B-Fest Diary 2010

As always, B-Fest is at least as much about the people as the movies. This year’s cast included:

Joe Bannerman, former proprietor of Opposable Thumbs Films.

Andrew Borntreger of Badmovies.org (and the USMC), returning to B-Fest, due to the generosity of his lovely wife Katie, after an eight year absence. Man, it was good seeing him again.

Jeff Withem, my old friend and the fellow I’ve been attending B-Fest with the longest.

Brian S., better known amongst the Jabooturazzi as long-time correspondent BeckoningChasm. Brian was our ceremonial First Time Attendee this year.

Julie & Tim Quant, long-time B-Fest attendees.

Liz Fulton (if that IS her real name), her hubbie Charles, and their pals Ian and Sally. Sally remains an enigma; she seems quite normal, but has returned to B-Fest several times now. I’m not complaining by any means, Sally is a charming young lady. It’s just weird, like seeing a pretty girl in a comic book shop. Liz, meanwhile, is definitely One of Us, even when she’s wearing her sexy glasses.*

Did I mention Liz also loves furries?]

Steve Billups, former proprietor of the much lamented Gangrene Widescreen, and his lovely ladyfriend Leigh Ann. Sadly, they didn’t make the after party, which I stupidly didn’t anticipate as a possibility, so I hung out with them barely at all. (In fact, I didn’t even get to say hello to Leigh Ann.) My loss entirely, and the one bitter thing about this year’s otherwise wonderful Fest. Well, that and the traffic ticket.

J.R. Jenks, an old high school pal of mine and Jeff’s. All year Holly has bitched about how he left he sweater at her house after last year’s Fest. I suggested he grab it but leave his current sweater behind in its place. I guess he did, and Holly’s predictable displeasure at this was pretty amusing, particularly after I informed her it was my idea.

(Among those sadly missing were Chris Holland of Stomp Tokyo, my very good friends Kirk and Patty Draut, and Sandy Petersen. The latter three put me up when I go to Texas for T-Fest—the Drauts when I arrive in Houston, the Petersens before I leave from Dallas—which will happen (at least) twice this year. I wish I could have returned the favor, although it would admittedly have been in much lamer fashion.)

It Has Begun

Things officially kicked off on Thursday. Joe arrived in the morning, Andrew in the afternoon, and then Brian and Jeff arrived nearly simultaneously during the early evening. Since Jeff had rented a van, that worked out well, and saved me another trip to the airport.

Having assembled the troops, as it were, we had our traditional pre-Fest dinner at Jameson’s Charhouse. Julie and Tim joined us (after first having gone to the wrong Jameson’s), as did Techmaster Paul and his wife Holly, the hosts for the post-Fest party.

We ate, caught up, chatted, and all that good stuff.

Then Paul and Holly took Brian back to their place, while Joe, Andrew, Jeff and I returned to mine. Andrew had brought me a double bill of typically insane luchadore movies, and we watched Champions of Justice. In this the Blue Demon and several other masked heroes fought a small army—no pun intended—of superpowered midgets. Andrew…likes his midgets. Like J. Wellington Wimpy (or I, for that matter) likes his hamburgers.

I was the only one to not nod off during the movie. Ironically, Andrew dozed off first, although to be fair, he’d seen the movie before. For myself, I had trouble sleeping, and ended up getting about two hours of shuteye before rudely keeping Jeff up all night yakking. Still, it was good hangout time, although I was a bit blitzed the next day (next several days, actually).

Friday

We picked up Brian and Holly, then breakfast at the awesome L&L Snackshop. Bloated with some of the best comfort food known to man, we headed out to grab Andrew the hoagie sandwich which I had failed to procure for him eight years earlier, and which I was still hearing about. We hit a local German deli, and Andrew had his sandwich constructed, while Jeff picked up some choice meats. (Including a pound or more of quite delicious ham, which was left behind for my ongoing dining pleasure this week.)

