Wow, about half way through and we ran dry of monsters until the final film. After Night of the Comet:
If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? Ron Ormond is a fascinating figure. In the 50s he made from (at the time) notably sleazy films that presumably played in the Pussycat circuit. Then he and his film making partner and wife, June, miraculously survived a plane crash and dedicate their lives to Christ. This was via a very fundamentalist Southern Baptist church, and after this point the Ormonds made message movies with their very hardcore minister. If Footman Tire You is one such, which is basically 90 minutes of a stolid minister–the type you’d see in Footloose–warning about what will happen if Soviet Communists take over the US. (Movies and tv shows always had us losing to the Commies.) Imagine a Jack Chick tract converted to a feature length film. I’m more symphathic to this sort of things than most, both in terms of Christianity and anti-Communism, but this is purely preaching to the choir material. Still, fascinating in a certain light, and featured in the Ormond omnibus blu ray set From Hollywood to Heaven.
Psychomania (aka Death Wheelers), the film about immortal Satanist bikers. It’s…OK, but I was glad it didn’t run back to back with the movie I sponsored. Would make a good double bill with Werewolves on Wheels. The last film (sadly) of one time huge star George Sanders.
Aerobicide The weaker of the two gym-based slashers (opposite Death Spa of course), the film features death so bloodless even I was bitching. You can’t argue that the characters aren’t hilariously stupid, though.
Shake, Rattle and Rock! A ’90s TV reimagining of the similarly titled ’50s rock n roll film, directed by Alan Arkush. I had two problems with it. First, it is basically a watered down carbon copy of Hairspray by John Waters. Second, it is a super smug affair that acts like in the 90s it was bold to think black and white teens should be able to do things together, and that light rock n roll perhaps isn’t the devil’s music. Wow, way to go out on a limb. Also, the ‘teens’ in the cast, especially the bikers, were hilariously old for their parts. Was it meant as parody? You tell me, I saw no sign of it. About the only good thing were the familiar veterans in the cast like Dick Miller and Mary Woronov. I didn’t hate it, but I disliked it pretty hard.
The Transformers: The Movie I never watched Transformers, so this was a nightmare of endless battle scenes featuring seemingly hundreds of characters and toylines I knew nothing about, or cared to. The animation, blatantly Japanese ala Akira and Fist of the Northstar, was the best thing about it. I dozed through like a third of it, the only movie that was true of this year.
Six-String Samurai. It was OK, but really it only wanted to be stylish. Could have been half an hour shorter. Has its fans, though.
Double Team Jon Claude Van Damme teams up with former Chicago Bull Dennis Rodman (cue an endless stream of basketball puns) to defeat gang boss Mickey Rourke. It has it’s moments, although the middle section is as pure a rip-off of TV’s The Prisoner as you’re ever going to see.
Our site was well represented right at the end. The penultimate film was Chad R’s College Girls Murder, a rare color Edgar Wallace krimi featuring a wonderful red monk using their neck-snapping bull whip (and poison gas-filled Bibles) to terrorize–what else–a school for sexy young women. One girl rights back with a squirt gun filled with acid. It’s that kind of picture, and I love it.
We had about ten minutes to spare, and there was this young woman who REALLY wanted them to show something called Heavy Metal Parking Lot. This was a typically super cheap public access show wherein a camera crew interviewed the fervid crowd waiting to get into a Judas Priest concert. I quickly felt sorry for it, because the short WAY overstayed its welcome–ran about 30 minutes and the crowd turned quite surly by the end. I’m not sure why she thought the audience would love it, but clearly she and presumably her friends did. To me, it was low hanging fruit clearly meant to make us feel superior to the moronic metal heads. Well, I have enough dumb hobbies myself that I quite adverse to that sort of thing. Would I want to hang out with them? No. Did I want to make fun of them? Not that either.
Finally we got to the last movie, the one I sponsored, and I picked a stone cold classic. You know the one, the picture is topside. I don’t even need to explain why, you’ve all seen it. It’s glorious.
And that was B-Fest 2025.
