Look upon the work of Mitch O’Connell, ye mighty, and despair!
This was the most streamlined Fest in my memory. Most notably, for various reasons—but especially the economy—we had the smallest group of attendees we’ve personally had since the long ago days when the Internet first brought in folks like Rob and Al of the fondly remembered Oh, The Humanity site. Indeed, in a very real way I had nobody site related at the Fest. Instead, we had affiliated groups. Liz Fulton (a.k.a. Lianna Skywalker) and her hubbie Charles are by now veteran attendees that would be there even if I weren’t. And that, I presume, holds true for their returning friends, Scott and Sally.
Veteran attendees Julie and Tim Quant—Julie being the younger sister of one of my high school crowd—are in a similar situation, having come in for quite some time from Iowa each year. They had a couple of friends with them as well, including Mark Petri, a fellow I slightly knew from back in the day. He had with him this stuff animal larval insect that proved a favored and quite beloved prop this year.
My old friend Jeff Withem has been coming almost as long as I have, starting from the days when he lived here but for a long time flying in from his current home in Arizona.* Throw in another seldom seen high school pal, J.R. Jenks, who was attending his first show. And that was that. No Andy Borntreger, much to Liz’s oft-expressed sadness. No Chris Holland (although he still administers the B-Fest.com site) or Scott Hamilton. No Kirk and Patty Draut, who had just been in Chicago from Houston a few weeks earlier to see their daughter Grace graduate from Navy boot camp.
And especially no Joe “Crybaby” Robin, which was too bad, as it meant more sadly that neither his delightful cousin Nick nor their pal Jesse were in attendance either.
[*He wasn’t even close to winning the furthest travel award however. Indeed, a guy from England was beaten out by a young lady from, I think, Hungary.]
Sadly, no Sandy Petersen, either. His gaming company had just been liquidated by Microsoft, but his request to leave a day or two early so as to make the Fest was denied because there was paperwork to fill out. And needless to say, that’s not the sort of thing you can do on a Wednesday rather than a Friday. Hopefully next year will mark his first B-Fest, and until then, there will be this summer’s T-Fest down in Dallas.
In the absence of our usual crowd, there was no reason for Jeff to rent the mini-van he usually engages (purely out of that big old heart of his) for transport purposes. We trusted to my recently acquired little Hyundai, which albeit small, had the advantage of working and stuff, unlike me old Ford. I picked Jeff up at the airport Thursday night, stopped for a robust meal at Mr. Beef & Pizza, and headed back to my trailer. The combination of the food and the hour soon saw us to our beds by midnight.
However, about 3:30 AM or so I woke up and noticed it was colder in my room than it should have been. Sure enough, my furnace had gone out. This then was the event that defined B-Fest for me this year. I called Four Seasons Heating, and they had a guy to my place by 6:00. (Luckily the heater worked in micro-bursts, just enough to keep us at least in the low ’60s rather than falling towards the teens as outside.) However, I was waiting for him all that time, and even after he got there, was kept nervous wondering what the damage would be. I’d been fretting over the furnace for a while now, since I had no idea how old it is. I know it was here before I was, over ten years ago. A couple of weeks ago we had this 60 hour plus spell where the temps stayed under zero degrees, at the nadir hitting minus seventeen. The furnace unsurprisingly ran nearly constantly, which didn’t do my nerves any good.
The guy worked on the furnace for a full three hours, which had visions of dollar signs dancing painfully in my head. In the end, he decided it wasn’t the furnace, but the thermostat. The good news was that the furnace itself was basically still sound. However, I inwardly groaned when he said the new thermostat would be two hundred bucks. (Luckily, he had one in the truck.)
Girding my loins, I asked how much the entire job would be. To my vast and remaining amazement, he said the thermostat would be two hundred, and the labor would be an additional $79. For the entire three hours—not to mention an additional hour of driving time—following a middle of the night emergency call. $79! I nearly swooned with relief and, frankly, disbelief. Four Seasons, you’ve got a customer for life. Still, the die was cast. My nerves had gotten a good workout over those three hours, and then there was the fact that I’d only gotten about three hours of sleep. So it’s not too surprising I ended up nodding off during nearly every movie at the Fest this year, at some point or other.