Due to meet Julie and Tim at Superdawg that afternoon, we were actually pressed for time after grabbing the ice for the coolers and getting the cars packed. Even so, we made good time, and got to Superdawg in good order. Then it was on to the Northwestern campus. We had to time it right, because you can’t park in the public lot until 4:00 or you’ll be ticketed, which actually happened to Julie and Tim a few years ago when they parked there like 20 minutes early.

The gate blocking the road to the Norris Center was in place, so we had to schlep all the gear up the hill. Luckily we had Andrew with us, who has the strength of twenty sherpas. And really, if that was the worst snag the whole weekend—and it was, other than getting a friggin’ hundred dollar red light camera ticket—I can’t really complain. Best of all, although it was cold, it wasn’t super cold, and there was zero snow all weekend. I’ll take that anytime.

We got our tickets, got situated, and then…show time.

Crippled Masters (1979)

I had never seen this flick before, partly because I’m kind of a baby on many matters, including deformities. CM stars two naturally deformed guys as fellows who respectively lose their arms and legs to an evil kung fu master. (Despite supposedly having his arms shorn off with a sword, the one guy sports a vestigial hand up near his shoulder.) Needless to say, the two join forces and develop personalized martial arts techniques that finally allow them to kill the villain. Oops, sorry.

Heartbeeps (1981)

Good grief. This was sponsored by an evil bastard (who however was brave enough to show up in person, and wearing a tux, no less) who also sponsored Sextette, a film that has given Andrew conniptions in the past. This was another unfunny comedy, which faithful Jabootu readers know is my personal cinematic Kryptonite. However, the sound system was turned down so low for this one that I couldn’t hear the lines (and I was in the front row), so I was able to basically ignore the film and just sort of keep on an eye on the visuals. Even that was appalling—I mean, a movie starring Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters as lovable robots—but I was definitely shielded from the full effect of this turkey. The most amusement was afforded by Andrew, who registered his vast displeasure with the film in constant, loud, and vulgar fashion. The sole highlight of the film was an appearance by Dick Miller, which is always fun. The film was so lame, though, that subsequent cameos by Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel moved me not at all. A very young Christopher Guest and Randy Quaid were in there somewhere too. Otherwise, bored for any other distraction, Liz and I cooed over the occasion rabbit or whatever that hit the screen. I’m a sucker for cute animals. Oh, and there was a brief appearance by a bear—probably Bart—so that was quite cool. This is one of those films where you wonder exactly how many days into shooting it was that everyone realized the movie would be an absolute debacle.

Gymkata (1985)

I’ve always found Gymkata a bit boring, save for three or four really inspired stupidities. (Hard to believe it was directed by the guy who made Enter the Dragon.) However, placing after Heartbeeps made it look like Citizen Kane. I personally wouldn’t have played two martial arts films within one movie of each other—‘balance’ being my holy grail at B-Fest—but it worked OK. (Lucky, though, that the Fest’s would be third martial arts movie, American Ninja 2, apparently wasn’t available. That would have been easily one too many.) Babyfaced Olympic gold medalist gymnast Kurt Thomas learns Gymkata—according to the film’s tagline, “The Skill of Gymnastics / The Kill of Karate”—in service of some absolutely retarded Reagan-era plot about winning a deadly contest in some podunk Slavic country where the US wants to put a missile tracking base, or something. This specialized martial art is rather ridiculous, in that it requires the fortuitous appearance of chalked parallel bars and pommel horses all over the place, as well as featuring zillions of back flips and suchlike. I thought martial arts were about economy of movement? Not this one.

Whereas the sound was too low (although that worked out to my benefit) for Heartbeeps, they overcompensated by turning it up way too high for this one. Even with ear plugs my ears were ringing.

