OK, so B-Fest 2025. We had a small group; it was me and Chad R. To my delight, though, Andrew Borntreger of Badmovies.Org, who I must not have seen for 20 years (man, I’m old), attended with his friend Todd, who was an absolutely terrific guy with a great sense of humor. So that really added to the event.
I was pleased for Todd because after last year’s rather dubious line-up, made up nearly entirely of films ranging from the 70s to the 90s, the skein recovered nicely this year. There were, I think, four black and white films (compared to two last year), and the decades balance was much better.
We started with Sheba Baby, one of two PG (somehow existing before Jennifer Lawrence) Blaxploitation films Pam Grier starred in, presumably to help win a wider audience. So it’s toned down in terms of grit, nudity, violence and racial invective. It also lacked the great wider cast of her other PG film, Friday Foster. Still, Pam Grier, so it’s pretty good.
The film also provided our yearly B-Fest Running Joke.* About half an hour in, in what at first seemed like a gag, we got a Beep! Beep! fire alarm and were instructed to leave the building. This occurred during a very tame sex scene, and thus audience members were to Beep! Beep! whenever anything vaguely salacious would appear on screen for the rest of the fest. We were outside for about 15 minutes, I’d guess, and while it wasn’t as cold as it could have been (right off Lake Michigan–like 20 feet off–on January 31st), the wind was howling. I was quite relieved when they cleared us to return.
(The other running joke, which I thought was very slightly mean, revolved around the fact that the organizers didn’t get the film schedule announced until literally like two hours before the show started.)
The next film was our first B&W flick, Universal’s living head movie The Thing that Couldn’t Die. It’s no classic, but it’s fun and only 69 minutes. Those were the days! I’d say its most notable feature was it’s hilariously fast climax, which is up there with Dracula manifesting at the end of Seven Golden Vampires and almost immediately expiring. So a pretty strong start.