Still, following a work-related conference call Jeff had that morning, we set out for our traditional breakfast at Des Plaines’ fabulous L&L Snack Shop. As usual, we left so stuffed we could barely move. That and the comparatively late hour pretty much knocked out the also traditional supper run to Superdawg before the show, since there was no way we could go justice to the place. Luckily, the L&L breakfast pretty much took care of our meal requirements for the entire day.
Instead, we packed up our diminished but still inane amount of gear, barely getting most of it (and everything we really needed) into the Hyundai. It was a close thing, though, what with the coolers, the fabled Tower ‘o Snacks, the invaluable army cot, and so on. I had meant to get down to Evanston around three, but it was just slightly after four o’clock when we arrived.
Thankfully, they had left down the gate that cuts off the approach to the Norris University Center. This allows one to drive up and drop gear right at the door, rather than trudging it up from behind the gateway in batches via the Center’s steep circular driveway. Sometimes they keep the gate down, and that really sucks. Anyway, it was a good start. Unsurprisingly, manly man Jeff had moved all the myriad gear inside by the time I walked back from the parking garage about a block away.
Inside things went like clockwork. We got our gear inside, and found that Tim and Julie had got there already (worse luck for them, as it turned out) and secured our traditional front row seats. Julie was kind enough to bring the essential Hostess Fruit Pies, since Hostess still has a lot of outlet stores in Iowa (they closed all the ones here a few years ago). To my horror, though, she confirmed that Hostess has just plain stopped making blueberry pies. My favorite!! And now I’ll never have one again, all bursting with blueberry goodness and with that awesome little sugar glaze on the outside. How depressing.
As I was wheeling the Tower o’ Snacks through the lobby, though, a guy tried to tell me that no food is allowed in the auditorium. I mean, yes, that’s the general rule, but they ignore it for B-Fest, for obvious reasons. I’m pretty much a rule guy, but I knew hundreds of attendees would be bringing food (hell, they even tell you to in the official on-line poster), so I just kind of ignored him and went about my business. Sorry, friend, I didn’t mean to be a jerk, but there was just no way that was going to fly. And it didn’t. I think he gave up after that.
Aside from that, we got quickly settled. Liz and her party met us before the show, and I met up with a guy who had a spare ticket I had procured for J.R., who himself arrived shortly after The only hiccup was when it appeared the six tickets I had pre-ordered had been shorted by one. After some frenzied investigation, it turned out Charles had gotten in line before me and grabbed his one ticket without alerting the rest of us. (You gotta watch that guy.) Other than that, everything was easy-peasy.
The fabulous Telstar Man showed up (flummoxing me for a short second, as he had hair this year), and produced from a very cool vintage suitcase his traditional mix CD of B-Fest appropriate music, which he yearly hands out far and wide. These are a much sought after collectable, and this year’s selections again failed to disappoint. Thanks, Telstar Man, whoever you are!
Anyway, we soon were settled, and the prelims were over. Although tickets remained available for a while this year, it did indeed look like a sell-out. The auditorium was pretty packed, anyway. Then it was time to start the show. As usual, Jeff and I were playing Stud (you don’t look at the schedule, but let each film in turn surprise and horrify you), and J.R. decided to do the same. The days when I performed the sorts of diligence that allowed me to report exactly when movies started are a thing of the past. However, the oversized printed schedule (featuring the most gorgeous artwork yet by traditional B-Fest artist Mitch O’Connell) was accurate in terms of line-up, and presumably at least more or less accurate in terms of run times.