The Wizard of Speed of Time

The sound was finally corrected (whew!), and we got several showings of this B-Fest perennial; regular, backward and upside down, etc. Great stuff.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

The living heart of B-Fest, although it wasn’t originally scheduled (or so I’m told). However, as in years of yore, I took advantage of the fact that I’ve seen this like literally 40 times to grab some sleep. First, though, I cocooned myself in my fleece throws to protect myself from any errant paper plates, which sail through the air by the hundreds or even thousands to simulate whenever one of Plan 9’s patently string-supported flying saucers hits the screen.

The Room (2003)

And so I finally saw it. This is the modern Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Plan 9, a reportedly hilariously awful vanity flick that’s been playing packed midnight shows across the country. In Hollywood, it draws stars who come to mock it and, hopefully, learn something about what not to do. I’d bought the DVD a while ago, but hadn’t gotten around to watching it yet. Frankly, this presented a best case scenario for doing so. As noted, The Room is a vanity project for one Tommy Wiseau, a cross between Fabio and Christopher Walken (his line reads are atrocious) who is probably the worst actor / writer / director / producer combo since Ed Wood. Yes, the hype for this one is pretty legitimate. Clearly adapted from a play, The Room (which takes place in several rooms, although maybe it was set in one room in the play, but if so, maybe they should have changed the friggin’ title when they expanded the action just a little) is the highly repetitive tale of Johnny (Wiseau), who is deeply in love with the less than faithful Lisa. The woman playing Lisa can’t act either, although she’s not QUITE as bad as Wiseau in the thesping department, and apparently was hired on the strength of being willing to regularly show her boobs in this ridiculous feature. Indeed, in like the first twenty minutes of the movie we get three fairly explicit ‘love’ scenes, each of which is accompanied by its own atrocious pop ballad. The films were shown on DVD this year, and this allowed for them to run the subtitles during the songs and let the audience sing along. It was pretty enjoyable. The film is really about two or three scene which are endlessly repeated until it’s time for the inevitable ‘tragic’ climax. This particular climax made me suspect some lady had wounded Wiseau’s heart at some point, and that this was his fantasy comeuppance to her. In any case, we keep hearing from everyone about how wonderful Johnny is, which proves the most dubious Informed Attribute I’ve seen in a loooong time. Also, I’m pretty sure we got the meaning of “But I’m Johnny’s best friend” the first six times that guy said it. And enough with that freakin’ football already! And why the hell was everyone wearing a tux in that one scene?! Ye gods!

By the way, Brian found this link. Check this out!

Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987)

To my eternal pleasure, Liz was sitting next to me during this, and thus I was able to drink in her literal rapture during this. HTtH is the (I think) second Andy Sidaris film. Sidaris ran ABC’s huge Wide World of Sports franchise, before retiring down to Hawaii and making with his wife a series of pretty fun (because they know EXACTLY what they are) ludicrous spy dramas mostly concerned with jamming as many gadgets and Penthouse Playmate naked boobs on the screen as possible. Liz about fell over when one bad guy is thrown high in the air after being hit by a car, whereupon one good guy (these films have huge casts, allowing for lots and lots of breasts and bodies) produces a rocket launcher and explodes the guy in midair. That’s a trademark Sidaris scene right there. This film is the favorite of many, though, for including a killer snake—a simply wonderfully bad puppet that often has blood in its mouth for now reason—who not only is a killer snake, but has been (wait for it) CONTAMINATED WITH CANCER-INFECTED RAT TOXINS. When this line was read, I was already watching for Liz’s reaction, and she assumed about the most beatific facial expression I’ve ever seen and stood, arms outstretched, like Tim Robbins standing beneath the purifying rain in The Shawshank Redemption. The snake (which sadly is a bit underused) later literally explodes from a toilet, as accented by dry ice clouds and a hidden klieg light. Sedaris’ flicks used to be constant cable fodder, but are still worth tracking down for those who aren’t going to by annoyed by the constant, highly gratuitous nudity.

There’s no link for this one because each of the numerous Andy Sidaris sets seems to have sold out immediately, with used copies going for up to hundreds of bucks on Amazon. The lesson: The next time one pops up, buy it fast.

