have been fatal, turning a two star selection into a mind-numbing zero star affair. A noble try, but no cigar.

10:15 Return of the Ape Man. I probably liked this more than most. A Bela Lugosi skid-row cheapie, it also stars the extraordinarily emaciated John Carradine, looking like Calistra Flockhart after a diet. Minor Horror icon George Zucco supposedly pops up as the Ape Man, but I never recognized him: the part was instead played by a stunt man. We open with Bela and Carradine bringing a bum back from suspended animation via a secret injection. (Most of the film’s events are heralded in the local newspaper; here we learn "Notorious Tramp Whistling Willie Still Missing", or something to that effect. This became a bit of a running gag. Still, it’s nice to see a town where missing bums warrant headlines. Must have been a slow news day.) Bela then takes advantage of some stock footage to head North. There, according to another headline, Cave Men are popping up in the melting ice in bunches. Bela indeed eventually gets one. (Watch the scene where the two ‘Eskimos’ dig in the ‘ice’, and are very, very careful not to sink their pickaxes into the stage floor hiding under the thin layer of ‘snow’.) He brings it home, whereupon his magic elixir brings it back to life. Using a convenient whip, he forces the guy into his equally convenient built-in jail cell. When Carradine objects to Bela’s plan to implant a modern man’s brain into the Ape Man’s skull, Bela eventually uses him as his subject. Ultimately, the beast destroys Bela (wow, there’s a shocker) only to die in a lab fire. The Cave Man proves immune to bullets (in one of the year’s funnier quips, provided, I think, by either Rob or Al, it was posited that the Ape Man’s invulnerability was the result of "guns not having been invented when he was living."). However, he fears (of course) fire, leading to the film’s funniest scene. After he escapes from the Lab, we see Bela, wearing a tuxedo and wandering the nighttime streets with a lit blowtorch (!), which he eventually uses to herd the Ape Man home. A fun cheapie, running only an hour (the perfect B-Fest running time).

11:15 Short: What is Communism? I explained why I didn’t like this short last year, so I won’t go into it again. And even if I, and a few of my reactionary associates, find it annoying, it’s become a great audience favorite. Which annoys me all the more, but they don’t program B-Fest for me alone, and I can live with an annoying short. It’s not like they showed You Are What You Eat or the, uh, Marionette Tragedy again. This became this year’s most popular running gag, and who am I to argue with success? Look for this to become a regular B-Fest element.

11:30 Short: Mad-Made Monster. It took me a second to figure it out, but this was a sort of Reader’s Digest compilation of the old Lon Chaney/Lionel Atwill flick. Chaney gets zapped with electricity by Atwill, terrorizes the neighborhood, kills Atwill (wow, there’s a shocker) and gets caught on barb wire, fatally leaking out his power. All in five minutes.

11:40 Break

12:15 Short: The Wizard of Speed and Time. The mascot of B-Fest appears. The newcomers among us were amazed at the sight of hordes of B-Fest vets running up on stage to herald our speedy hero, a guy who runs really, really fast and sings a neat-o little song amongst stop-animated film equipment. Live long and prosper, Wizard!

12:20 Plan 9 from Outer Space. The heart and soul of B-Fest. Bela, Tor, Vampira and the Chiropractor all make their annual visit to our venue. Unless you’ve seen this film at B-Fest, you haven’t seen it. I must make a confession, however: I nodded on and off during the film. Sorry, but I’ve seen this flick a thousand times before. And I was getting pooped. After this, though, I somewhat recharged.

1:40 Short: The Wizard of Speed and Time. The second, and oddly, last appearance of the Wizard. See you next year, dude.

1:45 Zardoz. If Fearless Vampire Killers was the envelope pusher that failed to work, Zardoz was the smashing success. Everyone (except Sue, apparently) seemed quite thrilled with this choice, particularly those in our little group. Filmed by the appropriately homonym-named John Boorman, this is a ‘70s sci-fi ‘mind-blower’/talkfest. Zardoz, to the delight of ‘trip’ fans everywhere, proves to be a giant floating granite head. It functions as a ‘god,’ dispensing firearms and ordering post-apocalyptic barbarian Sean Connery and his tribe to slay, rape and pillage peaceful folks in his name, while gathering grain for Zardoz’s use. A curious Connery, however, sneaks aboard the head. It takes him through the Vortex, into a land where he finds a bunch of granola eating telepathic immortals (who live off the foodstuffs harvested by ‘Zardoz’). ‘70s suckfest perennial Charlotte "Orca" Rampling is on hand to recommend his immediate death. She’s voted down, however. It eventually turns out that the immortals have become so thoroughly jaded that subliminally they’re hoping for Connery to provide them with a lasting death. Until then it’s yak, yak, yak, with a heavy sprinkling of pretentious ‘aren’t we fearlessly artistic?’ nudity to spice things up. For all it’s ponderous airs, Zardoz is quite a bit more like the utterly witless Logan’s Run than I’m sure it would like to admit. As critic Steven Scheuer (Movies on TV and Videocassette) astutely noted, "The film examines ideas as if they were to be looked at but not touched." Douglas, meanwhile, was amused by Boorman’s expressed pride over this goofy, pretentious fiasco, which he learned of while researching another Boorman turkey, Exorcist II. Anyway, Bravo! This was a four-star smash of a choice.

3:30 Short: Blue Hawaii Cartoon. One of those ‘sing-along’ cartoons, from maybe the ’40s or ‘50s, featuring the arrhythmic tune "Blue Hawaii." Follow the bouncing ball and try to figure out the constantly changing tempo, which had the audience constantly guessing at what speed they were supposed to be singing the lyrics. The inability to do so led to much amusement. Another item that inspired some gags throughout the rest of the show.

3:35 Short: Slaves in Bondage Preview: The theatrical trailer for the ‘30s era ‘social menace’ potboiler, about innocent (of course) girls who are kidnapped and forced into a life of prostitution. Composed largely of ‘risqué’ shots of girls lounging in their undies (Hubba hubba!) and the inevitable catfight. Don’t let this happen to you! You’ve been warned!!