6:00 Firewalker (1986) Although reviewed at this site, I’d never seen this highly lame Chuck Norris / Lou Gossett Jr. buddy action film. Still, I knew we had a good crowd when a massive cheer erupted as the Golan/Globus logo appeared on the screen, as well as a credit for the inevitable John Rhys-Davies. Firewalker is a typically cheap and lame Raiders adventure wannabe, as the two roguish heroes (or as roguish as Chuck Norris is likely to get; this basically involved him merrily chomping on an unlit stogie throughout the film) join Melody “Flash Gordon” Anderson on a hunt for a huge native treasure. The villain was your typically indestructible Indian—what kind, I couldn’t tell, since I had throughout absolutely no friggin’ idea where the action was supposed to be taking place—with magic powers and an eye patch. As recorded in our review, this latter item kept shifting which eye it covered (!), a fact a stage player ably mocked by setting up a Styrofoam head on stage with an eye patch and adjusting it whenever it changed places onscreen. Norris fans had to be disappointed by the comparative dearth of the star’s trademark fighting moves; certainly the film’s obvious sequel possibilities were never exploited. Will “Orca” Sampson also pops up for a while, looking sadly aged and fragile. Meanwhile, Gossett Jr. remains an all too instructive example of how little winning an Oscar can mean to one’s career. Following his Supporting Actor award for An Officer and a Gentleman, Gossett’s next film would be Jaws 3-D, followed in succession by the failed sci-fier Enemy Mine, Iron Eagle and Firewalker. Things never got much better from there, although the guy makes a living.
8:00 Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) If Firewalker was a comparatively strange start for this year’s fest—usually the first film is a comparatively restrained, often British sci-fi/horror flick like First Man in Space or Devil Doll—the appearance of a classic Universal horror was also unexpected. Still, good stuff, although the 66 year old Bela was woefully miscast as the Monster. (See, they transferred his character Igor’s brain into the Monster in the preceding film, so…oh, never mind.) Chaney is back in his second turn as Larry Talbot, who here deals with the harsh realization that Death has little apparent permanent hold on him. This is proven in a terrific opening sequence that for me ranks as probably the best opening to any Universal horror. Seeking an end to his affliction, he sets out to find Dr. Frankenstein, a man rumored to know the secrets of Death as well as those of Life. Being a direct sequel to The Wolf Man, the films also features the welcome return of the Old Gypsy Woman Maleva. This, the first of Universal’s monster mash-ups, isn’t great, but it’s pretty good. Aside from the stellar opening, I love the Wine Festival scene, when a roving singer inaptly chooses to wish the tormented Talbot eternal life. Dwight Frye is in there too. Sadly, though, the climatic tussle between the two monsters isn’t all it could be. Jeff pretty much ruined the remainder of the Fest for J.R. and I (as comrades back in high school we had all been inveterate punsters) after he observed, as Talbot drove a horse-drawn carriage, that he couldn’t have been the Wolf Man when he had done so because then he’d have “clawed reigns.” J.R. and I turned to each other and fumed, realizing that there was no way we’d be able to top that one, and that moreover we were only in the second movie. In retaliation, I contributed my main jape for the year, as I had Talbot seeking out Maleva in her tent because he was into OGWILFs. This drew the general bemused disgust I’d hoped for, and it was a card I played often throughout the festivities.
9:25 Mystery Short I didn’t really keep track of when what shorts played when, but they were as ghastly as assemblage of them as I can recall. I think the first one was this string of Japanese singers doing a loooong string of musical numbers, in Japanese. This went on and on, and by its intrinsic nature, could have gone on forever, since it was just Stuff. This sort of thing really gets under my skin, so it was with vast relief that I saw the ‘short’ finally ending.
9:45 Murder in the Air (1940) This pretty much gave away the game; this year’s organizers clearly were attempting to book as many films never seen at B-Fest before was possible. Certainly most had never played during my attendance, which has to go back twenty years by now. This was a very old programmer whose main attraction was to star Ronald Reagan as undercover agent Brass Bancroft (the film was part of a series), battling foreign spies. Of course, Reagan’s presence in itself is supposed to be funny, but sadly the flick was just way too tepid, even with its brief 55 minute running time. Despite the promise of some airship stock footage—and I really love airships—this proved too much for me in my exhausted state, and I slept through much of it. My main impression of Reagan here was that his naturally cheerfulness made him a really odd choice to go undercover as a Commie thug. Still, it was nice to be reminded of a time when Hollywood still admitted that Communism was evil. This picture might have played better later in the evening when people could have napped through it, but it did bring me back to the early days of the Fest when antique stuff like this ran a lot mostly just because it was obscure.