Black Shampoo (1976)

Like most Blaxploitation films, pretty fun. As you’d expect from the title, it’s a blaxploitation knock-off of Warren Beatty’s Shampoo, about a hair dresser who has sex with all his customers. This one just tosses in a more typical blaxploitation mobster angle, adding violence to the mix. Needless to say, this one attempts to best its model by making him even more of a stud; whereas Beatty at one point hooks up with a teenage Carrie Fisher, the hero here hooks up with two teenage sisters. And, of course, the fact that this black stud sleeps with so many white women is meant to a) blow the minds of us racist whites, and b) provide amused empowerment to black dudes in the audience. Anyway, I’d seen it before, and also never got past the cruelty of one comic character being sodomized to death with a hot curling iron. Ick. Anyway, I needed some sleep, so I grabbed it here.

The Adventure of Buckaroo Banzai (1984)

Joe told me he thought I’d want to sleep during this one, but that’s because he’s the wrong age. This came out when I was in high school, and was a huge favorite with my crowd. I am one of many who still mourns the fact that (like Remo Williams with Fred Ward) the film itself announced a sequel that never appeared. Still, we’ll always have this one. One of the great ‘80s casts (Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Clancy Brown, Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, Christopher Lloyd, more) brings great panache to this New Wave update of the pulp era icon Doc Savage. This was written directed by the same guy who wrote Big Trouble in Little China, another film I simply adore, and have all of the same strengths. It was fun to see this in a theater again. By the way, they run the first couple of reels out of order, and it didn’t really matter very much. That was kind of strange. The cast shout out at the end, as they march around in a concrete river bed under the end credits, is a classic. This film, like girls, just wanted to have fun. And it did.

Troll 2 (1990)

Boy, did this suck. How much? Well, there aren’t actually any trolls in it. There are goblins, which they could have called trolls and no one would have been the wiser, but apparently they didn’t think of that. I mean, I don’t know, a movie with ‘troll’ in the title should have a troll in it, right? The whole thing is about an ‘80s TV show-ish family that goes on vacation after renting a rural house, and it turns out the entire population of said town is made up of disguises goblins, and all they have to do to take over people is have them eat something contaminated with goblin juice, which is nearly always, but not entirely always, disguised as something green like green frosting. The lead young boy character (who is advised Yoda-like by his grandfather’s ghost, at least when the ghost isn’t manifesting in the hero’s sister’s room by mistake) at one point saves the family by peeing on all the food. Anyway, if you actually eat the food, you either turn into a tree or else into green glop that the ‘goblins’ pretend to eat, despite the fact that their quite lame masks feature immobile mouths. Oddly, the goblins are highly allergic to meat, so they are the rare evil menace that can be foiled by waving a slice of ham at them. There’s also a witch so over the top that she quite nearly, although not quite, gave Johnny Wiseau a run for the event’s bad acting honors. Certainly not as fun as such ‘80s craptastic classics as Rock ‘n’ Nightmare or ROTOR, but pretty awful none the less.

Live It Up! (1963)

A sadly dull example of the kids like rock ‘n’ roll flicks like Don’t Knock the Rock. The Brits made a lot of these, and this was one of them, although their films tend to feature rock and Dixieland jazz, which was also popular across the pond at the time. I was hoping this was one of the ones Richard Lester (who helmed the genre’s genuine classic, A Hard Day’s Night with the Beatles), as his movies are hilarious and feature pretty good music. This was pretty dull, though, with no bands or music you could recognize. The working class Brit accents were often impenetrable, although at least one character did say “Cor, blimey,” so that was awesome. Oddly, all the music is presented realistically (meaning we see the bands playing their instruments or such), except for one song a girl sings with music coming out of nowhere, like in a regular musical. Odd. The funniest part was when the hero gets knocked on the head with a box at a music studio (he is unhurt), this becomes front page news in the next day’s paper! Anyway, I like as many genres as possible at B-Fest, but this was about the lamest entry in this particular sort of film. Next year they should try Lester’s It’s Trad, Dad! If they can find a copy of it.