3:40 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. The early laughs at this Russ Meyer epic were mainly devoted to the fact that film critic Roger Ebert wrote the hideous screenplay for this ‘parody’ of soap opera mellers like, obviously, The Valley of the Dolls. While supposedly a comedy, the film shocked some still with the rather gross violence of the climax (with which we actually begin the film). This includes a dozing woman who has a pistol barrel inserted into her mouth. She begins to, uh, Lewinsky it in her sleep. Upon waking up and realizing what’s going on, the gun is fired, leading to a charming shot of a stream of blood gushing out of her nostrils. After we watch some of the massacre, we flashback to the story of a young chick and her rock ‘n’ roll band. They start making it up the charts, but basic soap opera-y travails keep them from enjoying their success. These include a smattering of drugs but mostly sex, sex, sex. This appeared some years ago at B-Fest, and I didn’t get much out of it then. Given the time at which it appeared this year, and that I hadn’t really slept yet, I almost decided to nap. However, one major problem with the film the first time it was shown was that the print is 35 mm, for which they didn’t have a projector. This led to the entire movie being shown in a visually squeezed and hard to follow fashion. However, the auditorium’s new projector allowed for a quite nice presentation, so I decided to stay up. The biggest laugh came when ‘with-it’ show business super-agent ‘Z-Man’ looked out at a trippy party he was throwing and declared "This is my happening, baby, and it freaks me out!" This line, of course, was borrowed by Mike Myers for Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. I always thought the line was funny anyway; knowing where it comes from makes it all the more comical. The big audience reaction indicated that I wasn’t the only one who recognized the line. Anyway, I largely enjoyed the flick, although it’s not one I’d particularly like to see become a regular feature at B-Fest. My feeling: Been there, done that.

5:30 Reefer Madness. The granddaddy of all Social Menace films makes an appearance. Seen it, and I was exhausted, so I took the opportunity to grab some Zs. Hoping to keep from being killed for my grotesque snoring, I took my sleeping bag and hid behind a convenient curtain up on the stage. Hopefully, this spared my fellows from some of the noise.

6:30 Break. Turned down the opportunity to go downstairs and grab a hot breakfast, and instead continued napping.

7:00 Short: Mime Sex Short (Not the real title, obviously). Still in a daze, I peeked around the corner of the curtain and, from an angle, saw a distorted view of a short that apparently featured a mime (ugh!) who ‘wittily’ acted out being both the male and female participants of a sex act. I couldn’t see it very well, but was under the impression that I wasn’t missing anything. This I later confirmed with others who had a better look at it.

7:10 Terror from the Year 5000. A cheap ‘60s sci-fi deal I haven’t seen since I was a kid. I debated getting up, but ultimately decided it was better to grab a little more shuteye. So I lay back and grabbed another forty winks.

8:10 The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent. This was worth getting up for. Suspiciously hot Viking Women (who wear plenty of ‘ancient’ makeup and sport nicely cultivated hairdos), longing for their men who disappeared three years ago, set out in a boat to find them. They are surreptitiously joined by a guy who has a masculinity issue because he’s kind of runty. Ultimately, their boat is sunk by the title Sock Puppet, er, Sea Serpent (shades of Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster). They land upon an island ruled by an evil tribe, who has enslaved their men, the victims of a similar incident. Their plans to escape are impeded by a conniving member of their own group, who is, of course, the only brunette among their otherwise uniformly blond (and therefore virtuous) number. When she realizes she will never have the man she loves, she repents and gives her life that the others may escape. The evil guys are ultimately destroyed by their own Sea Serpent (wow, what a shocker). Soon after, our heroes rather unbelievably manage to slay it with one of those little swords you use to hold sandwiches together. The rather effeminate son of the evil ruler (imagine ‘Pee Wee Herman: Barbarian Prince’) provided much fodder for the wags in the audience.

9:30 Robot Monster. As usual, by Saturday morning we start gearing up with the really good stuff. This Bad Movie classic might well be second to only Plan 9. It features the adventures of a robot who looks suspiciously like a guy in a shaggy gorilla suit wearing a nylon stocking on his face under a deep sea diving helmet. This is Ro-Man, sent to destroy all of humanity so as to clear the way for his kind to assume ownership of the Earth. However, six people, composed of a family and a hunky young man, have created an antidote for Ro-Man’s ‘calcinator ray.’ Therefore, he’ll have to kill them by hand. Luckily for him, these people, the only survivors in the world, just happen to be living about a quarter of a mile from the cave wherein Ro-Man dwells. At the mouth of this cave, on a rickety table, sits the Billion Bubble Machine, sort of a home Lawrence Welk kit. Tossing bubbles all about, this must have provided much amazement to audiences who saw the film in its original 3-D. All goes well (for the invaders) until Ro-Man inexplicably (but inevitably) gets the hots for older daughter Alice. (The film makes no illusions about his interest in her; he’s one lusty mechinoid). This causes Ro-man’s leader, the Great One, to become annoyed at his failure to off her. Ro-man ponders his actions: "I must…yet, I cannot. Where do these meet on the graph?" After a further bout of philosophizing ("To live like Hu-man…to be like Hu-man. Why are these not in the plan?"), the Great One unleashes stock footage of dinosaurs (of the ‘baby alligator and iguana with glued on fin’ variety, taken, I believe, from last year’s feature, One Million B.C.) to destroy the recalcitrant robot. In the end, it all proves to be a dream…or does it?!! One nice continuity error: Roy, the hero, at one point sports wax ‘blood’ dripping from his ear. The only problem is that this is supposed to be the result of a beating he takes from Ro-man, which doesn’t occur until ten or fifteen minutes later in the film! Much audience empathy was expressed for George Barrows, the fellow lumbering around in the hot sun while wearing that heavy looking ape suit.