10:50 It was time for the now yearly raffle. They had a lot of stuff to give away, mostly donated DVDs, so this took awhile. By the end our group of about a dozen had failed to win anything, even given the large amount of stuff, but first time attendee J.R. finally won one of the better items, the entire first season set of Smallville.
11:45 Wizard of Speed and Time They had put a lot of time cushioning in the schedule, which is a good idea, although it backfired slightly when all went smooth. So they not only ran the WoS&T backward when it was done, per tradition, but forward and then backward a second time. I’ve never seen the stage more crowded for this, as attendees rushed up and lied on their backs to stomp their feet in time with the running Wizard. J.R. (despite being in the front row) got up late, and chivalrously gave up what appeared to be the very last spot to a young lady. I winced as he did so, thinking he’d never find another space, but he did eventually manage to squeeze himself in.
12:00 Plan 9 from Outer Space This perennial was the first returnee, but man, I’ve done this a zillion times. I napped. However, the program’s main flaw (main, but not very crippling, as it was generally considered to be a very strong line-up) now because apparent for the first time, which is that the show was lopsided towards black and white features. This continued to be the case, in fact. The problem isn’t that most attendees have a problem with black and white (although some of the college-aged people might have), but rather the lack of balance, the most important element of a good B-Fest schedule. Your brain starts to melt after a while, and you really need all the cues you can get to keep the movies from running together; alternation color and B&W flicks is one of the most obvious tacks. Again, though, I think the (not at all unwelcome) emphasis on unshown material pushed them more towards B&Ws. After Firewalker we got three B&Ws in a row; then a color movie, then four B&Ws in a row. There was more color stuff towards the end, but there was an additional reason the color stuff wasn’t distributed more evenly…we’ll get to that later. Again, it was a GREAT line-up. I just would have personally worked on this one thing a bit harder.
Despite napping through this one, the lack of sleep the night before, plus my age—Jeff, who got at least a few hours of sleep the previous evening, slept through even more of the Fest than I did; I’d say 30% or more—pretty much killed me through the morning. When I tried to nap it was spotty, but then I kept nodding off when I tried to stay awake. Therefore I was unable to really enjoy a pretty good batch of films.
1:30 Scream Blacula Scream (1973) Blacula has played at the Fest a couple of times over the years, but was far as I can recall, this superior sequel never had. The film integrates Voodoo into the mix, and what could have been a real discursive element instead is integrated extremely well. Voodoo is what brings Blacula back to undead life following his suicide in the previous film, and might well prove the answer to his vampiric curse. Meanwhile, the third credited female lead is played by Pam Grier, who naturally brings a lot to the table. Grier was just about to start starring in her own movies, but she really provides a lot of her best acting here as a woman torn between her sympathy for Blacula’s tragic plight and the reality of his cruel, bloodthirsty deeds. Aside from being quite well written, the Blacula role clearly benefits mostly from the extraordinarily potent presence of the magisterially deep-voice actor William Marshall. Although I often made with the King of Cartoon gags, Marshall really was something onscreen, and it’s a shame that Blacula made no further screen appearances after this.
Sadly, I did sleep through a lot of the middle of this, although at least I was up for the really very good finale.
3:15 Don’t Knock the Rock I was torn when I learned what this was. I think this sort of movie, teen and JD dramas, really need to be a bigger part of B-Fest, if only to get things slightly away from the preponderance of horror/sci-fi/action stuff. However, I’d seen some of this on TCM recently, and moreover it’s in my Netflix list. I consulted with Liz, who did look at the schedule, and she advised me to grab some sleep. So I did. If you like a good serving of corn, though, look to this pioneering work in the “Parents, don’t worry about rock ‘n’ roll” genre, because rock ‘n’ roll really embraced it’s bad boy side. Good stuff.