Fiend Without a Face (1958)

Well, you can’t beat this one. This is almost a prototypical ‘50s sci-fi cheapie trying, and in this case succeeding, in fighting above its weight class. (Perhaps explaining why it’s one of the few schlock films to rate a Criterion Collection DVD release.) The film is best remembered for its incredibly awesome climax, in which the previous invisible menaces are revealed to be stop-motion brains that leap around and spatter lovingly when struck by .45 caliber bullets. It also boasts a nice, tidy running time (74 minutes), a gorgeous lead actress in Kim Parker, and atmospheric lighting art designed for mood rather than logic. But it’s those leaping, personality-laden brains that keep you coming back. Great stuff.

Sextette (1978)

I’ve had my say on this movie here on the site, maybe the only ‘comedy’ I’ve reviewed here. Andrew has a history with this film (the “Love Will Keep Us Together” number once drove him to crawl beneath my mom’s coffee table), and made his displeasure known on a pretty much continual basis. I could only join him with perennial loud moans of horror, however, as we watched the mummified, 86 year-old Mae West spew out a constant stream of raunchy double entendres, such as when she enters an elevator and speaks of “going down.” The film was pretty much summed up when one young lady in the audience was heard to shout in a justifiably agonized tone, “Grandma, why?!” Meanwhile, you could pretty much divide the old-timer attendees like me from the actual college students in attendance by whether they had any friggin’ clue as to who, say, one out of zillion guest stars Rona Barrett was.

War of the Robots (1978)

Like Live It Up!, this was a film that proved to be about the worst example of a promising genre. All Italian space operas in my experience don’t make a lick of sense, but most of them, like 2 + 5 Mission Hydra or War of the Planets, are Green Slime-esque campy fun. This one was traditionally incomprehensible, but incredibly boring to boot. One typical scene involved the heroes firing lasers at a squad of golden wigged (I guess) robots. They shot them all, than another wave of robots appear, and they are shot, and so on for at least five straight minutes. And the final, endless ‘space battle’ was similar lame. This won my personal prize for the worst film of the year, and given the unprecedented competition, that’s a well-earned crown. The B-Fest guys should try this sort of thing again next year, only go with one of the titles I listed above, or maybe Doomsday Machine. That would be awesome. As it was, it was our last serving of Deep Hurting.

The Giant Claw (1957)

The first film ever reviewed at Jabootu, or, as it was known back then, Ken’s World of Awful Movies. What more can I say about this one? It was as fun as a battleship.

Summation:

The line-up was pretty good, especially since it was *gulp* pretty unbalanced. Of 14 movies, only four were in black and white, and three of those played in the final five slots. In other words, we had eight of the first nine movies were in color, starting with the first film. They could have broken those up better, I think, and I certainly would have had at least a couple more black and whites.

Indeed, they had at least one other originally scheduled, but it was Bert I. Gordon’s Earth vs. the Spider. That’s a neat little number, Gordon’s best movie, I think, and one I prefer to Universal’s comparatively more opulent Tarantula.

Even so, that means that there would have been three ‘50s black and white monster movies (not counting Plan 9, a ‘50s black and white alien invasion / zombie movie), which again is too many. Especially since again EvtS had been scheduled to play near the end of the program, thus mushing four black and white movies into the final five slots, following eight of nine movies having been color ones. Surely had EvtS shown up, it would have been better to stick that or Fiend Without a Face into the first slot in place of Crippled Masters, or in the third slot in place of Gymkata.

