B-FEST 2024: Just remember - don't do drugs, because B-Fest may just rip your face off

 I've chosen to primarily nerd out about music on this here blog.  But once a year, I channel my energies into an annual celebration of bad and weird cinema at B-Fest, a 24+-hour B-movie marathon that I've been attending almost continually since 2004.  The event happens in the Norris student center on the Northwestern University campus and draws basically a small self-selecting group of weirdos who think it's fun to watch weird movies in a group setting.  I try to compile my thoughts and recollections.

Lest anyone think that the fact that I'm not actually much of a movie person could lead me to not take this event seriously, I'll note that I was at a meeting in Colorado that I only signed up to go to once clear that it wouldn't conflict with B-Fest, and I got up at 0545 missing the last few talks on Fri morning specifically so I could go to B-Fest.  And further, when my flight from Denver was delayed six hours such that I'd miss the first few hours of the Fest, I immediately started making phone calls to get on an earlier flight at my own expense so that I could speed out to not only get there in time, but to have a left-aisle seat in the theater picked out and food in hand before the first movie.  So, I'd say there's commitment there.

Sadly, my wife (nicknamed "Ms. Tweet" in past writeups) seems about done with joining in this particular ritual, so I managed to rope my brother (“J” here) in instead.  He made it well into the overnight, doing about six movies over about ten hours without taking any breaks - pretty solid showing for a first-timer.

This year's B-Fest went a full twenty-five hours.  I'd been concerned upon seeing the lineup that there wouldn't be time for everything; turns out the organizers were expecting it to go that long from the beginning.  So I was pleased to see a schedule posted on the doors with the films in a mostly much better order and with the end slotted for 1845 on Saturday.  Other than the last movie being about 15 minutes longer than appreciated, everything was on schedule.  Here's what we watched:

 

Stunt Rock (1978)

One of two non-Plan 9 repeaters for me.  Usual first movie inaudibility - everyone is anxious to get out every zinger they can think of – so I was glad to have the subtitles, and sad not to hear the allegedly heavy metal stylings of Sorcery.  There are stunts, mostly but not exclusively from better movies, and there is a rock show that feels the need to embellish its songs about sex and heartbreak with a wizard immolating the "Prince Of Darkness" in various ways (leading to some "mur-der!" chants from us).  The back-and-forth chants of "STUNT!" and "ROCK!" started before the movie, but didn't really last as a festival-length running gag that way I expected. 

Maybe due to the audio situation, I had to change my allegiance: last time we saw this, I was on Team Rock.  But since the band is so one-note whilst the archival footage is legitimately pretty impressive, I'm now Team Stunt.

One of the first scenes featuring real-life stunt guy Grant Page has a character call out that he's not much of an actor and that nobody sane would build a script around him, so, *shrug*.  J and I had fun with the closed captions identifying "[heavy metal music]" and "[dramatic music]" seemingly at random, causing us to spend the next few movies asking what kind of music the soundtrack should be classified as.

 

Hot Potato (1975)

A mind-numbing second movie quickly staked its claim to be the most tedious thing imaginable, although it'd get plenty of competition later.  Jim Kelly leads a rescue mission to save a senator's daughter from a warlord in Thailand or, uh, something, that entails him and his small group getting involved in 500 similar fight scenes.  All of the henchgoons attack one at a time, and none lands a single blow on one of the good guys, ever.  One of the good guys is the designated Odious Comic Relief Fat Guy who's introduced eating (and apparently driving his, uh love interest?  Eating competition opponent? into keeling over, with nobody expressing any concern or the movie ever showing that other character again) and is constantly getting into "wacky" fights with one of the other good guys.  After about five hours, the movie finally ends, and then its credits run through "highlights" of what we just watched, leaving us to wonder if we would ever be free of Hot Potato.  Notable for lack of explanation for why the movie was called Hot Potato, much to J's irritation.  Some attempted to start "stunt"/"rock" chants during every fight scene or explosion but were thwarted by some of us insisting on responding with "potato!" and continuing to do so all Fest long.