10:30 The Tingler. This year’s William Castle entry (when are they going to get House on Haunted Hill?). It’s the schlock director’s tale of a doctor (Vincent Price, yeah!) who discovers that fear feeds a parasite in the body, which he dubs the Tingler. The Tingler constricts the spine during times of intense terror, and will cause death unless paralyzed by a scream. (As you can see, this is all rigorously scientific.) An associate, who runs a small revival theater, proves to have a mute wife who has a wide suspiciously wide array of intense phobias (this is, after all, a William Castle movie). Learning of Price’s theory, he murders her by scaring her to death with cornball hijinks like posting her ‘death certificate’ on the wall. Since she can’t scream, she falls prey to the Tingler. Price harvests this buggie (looking rather like a foot and a half long earwig), which eventually escapes into the revival theater. This sets up the zany gimmick of the screen going black, while Price’s voice exhorts us that "The Tingler is loose in the theater! Scream, scream for your lives!" Needless to say, we all proceeded to do so. Castle, known for his gimmicks, created the "Percepto" process for this flick. This (I swear!) wired selected theater seats to vibrate (or ‘tingle’) during this exact scene, to help get folks to yelling. The A&O people, unfortunately, couldn’t provide us with this (needless to say), just as a couple of years ago when they couldn’t provide us with the non-existent second ending to Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus. In that film, the gimmick was that the audience was allowed to ‘choose’ from two endings, to be voted upon just before the climax. In one, the villain gets his, in the other, mercy is shown him. Castle, however, figured that no audience would ever vote for the kinder solution, and actually only filmed the just desserts ending. Knowing this, I goaded that year’s audience to grant Sardonicus mercy, just to embarrass our hosts, who were playing out the whole ‘vote’ thing. I’m sure this scored me big points with the A&O people. The Tingler was a superior choice, although I sleepily nodded through parts of it. Still, though, House on Haunted Hill. Please!

12:00 Break. I, to my amazement, saw that Lori was still there, although she was finally leaving at this point (her friend had left earlier to go to work). I apologized for not ‘hanging’ with her, and I apologize here again. Then I went downstairs, and for the first time since breakfast the previous day, had some hot food. Mmm, a double cheeseburger and fries! It saved my life. Jeff went down with me, and we joined Rob and Al at their table. I asked them if they meant to restart work on Oh, the Humanity, and they said they wanted to, but it was a time issue (gee, we don’t know anything about that problem). Mark then joined us, and luckily I took the opportunity to ask him if he had a place to stay. He had the phone number of a friend, but hadn’t been able to reach him. Obviously, I invited him to stay at my place, although all I could over him was my recliner (Super Host, huh?). We yakked a bit, but then it was time to head back upstairs.

12:30 Short: Dr. Coke Everyday (or something). I’m not sure about the title of this, having missed some of it. It was a silent short about something like a guy trying to smash a Chinatown cocaine ring. It was from 1916 (!). I couldn’t make much sense of it, but neither could anyone else I guess.

1:00 The Creeping Flesh. A later Hammer flick starring the inestimable horror duo of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. This means that the only major Horror Stars we didn’t see this year were Lon Chaney, Sr. and Boris Karloff. In Victorian England, an elderly Cushing returns home from a long expedition. He brings along a giant skeleton, which sports a skull that looks rather like James Carville’s. This begins to make sense when we learn that it’s the remains of a being of Pure Evil. Cushing has various domestic problems, too. His daughter is fretting because the household is going broke. Cushing’s brother, the head of a sanitarium (Lee), meanwhile, means to hijack a much needed science grant from him. Cushing also remains fixated on his newly dead wife, who went incurably mad and spent the last three decades of her life in Lee’s none-too-gentle care. When Cushing learns that water causes the skeleton to regenerate flesh (luckily, this is contained to a single digit), he posits that its blood can be used to formulate a sort of Evil Anti-Toxin, freeing mankind from its less noble impulses. (He might have wanted to confer with Dr. Jekyll on this.) When his daughter starts acting like Mom, he gives her a shot, only to learn that it instead speeds up her incipient insanity. She goes on a violent spree, meeting up with an escaped homicidal maniac from Lee’s asylum. Lee eventually steals the skeleton, unfortunately on a rainy evening, with predictable results. Cushing, in the end, learns a new meaning for the phrase ‘giving someone the finger.’ If this all sounds somewhat disjointed, well, so’s the movie. Those who are interested, however, can read a very insightful review of the film on the And You Call Yourself a Scientist! website, found on our link page.

2:30 Girls Town. Running a bit behind, Matt Bradford came out and (as happened last year) told us to pick a movie from the remaining choices. The selection was either War of the Colossal Beast (sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man) or Girl’s Town. Genetically predisposed to Monster Movies, I voted for Colossal Beast. I was outvoted. Annoyed at first, I soon had to admit that I’d been wrong. This was, after all, the only JD (Juvenile Delinquent) flick we had this year. And we already had a Bert I. Gordon flick. Wild girl Mamie (Navy vs. The Night Monsters) Van Doren ends up in Girls Town, a reform hall run by nuns, after she’s accused of pushing some dude over a cliff. Eventually, we learn that the deed was done by Doren’s goodie two shoes sister, after he tried to rape her. In the end, Sis must be saved from the dead guy’s roughneck brother, hilariously played by the young, tubby and chinless Mel Tormé (!). I suppose that the more menacing Don Knotts wasn’t available. Also on hand is a young Paul ‘You’re Having My Baby’ Anka, who apparently has lots and lots of time to spend helping out the inhabitants of Girls Town. He sings ‘Lonely Boy’ and, in a classic camp moment, reforms Mamie by warbling ‘Ave Maria’ (!). Later the willowy Anka manages to punch out Tormé. The busty Van Doren (who you got when Jayne Mansfield wasn’t available, like you got Mansfield when Marilyn Monroe wasn’t available) gives her normal non-performance, while displaying her, uh, assets. Her best outfit is a kind of overalls-type deal that she wears over a white turtleneck sweater, but with the straps noticeably on the outsides of her breasts. As if her chest needed help grabbing attention.