Also unbalanced were the periods represented. We had three films from the ‘50s, one from the ‘60s, four from the ‘70s, four from the ‘80s, one from the ‘90s, and one from the ‘Aughts. That actually makes it sound more balanced than it is. Three of the ‘70s movies were made in ’78 and ’79, the one from the ‘90s in 1990. So eight of the fourteen movies, more than half, were made in a thirteen year period. I realize that the guys running the Fests are now roughly 25 years younger than I am (and that gap will increase each year),* and I love cheesy films from the ‘80s too, but that’s just too many.

All that said, it remained a strong slate. It helped that there was a solid bench of Deep Hurting flicks, three solid painmeisters in Heartbeeps, The Room, Sextette and War of the Robots. Films like that add spice to the proceedings, and help make mediocre flicks (Gymkata, Live It Up!) look better than they are in comparison. It also helped that American Ninja 2 and Earth vs. the Spider fell through, more because of the sorts of films they are rather than because of their respective deficiencies. Indeed, I’d love to see them there next year, assuming they aren’t again crowded by similar choices.

On paper I would have been a lot more suspicious than the line-up actually warranted. There was a chemistry there I wouldn’t have been able to anticipate. Well done, chaps, whether that chemistry resulted from planning or just happenstance.

The other big change appeared to be regular usage of DVD projection. That means that in the future a LOT more films will be available to show, since a lot more movie are available to rent on DVD these days than on actual film. What you lose in that ethereal quality film stock delivers you more than make up for in terms of how diverse of a slate you can develop. Hell, maybe this will allow for the return of the former B-Fest mainstay The Creeping Terror.

Finally, there were a whopping six films I hadn’t seen before. That might be a record throughout twenty-plus Fests, actually. If not, it’s pretty close.

By the way, for those who haven’t heard, Chris Holland and Scott Hamilton have officially put Stomp Tokyo to rest. They are currently working solo albums. As such, for the first time in many years, there weren’t official Stomp Tokyo giveaway glasses. (I have a complete set, I think.) So what did the kids at A&O Films do? They bought a bunch of disposable plastic cups, wrote a wacky slogan on each one along with “B-Fest 2010,” and handed those out instead. That’s very cool.

And that’s that. Another Fest in the books.

The Beginning of the End

The event done, it was packing up all the gear and heading back to Paul and Holly’s house in Rolling Meadows. There he had the traditional Gino’s East deep dish pizza (I also bought some Portillo’s Italian beef sandwiches, which were cut up for appetizers), watched bad YouTube videos, and yakked. On my end, Ian, Brian and I had one of those college-esque hours long gabbing sessions about Politics and Philosophy and the Nature of Man and the like. This went to about midnight, when exhaustion hit. (By the way, Brian managed to stay up during the entire B-Fest, something I’ve never managed. That dude is a machine.) Joe and I split, but Jeff and Andrew were still going strong, so they stayed behind. I think they eventually tumbled into my place about 2:30 AM.

The next day we got a real treat. Andrew (with Jeff’s aid) took over Paul and Holly’s kitchen and made omelets and his signature, personal-recipe pancakes for a good dozen people. And they lived up to their reputation, I can hereby avow.

Fortified by these comestibles, it was time to start doing some airport runs. Brian was off first, then pretty much immediately upon my return, it was Andrew’s turn. (Naturally the flights were space just enough that you couldn’t drop two people off at one time, because the second person would have gotten there about four hours early.) Then Jeff had to leave before we got back—he had the rental van to return—so sadly I missed getting to say goodbye to him. However, he phoned me a few days later and said it was a good thing he left when he did, because they were really beating the security drum at the airport and he needed all two hours he’d afforded himself.

Joe wasn’t due to leave until Monday, which was great. We hung out with Paul and Holly that night. Then Monday we got up in time for another L&L Snackshop run (having had too many sweets over the weekend, I forwent my normal French toast in favor of bacon and eggs). Then it was time to take Joe to the airport, and then, finally, I was able to go home and crash. I won’t say I slept for the next 24 hours, but I slept for a good amount of it.

And that was that. 2010 is in the books. Here’s to 2011.

Bonus: Here’s Brian’s B-Fest write-up.