 

Wonder Women (1973)

The organizers for the most part came up with a pretty great order of movies, but I did have to question putting the international '70s action-thriller right after the international '70s action thriller.  This time the Asian villain (it's always an Asian villain in this sort of movie) is the brilliant Dr. Tsu, whose work on transplants causes her to raise an all-female Charlie's Angels style army for some reason to help her kidnap athletes for their organs.  I expected the suave spy hero to be way more smarmy and annoying than he was, but I have to wonder whether I was mostly willing to forgive the movie a lot for not being Hot Potato.  I mean, it's impossible to take a movie particularly seriously when it pauses its climax to have its villainess hook up its hero to what can only be described as a "brain-sex machine," or a movie whose alleged badass assassins dress in tiny outfits designed for maximum concentration of panty shots.  But it has something resembling a plot, and the sets are pretty good, and you always know where a character is in relation to the others during a fight scene.  B-Fest very quickly leads one to stop being picky.  There are of course a million action setpieces, my favorite coming when the henchman-turned-eventual-love interest attacks our hero in a state of pre-coital undress, pulling throwing stars and the like out of concealed spots in undergarments, that then devolves into a chase scene in which they both steal tour minibuses and plow through crowded streets and markets.  Either the vehicles or the soundtrack includes a "beep beep" sound that led me to make a Roadrunner reference that retrospectively seemed funnier every time we heard the “beep beep,” like clockwork every fifteen seconds or so, for the remainder of this very very long sequence.

Sadly we don't have the technology to run a short backwards and upside down unless it's on film, but we did still get in a couple showings of the traditional The Wizard Of Speed And Time, about an hour earlier than usual.  It's a dwindling group who hop on stage to run along with the Wizard, but hopefully I'll be one of that group until arthritis or death prevent it.

 

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

Starting at 2310 or so rather than the traditional 0000, P9FOS remains a classic.  I hadn't seen it at B-Fest in close to five years now taking into account the missing years, and it's always worth showing a newbie like my brother a Fest Plan 9, with the rain of paper plates and the “Bela”/”not Bela” chants and so on.  We got a new on-stage representation of the "explanation" of the solarmite bomb, too.  It's easy to forget when joining in the B-Fest rituals, but it is worth noting that the "plot" of this movie concerns a group of aliens who decide that, in order to prevent Earth from developing a dangerous weapon that will destroy the universe, they will force humanity to acknowledge them by animating three zombies.  That is the major narrative thrust of this movie.  Just saying.

 

Demonic Toys (1992)

This year's B-Fest was the first to feature films from Puppet Master makers Full Moon Films, and it had two of them from the early '90s.  I wasn't much looking forward to Demonic Toys because I don't love killer toy movies.  But this wasn't too loud or shrill.  Just a few demonic toys, but why one is a bear and one a clown and so on I'm not sure.  The kills were gruesome with lots of faces getting ripped off.  It did feature a security guard introduced getting chicken delivery and drinking on the job - he of course lived a long full life.  And a character who just appeared out of the walls to give exposition before getting killed.  And an estimated 500 scenes in which the cop hero is locked in a small room with a minor character who's constantly antagonizing her.  Anyway, it's a killer toy movie with lots of gore.  I was barely conscious by this point, and everything starts getting hazy in my memory around this point of the event, so I had little to add, then or now.  I actually got my personal biggest reaction to a riff of the night, but it wasn't anything especially clever - just a well timed The Room style "oh hai, Mark."  (One of the characters was called Mark.)

 

Hard Rock Zombies (1984)

There were a few movies this year that were not exactly as advertised on the tin.  I thought I'd know what Hard Rock Zombies had to offer - a small town has an unpleasant run-in with a band, and a girl brings them back from beyond the grave to unleash vengeance.  Straightforward, right?  Well, not so much.  First of all, after a bunch of copious sleazy nudity, the band (who's the sort of "hard rock" band that Sorcery fans deride as pop poseurs) are murdered as far as I could tell not just by stereotypical yokels but by a witch girl who seduces before chopping off people's hands and storing them in jars.  After I nodded off for about fifteen minutes - don't worry, J assured me that the movie is still complete nonsense even if you watch every minute - the band are brought back by one of their love interests, who looks like she's about eleven (this is somehow not the creepiest element of the film).  But there are also zombie versions of the mean rednecks too.  And I don't think anyone in the sleep-deprived theater was quite ready for that moment when, midway through, a weird patriarch guy who's spent the movie giving weird speeches, has his face melt off, revealing itself as a mask, revealing an infamous mustache underneath, and yes, it is Hitler, becoming a central figure in an '80s rock-zombie movie.  Normally one thinks that "it was Hitler all along" would be the final crazy-ass reveal of a crazy-ass movie, but no, we're just getting started.  Amidst the small-town groups of Nazis and the mercifully uncaptioned rants about "die Juden" and "die Schwartzen," we get a bunch of gratuitous violence including one zombie, separated from everything else, who spends most of the movie eating itself even after it no longer has a stomach (because it's eaten it).  After learning that - and this is an actual line of dialogue - "ghouls hate heads the way Satan hates the Church," some ill-fated characters to try to avoiding zombies by holding photographs of dead celebrities in front of their faces.  The soundtrack for the zombie rampage varies from alleged "rock" to background synth music to soft keyboard and xylophone tunes - Tristian and I agreed that with age they all become soft-rock zombies eventually.  Lots of appropriately gruesome deaths, some with beheadings, some with face ripping.  I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot, but being half-asleep and unable to really process what I was seeing was the appropriate state in which to view one of the most incoherent and stupidest things I've ever seen.  Ah, B-Fest.  Don't ever change.