4:00 Destroy All Monsters. B-Fest usually ends things with a Godzilla movie. After all, they’re loud and colorful, just the kind of thing to wake up dozing audience members. And the grandest Godzilla movie of all is Destroy All Monsters, Toho Studios’ all star extravaganza. It’s the futuristic year of 1999 (that’s right, 1999), and the UN has managed to corral all the Earth’s monsters onto the Ogasawara Islands, a.k.a. Monsterland. Things go awry, however, when alien beings, the Kilaaks, come to Earth and kidnap the various monsters. The beasts soon show up around the world, attacking various major cities: Mothra in Peking, Rodan in Moscow, Gorosaurus in Paris. (Actually, the script has Baragon attacking Paris, but the Baragon suit was too messed up to film the scene. This is why Gorosaurus is seen tunneling up near the Arch de Triumph, when he’s not a tunneling monster. Baragon is. Given the original script for translation purposes, the American version of the film even identifies Gorosaurus as Baragon during the attack, annoying us nerds no end.) Meanwhile, the Big Guy, Godzilla himself, torches the UN Building in New York. Ultimately, humans manage to destroy the Kilaak’s moon base, and then scramble the radio transmissions that they’re using to control the monsters. Godzilla then leads the assembled brood on a mass attack on the Kilaak’s Earth base. This is only slightly impeded when the Kilaaks call in their trump card, the mighty Ghidrah the Three Headed Monster. This is simply a great film, probably the most enjoyable of all the Toho flicks. Paul talked to Christy (I think) and learned that this film alone (and it was a simply marvelous print, to boot!) cost $400 to get. It was worth it!! Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra (in caterpillar form), Ghidrah, Minya (a.k.a. Son of Godzilla), Spiga (the giant spider from Son of Godzilla), Manda (the serpent god from Atragon), Gorosaurus (King Kong Escapes) and Anguirus (Godzilla Raids Again) all show up, while Baragon (Frankenstein Conquers the World) and Varan the Unbelievable have cameos. Frankly, this movie alone was worth the price of admission.

5:30 Short: What is Communism? One last chance to chuckle at mass graves before B-Fest ends. (Although, admittedly, that’s a minority take on its appeal.)

And that was that. Unlike the past few years, not many of the attendees acted like pigs, and cleanup went quickly. To my chagrin, I ended up taking almost all of the food I bought back home with me. Somebody remind to look at that list of food I bought this year, most of which didn’t get eaten, prior to next year’s event. Stop me before I shop again.

Julie and Tim made plans to meet us for dinner at Gino’s East (so our guests got some Chicago Deep Dish Pizza after all). Douglas and Sue went with me, Jeff and Mark with Paul. John Dudlak, meanwhile, gave us a hand with our stuff (the guy’s a sweetheart). We made plans to set up a small-scale, video mini-B-Fest this summer. Take it easy, man.

We stopped by my house and grabbed Sue’s gear. As her motel was on the way to the restaurant, we stopped and she got set up. After a minor misadventure with her keycard, we were on our way. At Gino’s we met up with others and had ourselves some pizza (except for Douglas, who had lasagna - there’s a ‘Burger King’ in every crowd.)

Julie and Tim took off. It was only later that I was told that they had come in from out of town (I never got that ‘moving away’ thing). Guys, I am so sorry we didn’t make more room for you. If for some insane reason you choose to come again, maybe with Lisa, please be assured that we’ll do better by you.

I ascertained that Sue had something to do the next day, and made tentative plans to drive her to the airport on Monday. Then I asked Paul and Holly to drive her to the motel, as my car would be full with the guys staying over at my place. So Jeff, Douglas, Mark and I loaded into the Escort and headed home. There we had a long, gratifyingly enjoyable chat session, lasting until 2:30 in the morning (although Jeff dropped off somewhat earlier).

When I thought I’d have two guests, I’d planned to put Douglas in a side room, on the air mattress I borrowed from my Mom. (Note to self: Purchase futon and upgrade the guest accommodations.) However, Jeff, who I intended to give the fold-out couch in the living room, is almost as horrendous a snorer as I am. I therefore figured that if two guys had to sleep in the living room, he shouldn’t be one of them. So Douglas took the couch (not even folding out the bed - it’s like he’s some kind of Mountain Man). Mark took the recliner - only the finest for my guests.

Mark had to be at O’Hare for a 9:30 flight (groan), so I got up at 8:00 and we got him there at 8:30. It’s amazing how long it takes to plan these things, and how quickly they’re over with. Anyway, a quick farewell and Mark was off. Nice meeting you, man. I got back home to find that Jeff and Douglas had started my copy of Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (those jerks). We spent the rest of the movie complimenting Michelle Bauer and Linnea Quigley on their, uh, acting abilities and laughing at what is actually a surprisingly witty script. This would actually make a terrific B-Fest movie, only I’m pretty sure that it’s DTV, or direct to video. It’s really a shame.

When the movie’s over, we head over to the L&L Snackshop, a legendary local breakfast spot. Then we take Douglas, next in line, to the airport. Another too-quick good-bye and then he’s gone too. Jeff and I stop by the Yoawan Shopping Center, a little oasis of Japanese goods in the suburbs of Chicago. Jeff collects Japanese tea stuff, although he didn’t find much this time. Then we stop at Barnaby’s, a local sandwich place, to meet Jeff’s wife. After lunch, they take off, so as to catch their flight out. Alone for the first time since, Friday morning, I go home and nap.

The last thread is tied up when I wake up that night. Sue’s left a message on my machine. She’s gotten a ride set up with friends, so I’m off the hook. She tries to reach me the next morning from the airport to say good-bye, but catches me in the shower (shades of Major Cummings). Anyway, she’s now in South Africa enjoying a nice, long vacation. To my delight, however, she indicated on her message that she intends to return for next year’s show. To my utter amazement, both Mark and Douglas later do the same.

Well, that’s about it, I suppose. I just want to thank, again, Matt and Christy for a nearly perfect B-Fest, and Mark, Douglas and Sue, and all the others, for helping to make it the most personally enjoyable one yet. Here’s hoping that they can all make it back next year, where we can get to know Jason to boot. Anyway, that’s it, except for the anticipation of reading the other guys’ reports.

Hope you can all join us next year.

Lori

Little Lori’s B-Fest Diary for the Year 1999.

I have the pleasure of working with Ken, and after some years of prodding, I decided to cave in and go. I know I shouldn’t say this, especially on a site as devoted to bad movies as this is, but I do not have a strong passion about bad movies. I would rather not watch a bad movie. However, I am open-minded and I like to make fun of stuff as much as the next guy, so off I went to my First B-Fest.

I had fun. No one paid me to say that although I was reimbursed the ticket price (Ken’s idea). On the way, my boyfriend said to me: "I hope for your sake, and mine, that you are not the only girl there." I’m glad to say that I wasn’t. I don’t think it matters what gender you are, if you like something, then go. But I do think I saw some girlfriends that were probably dragged along.