5:00 Donovan’s Brain (1953) The second film this year connected to writer Curt Siodmak, who remains best known for creating all the universally recognized werewolf lore (full moons, the humanoid werewolf, the whole silver thing, the mark of the pentagram) out of whole cloth when he wrote The Wolf Man. His second most famous story is this, the grandfather of the Living Brain/Head genre. Siodmak’s novel was adapted several times first as a radio play, most famously a version starring Orson Welles for the program Suspense. Indeed, casual fans may wish to stick with that, because frankly it’s a rather livelier affair. This film was also the second (of several) adaptations of the book, the first being 1944’s The Lady and the Monster. This version stars Lew Ayers (who I thought sounded distractingly like Jack Lemon) as the ill-fated scientist who strives to keep alive the brain of the monstrous industrialist Donovan. And yes, we did make free with the “Sunshine Superman” jokes. I assume it’s a coincidence, but the film also stars a rather stiff Nancy Davis, who later became Nancy Reagan. I’d like to say I made it all the way through this one, but sadly Morpheus continued to dog me, and I missed the climax. Liz later described the action, and it didn’t sound like I missed that much. Still, I’d really have liked to have made it through this one.
6:30 The Tingler (1959) Ah, William Castle and Vincent Price. What a combo. This is no House on Haunted Hill, but it’s a minor classic nonetheless. A typically plumy Price is a doctor where on fear research, in furtherance of which he subjects himself to cinema’s first LSD trip. The main conceit, though—and it’s a doozy—is that extreme fear causes a giant earwig thingie to manifest itself on our spines and kill us, unless we evaporate the beasties by screaming. At one point the Tingler Price manages to capture gets loose in a (in-movie) movie theater, allowing for Price to yell to the real life audience, “THE TINGLER IS LOOSE IN THE THEATER! SCREAM! SCREAM FOR YOU LIVES!” Only Castle. In real life, some theaters (although probably not to many) wired up the odd theater seat to vibrate, or ‘tingle,’ during this sequence. Needless to say, this was another Castle idea. Still, the film is pretty sloppy. Price is given a whole elaborate subplot about a poisonous floozy of a wife (a device also used in House on Haunted Hill), who furthermore is blocking the marriage of the wife’s good girl sister and Price’s earnest lab assistant. Oddly, the film leaves the whole situation unresolved. Castle didn’t make sequels to his films, as I recall, but maybe they were thinking of one for this.
8:00 Captive Wild Woman (1943) I’d never seen any of these very obscure pictures, revolving around the common plot of during an ape into the beautiful, if ‘exotic,’ actress Acquanetta. (She was born in Wyoming, by the way.) This is a pretty standard hour-long Universal cheapie, clearly meant to fill the bottom of a double bill. In this case, the frighteningly gaunt, albeit atypically young, John Carradine is, what else, a mad scientist who Dabbles in God’s Domain. His sanitarium is conveniently close to a circus, allow for him to steal said gorilla—played by stuntman and gorilla/monster suit man Ray “Crash” Corrigan—to perform his experiments. These involves transferring glands, which were considered quite amazing back in the ’40s and often held pretty much the same role in that decade as atomic energy would in the ’50s. He takes the glands from a woman suffering from weight loss (although she’s not nearly as thin as Carradine), I guess to explain why the huge ‘gorilla’ turns into teeny-tiny Acquanetta. As usual, all would go well except that Acquanetta can’t control her inevitable Animal Instincts, especially in terms of falling in love with her ex-trainer, the slightly psycho big cat ‘tamer’—there’s a whole lot of time-killing lion and tiger stuff, although much of it is pretty cool—played by Milburn Stone. Liz enjoyed how the guy constantly nearly got himself killed why always condescendingly pooh-poohing everyone’s concerns about the risks he was taking. Mason’s girlfriend (and for convenience’s sake, the thin girl’s sister) is the original scream queen, Evelyn “The Wolf Man” Ankers. I think she may even wear some of the same outfits from that rather more expensive movie. All goes pretty much exactly as you’d expect, but apparently the movie made some amount of money, because despite unequivocally dying here, Acquanetta’s ape woman returns (along with Ankers and Stone, but with J. Carrol Naish filling in for Carradine—fittingly, Naish himself played an exact analogue for Acquanetta’s character in Dr. Renoit’s Secret) for 1944’s Jungle Woman, before leaving the role to Vicky Lane for 1945’s The Jungle Captive. That one co-stars Rondo Hatton, so I have to admit, I’d like to see these. Maybe Universal could put out a little set of them. Acquanetta’s career never took off, and she’s mainly remembered for her two films in this series. Good stuff, but it came at the tale end of four black and white movies in a row, and the audience was perhaps getting a tad restless. Indeed, of the nine movies so far, only two had been in color, and the rest were all from the ’40s and ’50s. I’ll go into what I would have done slightly differently in a bit.