 

The Chilling (1989)

So, a human-cryogenics company in Kansas City is up to no good, as one expects.  Here I was entertained by the setup more than the eventual monster shenanigans.  A guy trying to preserve his worthless son is eased towards the truth by a conscientious employee who I announced had hair that was at war with itself (it was the '80s), and the movie feels the need to show every moment of their phone conversations agreeing to meet up at point B, and every moment of the car trips from point A to point B.  A couple of low-level employees are caught in a state of partial undress making out rather than doing whatever job they're supposed to be doing, leaving the woman to exclaim (after the boss glowers his way out of the scene) "I think he knows!"  Things culminate when a citywide storm described as a winter storm yet consisting mostly of rain and thunder (?) knocks out power, and, as one does, workers drag the cryogenic capsules out into the storm to keep them cool (?) and they one at a time get struck by lightning and glow green, as often tends to happen.  From there it's another zombie movie, I think, and I lasted long enough to decide that the movie wasn't going to give me anything else to work with, and grabbed a full-on nap in my chair for basically the third act.  Honestly couldn't tell you whether anyone gets their face ripped off in this one. 

I did wake up in time to catch the credits, which credit the same people for the same things multiple times and include a steady progression of more and more minor accreditations until they're thanking seemingly every vendor that anyone ever bought a sandwich from while working on The Chilling.  I don't think it was camp; I think it was just the movie displaying its characteristic level of attention to detail and understanding of an audience's needs.

 

Runaway (1984)

Even more '80s schlock!  Runaways, though, was the designated movie that verged on being good, such that one might actually voluntarily watch it in a non B-Fest setting.  Someone's reprogramming all the helpful machines to kill people, and a cop has to act as sleuth and action hero whilst protecting his son and overcoming his fear of heights.  It's an action movie like many others, and by B-Fest standards it seemed like a masterpiece.  I took my final extended nap here, voluntarily lying down on the floor in front of the seats (first time I've ever tried that) because I knew I needed the sleep.  Just missed the early parts, and then was in good shape to catch the rest of the movie, and the rest of the Fest.

 

A Boy And His Dog (1975)

Going into B-Fest, I figured that ABAHD, a post-apocalyptic "slightly kinky tale of survival," would easily “win” worst-of-Fest.  It lived down to my expectations completely.  When you have '70s pretentiousness mixed with '70s nihilism (there are no sympathetic characters) mixed with long stretches of "nothing has ever happened or ever will happen," you have a movie that conjures up unfond memories of the likes of Zardoz.  So, here Don Johnson is wandering through the wasteland having no thoughts or desires other than getting laid and arguing with his ugly-looking telepathic dog, who cares only about food and self-preservation to the point where he frequently advocates letting others die.  They're just mean to each other at all times so the whole bond that the movie tries to lean on for pathos falls completely flat.  This is an alleged comedy, but it's such an unpleasant (and boring) world to live in that it's about as funny as Middle East war, or Galaxina.  The Dog's contemptuous reactions to human sex drives did get a few decent sized laughs out of the theater crowd.  (I feel like a dog would be more likely to be defined by constant horniness than a human, but, uh, just go with it?)  This is the sort of movie where, after about nine hours of nothing happening, Don finds the love interest while hunting for sex and takes time to make it abundantly clear that he's getting laid, regardless of how she feels about it... but she's totally into it, being a female character in a sci-fi movie clearly written by men, so, uh, just go with it?  A Boy then leaves his Dog and wanders into a sub-society so loud and garish that the jump-cut made me wonder out loud if we'd suddenly ended up in a different movie, despite knowing that unfortunately we were still watching A Boy And His Dog.  Here the marching bands and green town squares hide a totalitarian society that plan to refresh their genetic material using A Boy - except that to his dismay, there’s no sex involved, they just want to use a machine to pump spunk out of him.  Ha ha?  Here I don't know if we're expected to throw in our lot with A Boy as the one who refuses to trade freedom for security and plenty, or if it's just a nihilistic movie that hates people.  Like I said, no even remotely sympathetic or likeable characters in this world, and that’s allegedly funny. 