Oh, I’m not going to write about the short subjects because, while, hokey, they were not as memorable to me. I remember some of them, but I’d rather not leave anything out from the movies. I’m sure some of these other diaries will be much more comprehensive than mine.

I finally found Norris Center and stumbled in with my blankets and pillows and what should be the first movie to be shown but Fiend without a Face. I had the great pleasure of viewing this just a few months ago, and I immediately felt comfortable and had high hopes for the rest of the night because this of all movies should be first. The great stop-motion brains-with-spinal-cords-and-feelers-that-burst-and-spurt-blood-when-shot-at-fiends were like old friends and I looked around with a glow of joy as people made funny comments I understood and not so funny comments which flopped. It was like I was at home. But seriously, those special effects were a-maze-ing.

The next movie was The Spider. I tell you, I really admire the filmmakers back then. To decide that a close-up of a tarantula walking amongst models of caves and a town takes courage to believe that your audience will believe you. It’s too bad that audiences nowadays need everything to look so real. Then the overacting of some of the cast, especially the main girl saying (not screaming) a canned "Ahh!" as she jumped (accidentally of course!) ONE foot into the spider’s web, provided a rash of overacting from some of the less modest moviegoers at B-Fest. Sometimes these people were about, oh, say a million times funnier than what was actually on the screen. They were well prepared too: strings of lights, slide whistles, (annoying) laser pointers, and flashlights. Those kept me at least awake most of the night.

I find that I’m not saying much about the movies. I’m sorry, I just want to the reader that if you aren’t interested in the movies you are watching then someone else is bound to be doing or saying something interesting. That’s why I may be writing a bit more about the other doings than the actual movies. Anyway, this helps boost energies. I really liked the interactivity between the film and the audience. (I like how pretentious that sounds.)

It’s a good thing the first two movies were rockin’ because Fearless Vampire Killers was not. It was in color, which was new on the eyes since the first two movies were in black and white. And there were two buxom beauties, scantily clad sometimes, which kept my attention sometimes. That’s about all the good things I can say about the movie. It was a bad, bad, lowdown movie, and not even really worthy to make fun of. The characters were bumbling idiots which wasn’t that cute if it was trying to be. The story was convoluted. And nothing happened. It wasn’t that scary, and it failed to be lighthearted. We were all quite happy when it finally got done.

Ah, next was Return of the Ape Man. This was a favorite because it created an appetite for Bela Lugosi (and we all knew what immortal film was to be shown next). This movie didn’t have much of a plot either. The only thing that happened was Bela changing jackets at least ten times (if not more) during the course of the one hour movie. This was acted out gleefully by a member of the audience. I’m not sure what else happened in the movie. You can’t really hear the dialogue very well for any of the movies because everyone in the audience is saying stuff at the screen. That’s okay because the dialogue here is so inane that it doesn’t really matter what is being said. So that’s my brief (ha!) explanation of why I don’t remember anything else about Return of the Ape Man.

We had a lucky break and some lucky girl won the first raffle prize of the night: the soundtrack to Orgy of the Dead with (I hope this is true) comments by Criswell. I wish I would have one that. My birthday is coming up (hint, hint). Just Kidding!

The movie we were all waiting for came next. The cumulation of the evening was right then: the illustrious Plan 9 From Outer Space. The audience was so psyched! A tradition is every time a spaceship appears on the screen, everyone is supposed to throw a paper plate because that’s what the spaceships in the movie are supposed to be. That was so fun! I really like John Breckenridge’s part in the movie – the leader of the ‘aliens’ who are implementing Plan 9. He is so funny, even though he is not supposed to be. Since it was 1:15ish in the morning, I dozed off for the last twenty minutes or so of the movie. It’s a great movie, and I love it dearly, but I don’t think I haven’t slept through some part of it while watching it. A paper plate banged me in the back of the head about five minutes to the end, so I was wide awake for the end credits. The audience participation for that movie gets an A+ from me.

One word: Zardoz. Five words: Sean Connery in a loincloth. That’s all that needs to be said. It seems that the tradition of this movie, at least for guys (and my findings should be well-founded since I talked to two guys about this), is that they see it when they are ten. They remember a big floating head and really weird stuff with a crazy explanation for it all. So they vaguely remember it and when they see it again it’s "Oh it’s that weird movie." Yes, it is a weird movie. I feel so sorry for Sean Connery. At least there are some scantily clad women riding bareback on horses and stuff like that. So, I’ll probably remember as much as those two guys did, except that this was my first time viewing it and I’m 21. I’m not sure if I want to see it again to vaguely remember glimpses of a floating head. Oh, I fell asleep for about the last twenty minutes of this movie too. A loincloth or something banged me in the back of the head this time to wake me up. (Note: That’s not true; don’t get scared.)

My favorite movie of the night, er, morning was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Bright Technicolor; a groovin’ soundtrack; nudity; sex scenes; a crazy killer; and a transvestite in reverse all rolled up into one. This movie offered everything. And I can’t believe Roger Ebert wrote the screenplay. For anyone who has seen Austin Powers, that one line: "It’s my happening, baby, and it freaks me out!" comes directly from here. The dialog is so outrageous and so are the characters. The plot twists are unbelievable. I had fun with the movie. There was never a dull moment; crazy moments, sure, but no real lull. Considering it was about 3:50 a.m. when it was on, I needed a boost like that.

So, when Reefer Madness started showing at 5:40 in the morning or so, I was bedding down. This movie is so dumb. I don’t like to talk about it. It is really far-fetched and the plot is unreal. I can’t believe it is supposed to be a serious or "educational" movie about marijuana’s effects on a person (and society at large). I’ve never smoked marijuana, so I don’t really know if my arguments are well-founded, but if I never saw this movie again it would be too soon. I don’t mean to be so MEAN about this movie. I just don’t find it interesting enough to talk about.

I did bed down after that. I wanted to watch The Tingler and then go home. Well, I won’t talk about Terror From the Year 5000; Viking Women vs. the Sea Serpent; or Robot Monster. I’m sorry. I won’t talk about anything after The Tingler either. I thought that 18 hours at my first B-Fest was good enough.