9:10 Mystery Short Break As noted, I didn’t really keep track of the shorts, but they were a gruesome lot. One returnee was a waaaay overlong student film about how war comics like Sgt. Rock were used to program kids to be killers. The lead kid summons his pals to their tree house with a clarinet instead of a bugle (presumably they didn’t have access to the latter), and the kids all sit around reading the comics looking increasingly sweaty faced and glassy eyed, as a narrator spends the entire film whispering stuff like “Kill! Kill!” over the soundtrack. This looks pretty much exactly like something Frederick Wertham would have made. Amusingly, nobody noticed the exact comic they keep showing being read is a Sgt. Rock where he’s screaming on the cover, “STOP THE WAR! I WANT TO GET OUT!” Yeah, that sounds like pro-war propaganda, alright. In the end, the zombie-like kids invade a nearby playground full of younger children and blow up the latter’s array of plastic soldier-littered sand castles with M80s. Which, need I say it, looks totally bitching and a great way to spend a day. It’s amazing how often ‘message’ crap like this completely backfires. This short may have failed to get people to revolt against war comics, but maybe it inspired guys to do shows like Mythbusters. There was also another ‘short’ that was just Stuff, sort of a drug-induced hippie imitation of Terry Gilliam’s work, although I think it might have actually predated Gilliam.
9:30 American Ninja 2: The Confrontation (1987) Much better than the highly disappointing sequel, “American Ninja 3: The Diplomatic Negotiation.” This was perhaps my favorite movie at B-Fest this year, and it probably helped that it was the first color film in over six hours. Unlike Firewalker, this is played dead straight, and is all the funnier for it. Say what you will for Cannon in the ’80s, but man, they knew exactly what their audiences wanted, and they gave it to them. Really bad ninjas (purportedly a comically huge army of them, but they always attack in small groups, so that the same masked stuntmen can be used over and over after being ‘killed’) are threatening a marine base…somewhere in the world…and American Ninja Michael Dudikoff and his beefy friend Steve James show up to take out the garbage. Pleasingly, the film gets goofier as it goes along, and only in the last third does it suddenly become about genetically engineering Evil Super-Ninjas. The humongous James, who always looked like he was having a blast starring in stuff like this, sadly died of cancer only five years later. Man, if they could get Lucinda Dickey’s Ninja III: The Domination next year, that would be the most awesome thing ever. The latter is stupidly unavailable on DVD (WHY!!!), but can be see as a Video on Demand at Amazon.com.
11:10 Terror of Tiny Town It’s just not the same watching an ancient, all-midget western without Andy Borntreger there, so Jeff, Charles, Scott, Sally and I headed downstairs to grab some hot food from the now-open cafeteria area. Sadly, the Sbarro pizza place wasn’t open yet, so I got a double cheeseburger instead. Yum. Jeff and I agreed that this yak session was one of our favorite parts of the weekend, although after blathering on about comic books for like forty straight minutes I suddenly realized (this happens to me on occasion) that I had to be boring the comparatively normal Sally to tears. Sorry, Sally!
12:45 We headed back up for the home stretch. To my deep chagrin, we are greeted by The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, a highly nasty, mean-spirited flick I’ve deeply loathed ever since seeing it was a kid. I basically napped some more, but saw enough of it now and again to confirm that my opinion of the picture isn’t wildly off base. Indeed, I was satisfied to note that it seemed to engender quite a lot of hostility from the rest of the audience too. And this from a film starring Bruce Dern and Casey Kasem, and featuring the actress who had played Marilyn on The Munsters in a little white bikini. Blech.
Meanwhile, I think it was with this movie that Liz deemed the Weird Unexpected Gestalt B-Fest Theme (there always is one; the best was the year when nearly every film featured a naked or near naked fat guy at some point or other) to the Extreme Medical Malpractice—To the Max! Although Mad Science is a given at these things, it’s true that such shenanigans drove a lot of the films the year; Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Donovan’s Brain, The Tingler, Captive Wild Woman, American Ninja 2 (the genetic engineering angle) and now this. Even Plan 9 involves reviving corpses, albeit with a ray rather than medically. Anyway, good call, Liz.
2:20 Mystery Short Break This was the one amusing short, another lengthy but in this case somewhat amusing deal about a concert by a tuxedo-clad fellow performed on roadway crossway stripes (like the ones the Beatles walk over on the Abbey Road cover), which he plays by leaping around them like keys. Think of the giant keyboard scene in Big. Eventually it becomes pretty elaborate, and it was filmed in a road behind London’s Albert Hall. Another Beatles connection. Not the greatest thing ever, but clearly the best short this year.
2:25 Megaforce (1982) Megaforce! Man, this was awesome. What can I say about the film that I didn’t say in my review? However, Jeff and I noted that by the end of the movie, Sally, who was sitting in the alcove by the fire door, had his highly irate look plastered on her face. I think this picture broke something deep down inside her.
Tragically, Megaforce is NOT available on DVD. How can this be?!
4:30 Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973) I’m always glad to see a Godzilla movie here, but really, we have to get away from these crappy ’70s ones. They suck. I know Sony rents out all the films, but it could be that they cost too much, or maybe their fee structure doesn’t work with the Fest (i.e., they could want a percentage of tickets sold), or maybe it’s just too hard to work with two companies. If that’s the case, then we’re sadly stuck with whatever handful of flicks Swank offers. Really, though, we need to go either earlier or later than the ’70s.
Afterthoughts
Again, the strategy the organizers apparently pursued this year, of trying to offer films previously unseen at B-Fest (by my unofficial count, 10 of the 14 movies were new, an impressive total, especially when you consider that you have to show Plan 9) was pretty neato-keen. However, either this pushed them in an unbalanced direction in some ways, or else they didn’t take such matters entirely into account. Again, I’m hardly one to complain about watching B&W films, but eight of the fourteen films were in black and white, and they tended to run them in blocks. Looking at the schedule over all, the one change I’d have made (assuming I had the films they ended up with) would have been to move The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant to late Saturday night, when then ran four black and whites in a row, for a then total of seven out of nine black and white movies thus far.
Further skewing those results was the fact that the first film was in color. After that, of the next eight movies, only one (Scream Blacula Scream) was in color. Meanwhile, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant started out three color movies in a row—half of all the color films altogether. So I would have switched that with, say, Donovan’s Brain or The Tingler, and I think that would have mixed things up a lot better. Also, I admit, it would have been easier to ignore Transplant at 5:00 in the morning than at 1:00 in the afternoon.
Really, though, that’s the only major rescheduling that could have been done, since the line-up was warped by another fact; three of the six color movies were all goofy ’80s action flicks. As such, it was necessary to separate those as much as possible, which explains why they started with Fest with Firewalker when, in other circumstances, you’d want to save one of your color movies for later. This year, they got away with it, largely because Megaforce is so weird as to seem a thing unto itself. However, although ’80s movies are becoming more popular at B-Fest (and with good reason), I really watch this sort of thing. Three roughly similar films like this can really unbalance the line-up.