The Tingler. I heard about this movie and I wanted to see the big fuss. Vincent Price was scary as a mad scientist. You know what. I can’t remember this movie very well. I wanted to write one good review for you about the movie, and now all I think I can say is that it was clever. When the big bug thing attacks someone in a theater in the movie, and then the screen goes to black and Vincent Price is telling everyone in the theater to stay calm. And then the bug is seen going into the projectionist’s booth (in the movie), and the next scene, the bug is walking the white screen of the film so its shadow is projected. This way it looks like it could be in our very own projection room!!! Scream! as loud as you can because this is the only thing to calm the bug down so it won’t attack! The gimmicky mind of William Castle is showcased well in this movie.

That’s it. I heard the last movie of the whole shebang, Destroy All Monsters! was beautiful and in excellent shape. I’m sure everyone who reads this can’t wait to go next year! Remember: I’m new to this. I know that I won’t be able to use that excuse next year. I apologize deeply for not including my thoughts on the short subjects. I’m glad Ken invited me and I got off my high horse and went. I’m already roped into going next year. Maybe I won’t let Ken reimburse me next year.

MAYBE.

Until next year,

Little Lori

Mark a.k.a. Apostic

B-Fest '99 -- You May Never Look at Bad Movies the Same Way Again

Rather than writing subjectively about the individual movies shown at B-Fest '99, this article is about why events like this are special entertainment experiences. You won't find anything here selectively slamming Zardoz or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls; there're plenty of words written about the pain of these features already. Nor will you find entertaining instances of hilarious comments during the movies because the author can't recall all the good ones nor remember who said what. Instead, the following is a personal analysis of why B-Fest is profoundly different from trying to do this at home. Finally, the author is trying to be objective about a subjective event and apologizes in advance for the resulting dryness in this article.

All that out of the way, let's get down to cases here, pilgrim. There IS a difference (and it's NOT the sound system). Watching VCR movies at home on your TV by your lonesome is not the same as seeing them in a dark, occupied theater on a big screen from a film projector. Having read this, you may be thinking, "Well, duh, Mr. Wizard, don't you think that's rather obvious?" Yes, on a purely intellectual level, it is, but not on a psychological level, and due to the magnitude of this psychological effect, it deserves some analysis. Therefore, let's take a look at the psycho-technical (vice psychotronic) and social effects of a B-Fest.

Among the technical aspects that affect the psychology are the image definitions, the size of the images, and the nature of seeing real film from a projector. The author must acknowledge that he has no experience with DVD, but technical comments on VCR tapes may apply to DVD as well.

Unless you've grown up in a world with nothing but high definition TV, you'll know the difference between seeing projected film and an image on television screen. The key word here is definition. If you lay a white doily onto a white tablecloth and film it with enough competence, odds are you can see it clearly on the film. In most cases, if you were to use a video camera to record the image, or if you use a film chain to capture the filmed images for an electronic video medium, individual lines of the doily are blurred by the scan and tend to fade into the tablecloth. This is very true if your video system uses the format associated with the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC -- also stands for "Never Twice the Same Color"); PEL users may experience a similar problem. Therefore, seeing the movies from honest celluloid film is an entertainment bonus for B-Fest, where half the movies are in black and white and none of the features are direct to video productions.

Most people reading this probably don't have a gigantic TV screen. Assuming you've been blown away by an impressive movie ten times the size of God at a theater and then wondered, after watching it at home on your TV, what the big deal was, then you already know what the big deal was. Even your home movies can seem like epics when you blow them up. When watching films by Ed Wood, Jr. and Russ Meyers on this scale, the tackiness and pretentiousness is amplified as we well, contributing to their "bad entertainment" value. Also, please note the difference in aspect ratio. Watching a wide-screen production hacked down by pan-and-scan can be as annoying as watching a colorized movie. As previously stated, knowing this on an intellectual scale is one thing; sitting through Destroy All Monsters presented in original Toho-scope (2:1 aspect ratio) as it fills out your peripheral vision is quite another. Letterbox presentations on most home video screens may be complete, but they do not compete. (Some readers may point out the differences between a modern theater's high quality sound system and most home systems, but this does not really apply to B-Fest features).

Mild imperfections are important, too. A few years ago, semiconductor technology caught up with and surpassed vacuum tube based amplifiers. In purely acoustic terms, the improvement in quality was the absence of noise from the tubes, which added a slight background hum. Some tube amplifiers also clipped off some of the peaks of sound at certain frequencies. Ye Olde Stereo Faithful often complained about the quality of semiconductor sound, saying it wasn't as rich or powerful as tube amplifiers. Some also missed the slight hum, which they said made the output sound "warm." In an experiment sponsored by semiconductor aficionados, the missing hum was added to a semiconductor circuit and some selected clipping was imposed, and lo, it sounded "right."

You can make a similar observation about seeing a film from a projector and seeing it from a VCR. Despite the fact that most VCR movies are (usually) flawlessly projected film with a high quality video image tube pickup, seeing these films directly from a real projector with all its slight mechanical imperfections is a more old fashioned experience. It looks and sounds "right" for movies that were produced before movies had to compete with things you could see on TV or pick up at your local Blockbuster. One good example of this imperfection is when the slack on the incoming side of the lens (the sound loop) goes badly on the projector, distorting the sound. Sure, the audience begs to have it fixed immediately, but its lingering effect gives the viewer an experience closer to what the original audiences had.

It may be conceded that this is nostalgic argument; however, experiencing a bad movie from our jaded, technologically advanced view misses the feel of the same bad movie (or any movie) presented with technology closer to the original. During an event like this, one is tempted to muse that the projectionist's skill is becoming a lost art. (Do the high school AV geeks of today still have to learn how to thread a projector and set the sound loop?) You can make of the importance of this what you will. In any event, there probably won't be a demand for subtle projector flaw simulations added to VCR tapes of older movies any more than there is a general demand for live sound flaws in CD recordings of live concert events.

None of this has been a suggestion to the readers to throw away their VCRs and get film projectors. This is saying, when you get a chance to see a classic old movie from a film projector, do it now while you still can. Like going to a wild animal park, you get the sensation of seeing the feature in its natural environment.

After musing over the technological differences and their associated psychological effects, it is time to consider the social effects of seeing these films in a well-populated theater on a B-Fest schedule. When this author first heard about B-Fest and saw the open invitations to attend, his compromising answer was, let me save some money and time by running these shows in the privacy of my own living room many miles away from Chicago. He can tell you all, now, after the fact, the following: "Kids, don't try this at home." The home version will miss some of the effect of the crowd and its variety, the sense of anonymity, and some of the indoctrination.

As an example of the effect of a movie on a crowd instead of an individual, there's a fine Harold Lloyd silent comedy (obviously not shown at B-Fest) called Safety Last. During one sequence, Lloyd's character is dazed and wanders around aimlessly. His confused stumbling leads him to several close calls with narrow ledges and, after regaining his senses, some frantic, dangling stunts on the hands of a large clock about a hundred feet off the ground. If you watch this at home, you may nervously marvel at the showmanship of a man very close to plummeting to a certain death; watch it with a crowd, and that nervous energy transmutes into screams of hysterical laughter.

Entertaining movie badness seems to have that same transmuting effect in a crowd as well. Most people reading this have found their own fun while watching a bad movie at home, and entertainment like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the various bad movie sites on the WWW have opened up the communal aspect of watching a bad movie for the home market. When you amplify the audience participation from a small room to a theater, you amplify the intensity of the fun and the sense of "it's all right to laugh at this" as well.

There is also an increase in the variety of audience commentary. If you watch a bad movie by yourself, you may have your own musings, but a joke told to oneself is not as potentially funny as a joke told by a stranger. Watching a bad movie with a few close friends will give you some fresher humor and the delight of sharing a hopefully witty observation, but odds are your close friends aren't going to surprise you as much as a theater full of strangers.

For example, one of the favored commentators during B-Fest '99 was someone with a slide whistle. I don't know who it was (and I'll probably get a jillion letters telling me who it was), but I'd love to shake his hand; the man was an artist and the crowd loved it. Those rare, carefully selected additions with the slide whistle had a classic silent movie or cartoon effect. For example, he played a decreasing the pitch when a character was too obviously experiencing disappointment. The man on the screen not only looked crestfallen; he sounded it, in a very cartoonish way. I suspect that most close friends who gather for a bad movie night would not think of a slide whistle or other sound props until they experience it at something like a B-Fest, where the various backgrounds blend into a fertile soil for growing rich commentary.

Despite being in a crowd, viewers who feel like commenting on the films are still granted some anonymity. Regular users of computer bulletin boards and chat rooms know how that sense of anonymity encourages people to express things they wouldn't normally say to another person's face. You get the same effect in a dark theater. Even if you know the people next to you, there's still plenty of other people within earshot who will never know you and, frankly, don't care. Furthermore, unlike "proper" theater experiences where your verbal contributions are a sin against your fellow man, those same contributions to events on the "B-Fest" screen are a given, so you get the novelty of guiltlessly speaking your anonymous mind in a real movie theater. As an added bonus, this author never heard a racist nor sexist comment made; no one seemed to be abusing his or her free speech by forgetting to be responsible with that freedom, and hopefully that standard will continue.

Finally, after camping out in a theater for twenty-four hours, there is a sense of indoctrination. A close comparison is military training, which conditions the recruits to be less individualistic and more team oriented. It does this through long, relentless denial of individualism, such as manner of dress, modes of expression, choice of meals, and sleeping in private.

Does indoctrination happen at B-Fest? Let me put it this way. One of the last films shown at B-Fest '99 was Girls Town, which I had never seen. If you were to ask, immediately after it was shown, if this was a good movie, I honestly couldn't tell anymore. Intellectually I knew it couldn't be good, but I was enthralled by it emotionally and spiritually. After prolonged exposure to mean spirited films like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Zardoz, and Reefer Madness while subsisting on junk food and lacking sleep, Girls Town honestly felt fresh with a fun sense of originality. It was solid entertainment. I loved it. Mamie Van Doren, Paul Anka, and Mel Torme were all great in it. Four stars. Check it out.

I know intellectually that if I had seen Girls Town on its own, I would've been so moved. When you can no longer tell the difference between crap and quality, you have been indoctrinated. Now, sell all your possessions, go get a crew cut, put on your B-Fest '99 T-shirt, and bow before the Mighty Jabootu, who has broken your puny little spirit. And see you at B-Fest 2000.

Susie Q.

Which one word would I use to describe B-Fest?

Well, I’m not sure, but it wouldn’t be ‘Zardoz’. Hate that movie. Not even Sean Connery in a loincloth can make up for its complete hideousness. Actually, I think the one word I would choose is ‘cholesterol’. Easy Cheese, food of the Gods.

After arriving in cold, windy Chicago I was whisked by the ever-gracious Ken, A of J, who was not only a bastion of warmth and Easy Cheese but also a font of Bad Movie Facts, from the cold and windy platform of some El station somewhere (I know Chicago? Hardly.) to the Northwestern University Campus (did I mention it was cold and windy?). I met the irrepressible Mr. Milroy along the way, and by great good fortune got to sit betwixt the two in the auditorium.

I was prepared, what with my newly purchased fuzzy sleeping bag thingy, and Easy Cheese. Ken supplied not only my admission cost, but the biggest collection of lip-smackingly yummy junk food it has been my pleasure to see since my best friend quit smoking dope. Truly, he is a man among men.

So, on to the movies!

Fiend Without a Face

A fine example of the ‘props we had on hand so we put them in the movie’ genre. You say you inherited your uncle’s Canadian Air Force uniform? One of our heroes could be part of . . . the Canadian Air Force! Yeah, that’s it.

I enjoyed the Fiends, sort of tadpole-looking brain things. Did you know brains can jump? Neither did I. They can also inchworm along fast enough to catch full grown adult human beings who have all their original arms and legs. Well, well, live and learn.

Candy for Your Health (short)

Eat candy, live longer. I bet the American Diabetic Association has something to say about this.

Species II trailer

Proof that filmmakers today are just as capable of creating total dreck as any director of yore. Only with naked chicks.

Earth vs. The Spider

This is one of my all time favorite Bad Movies. I just love it. I was thrilled that they played it. Giant unexplained bug (yeah, arachnid, I know) eating people all over the place. What can beat that? Well, actually, the sheer brazenness of having the local students break into the school gym where the semi-dead spider is lying curled on its back after a semi-fatal dose of insecticide, go ‘Oooooooo, icky’ and decide . . . to have a sock hop. Right next to the spider. They never look at it again (mistake) until, presumably as maddened by the awful music as I, it regains consciousness and runs away screaming. OK, it really doesn’t scream ‘cause spiders can’t make any sounds but I am sure it wanted to. It stomps the town and gets killed in its own den, end of story.