Anyway, that means that with the Godzilla movie locked in per tradition as the last film of the show, they really did nearly as good a job as possible arranging their line-up. Again, the only change I would have made would have been moving Transplant to early Saturday morning. Aside from the heavy emphasis on black and white films, another odd fact that that this year, there was no film at all from the ’60s. We had one film from the ’30s, three (!) films from the ’40s, three from the ’50s—everything up to know being black and white—nothing from the ’60s, three from the ’70s, and three from the ’80s. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and I genuinely admire bringing in more old stuff (again, this made it feel a lot more like the very first B-Fests I attended). I just thought it was interesting. I will say again that the films of the ’80s seem very much distinct, and that three of them, especially in the same genre, might be a bit much.
I should note that I’ve been attending B-Fest nearly as long as the kids who ran it have been alive, so a lot of this is just purely kibitzing on my part. All in all, it was a great show, and I’m extremely thankful to them for their obvious hard work and creativity. I like the fact they took some risks, and such should always be applauded, even when (maybe especially when) the audience doesn’t always seem to ‘get’ it.
B-Fest 2009: The Aftermath
After that, it was the usual clean-up and packing drill. The one bad thing was that Tim and Julie discovered they were ticketed for parking before the lot goes open—this happens at 4:00 on Friday afternoon, and they parked there at 3:30. We do this all the time for B-Fest (it was purely by accident that Jeff and I arrived and parked in the same lot at 4:05), and this is first time we’ve gotten ticketed. Needless to say, the ticket is ridiculously large, for $50. I mean, c’mon, ten bucks maybe, but fifty? They’re going to try to fight it, and I hope they succeed.
Anyway, then it was off to Paul and Holly’s for the traditional Gino’s East deep dish pizza. This time, for about the first time ever, we pretty much only ordered as much pizza as we needed. Progress! We were joined by a couple of friends of Holly’s, Kevin and Jodi, as well as their young son Alex. Kevin proved a b-movie nut of the highest caliber, and seemed positively intoxicated to finally stumble into a herd of his own kind. Also on hand was Lisa Dawson, yet another high school buddy. Scott and Sally opted out, though, probably to get her therapy for PMSD. (Post-Megaforce Stress Disorder.)
The pizza was great, as was the chance to sit and gab, and a bunch of us old-timers watched a vintage Battle of the Network Stars—the third one, I think—and had much amusement from it. Even so, I crapped out about 11:00 and dragged Jeff back to the trailer for a desperately needed night’s sleep. When we got to the trailer, we started watching the first Yokai Wars movie, but started nodding off before we even got to the ghosts.
However, by the time we woke up about 9:00 the next day, we were somewhat refreshed. Per arrangement, we went directly to Ritzy’s for our traditional Last Breakfast. Even J.R. was there, because he came down with us with no firm plans to get back home, which in his case was actually back close to B-Fest was held. Lisa also joined us. I would have taken him to the train station, but Charles said he was more or less going that way as he and Liz headed back up north, and so that was done. After that, it was the normal hugs and handshakes and see you next years.
And so we went our various ways. Jeff and I went back to Paul and Holly’s and hung out a while. Jeff had really checked his itinerary at all, and for some reason I thought he didn’t leave until about 8:00. However, knowing I’m a moron, I checked again, and it turned out his flight was leaving at about 5:00—big difference!
We had just a little time for Jeff to make a run to the nearby Japanese shopping mall he likes, and pick up some exotic treats for his daughters. He also got me a little box with a miniature Godzilla toy in it. Inside was Mogera, the robot from The Mysterians. After that it was a quick run to the airport. (We never did get to Superdawg this weekend, worse the luck.) Following that, I returned home, ate, went back to sleep, and then spent the entire week off farting around and doing Jack Crap when I should have been working on this report. Now it’s done, though, and thus I can officially call an end to B-Fest 2009.
See you folks next year.