Fearless Vampire Killers

This is the second time I have seen this movie, and it was just as unfunny and pointless this time. Roman Polanski, stick to drama. Notable as the movie where Roman fell in love with, and afterward eventually married, Sharon Tate. Notable in no other respect whatsoever.

Return of the Ape Man

I slept through this.

What is Communism? (short)

I admit I missed this the first time around but since they showed it again just before we left I will tell you now that I was embarrassed to be from the same country as the ignorant mothers who made this. Pishers.

Man Made Monster Compilation

Yeah, I slept through this one too, ya wanna make something of it?

Wizard of Speed and Time (short)

This was too cool for words. I can only imagine how many illicit substances were consumed during the conception and creation of this short. I don’t take drugs, but if I did I would want to watch this about 200 times. This guy’s universe is beyond bizarre. Who thinks up something like this? ‘Hey, I want to make a short film about . . . a guy who runs really fast! And I’ll star in it and score it myself and do all the stop motion animation! It’ll be great!’

Plan Nine from Outer Space

This is a movie that can only be watched with other people, never by yourself. Know your cast. Bring paper plates. It is helpful if you can distinguish between night and day.

Also, that furniture is clearly wicker, not rattan. Rattan has much wider strips of stuff while wicker has narrow strips. Duh.

Wizard of Speed and Time (short) again

This short makes just as much sense backward as forward. I rest my case re: drugs.

Zardoz

I hate this movie.

Blue Hawaii (short)

I slept through this too. Shut up.

Slaves in Bondage (short)

What the heck was this? I must have been really soundly asleep. Jeez.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

This movie was absolutely terrific in a time-capsule ‘the 60’s weren’t nearly as cool as they like to think they were’ way until the last 10 minutes or so. Awesome clothes, amazing . . . well, acting isn’t the right term, maybe emoting? . . . Dialogue to die for (‘It’s my happening, baby, and it freaks me out!’) and some wonderful ‘do your own thing, it’s good for you’ philosophy but THE LAST TEN MINUTES WERE COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY AND DISGUSTING. The dude with breasts kills everyone. Roger Ebert, you owe me 2 hours of my life back.

Reefer Madness

Guess what I did during this one? If you said ‘slept’, you win a prize.

Mime Sex (short)

I will not acknowledge that I saw this. It never happened. I will deny it to my last breath.

Terror From the Year 5000

I don’t remember much about this except that some dude was doing bad things with a time-machine-like structure and a chick walked around in a silver lame jumpsuit. Something was wrong with her face, as I recall. Also, a dead mutant cat is thrown into a lagoon and the hero dives in to retrieve it. I think that the bottom of a lagoon is a good place for a dead mutant cat, so I lost sympathy with the protagonist right there.

Viking Women and the Sea Serpent

I slept. Chicks with big racks and a sea serpent. Not interesting.

Robot Monster

This was phenomenally cheesy. When Ro-Man, our erstwhile bad guy in a gorilla suit and old-fashioned diving helmet, is talking to his lord and master or whatever on the ‘videophone’, he walks behind a TV set frame and looks into the camera from behind the frame. This is the indication that you are seeing him from the lord’s POV; he is now an image on a video screen. Several times they neglected to notice that you can see his gorilla suit sticking out past the edges of the TV. You gotta love a movie that cares so little for common sense. The diving helmet was a nice touch.

The Tingler

A nasty little booger who seems to be related distantly to the Fiends grows on your spine when you get scared but can be killed or at least drastically disheartened when you scream. Vincent Price outacts everyone, and a mute lady buys it.

Dr. Coke Eneday

I was awake for this, but frankly don’t have the faintest clue what it was. I believe there was a detective type and I clearly remember the Fish Blower (what kind of a job is that!?!?) and there were cocaine issues. If someone ever figures out the plot, don’t tell me ‘cause I won’t care.

Creeping Flesh

Hammer Films!! Uptight British guys taking very seriously large-scale silliness in glorious color! Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are just the greatest. The monster in this was at first merely a skeleton, eventually resurrected and re-fleshed by getting wet. Pete discovers by accident that the huge malformed skeleton will grow a fleshy covering when water is spilled on one finger by accident. He cuts the finger off and performs experiments. Frankly, I thought the cut-off finger was really, uh, reminiscent of . . . OK, it was Freudian. He injects the blood of this nasty thing into his daughter, who becomes wildly excited and shows lots of skin, kills someone and I can’t remember what all else. Many things happen, including a convenient rainstorm, and somebody (not the skeleton) gets a finger removed. I won’t tell you who to preserve the surprise.

Girls’ Town

Mel Torme as a juvenile delinquent. Paul Anka as a heartthrob. Mamie Van Doren wears tight clothes. That pretty much covers it.

Destroy All Monsters

Weird space chicks in sparkly silver jumpsuits(apparently the color of choice for space chicks, see Terror From the Year 5000) want to conquer Earth, or something, and they let all the monsters out to do it. Many Monster Stomps and multi-monster battles later, the Earth is safe. Whew.

• I won a prize! My very own B-Fest T-shirt!! I was tremendously excited, since it meant I now had clean clothes. My original shirt was a trifle ripe by that time. Memo for next year - bring a change of clothing.
• Meeting Douglas, Jeff, Paul and Mark (Apostic) - and of course meeting Ken. Being with Ken is sort of like being a groupie - people know him and look at you differently because you’re in his august presence. Wow.
• Easy Cheese! I got some even if Jeff did eat most of it.
• Chocolate Pop-Tarts, love ‘em!!
• Earth vs. The Spider while I was still awake.
• B-Fest Players miming a giant spider against the screen by having one guy pick up another guy upside down, then waving all arms and legs possible.
• The amazingly witty commentary that flowed past me in a veritable fountain. I realized that though I may be clever in some respects, I am merely a piker when it comes to snappy repartee.
• Paper plates during any flying saucer scene whatsoever.
• The B-Fest players stomping their own miniature Tokyo, complete with Silly String representing Godzilla’s fiery breath.