As terrible as Hard Rock Zombies was, it was entertaining and did not fill me with a desire to hurt anyone involved in making it.  A Boy And His Dog cannot say that.  Anyway, fuck everyone involved in making this movie, and a special posthumous fuck-you to Harlan Ellison who wrote the novella that inspired the movie yet chose this as the one adaptation of his work to not take his name off.  Fortunately or unfortunately, B-Fest just isn't B-Fest without one of these.

 

We ended too early for breakfast places to be open, but it was a long breakfast break.  I got a chance to change clothes and get in the epic Starbucks line.  Still missed the very beginning of the next film, but got to soak up most of the joys of...

 

The Apple (1980)

Second B-Fest appearance for me of this timeless classic disco musical that takes the bold stand that hippies will save us from the record promoter who's literally the devil.  The songs remain oddly appealing despite being objectively bad as despite its anti-disco message, the movie certainly doesn't mind sharing the output of Boogalow Industrial Music (BIM).  The setpieces are as classic as ever, especially the montage of everyone including critical care docs, firefighters, etc taking breaks for their mandatory "BIM Break."  Audience riffs ranged from the fun ("but, I am Pagliaacci!" in response to an extended sequence involving a sad clown) to the fun-but-predictable ("Do you think there's some kind of metaphor or message here?" during the Eden-themed "Apple" song, "this is a single-entendre" during "Come With Me").   Got a kick out of how willing these morons are to accept drinks from people they allegedly don't trust, and out of how frequently the phrase "come with me" appears in scenes in which the filmmakers no longer want it to be interpreted as a come-on. 

Look, I get that The Apple is both a bad movie and a completely insane one, but my brain doesn't even process it as bad anymore.  I love living in a world in which it exists.  I love seeing where it goes and how audiences react.  So, between that and a caffeine buzz, this was something resembling my happy place and went down nice and easy.

 

The Black Scorpion (1957)

Only non-P9FOS black-and-white film this year.  This was one was as advertised, unless maybe the fact that there are multiple scorpions and not just one.  A volcanic eruption in Mexico somehow creates some (North) American kaiju and tasks a couple of scientists with figuring out a way to kill them.  Scorpions here seemed to be depicted with a mix of stop-motion, which looked quite cool, and puppets, which looked pretty silly.  Some of the closeups got repeated over and over, which both took away from the impressiveness and made me yell "Dormamu, I've come to bargain!" a few times (a Dr. Strange reference that Tim added to the Plan 9 ritual  few years ago).  Otherwise, I thought TBS was pretty tightly constructed within its genre; the action scenes were good, and it helps that none of the characters annoyed me (not even the idiot constantly imperiled kid!).  In the end we honored this movie’s military heroes by chanting "Mex-I-Co!" in place of the usual "U-S-A!"  People around me were praising The Black Scorpion as an underappreciated classic in the canon of giant monster movies from the '50s, and if anyone would be qualified to judge such a thing, it'd be a B-Fest crowd.

 

She-Devils On Wheels (1968)

I was looking forward to this.movie, but it ended up being another one not as advertised on the tin.  Who doesn't want to see Hollywood clutch its pearls whilst giving us the salacious tale of an all-girl motorcycle gang (the "Maneaters") raising hell, fucking and dominating the men who're into that sort of thing and fucking up the men who oppose them?  Unfortunately for fans of movies that aren't so, uh, "sparse," the actual experience of watching She-Devils On Wheels is more like watching a series of vignettes in which a bunch of interchangeable characters do nothing while nothing ever happens or ever will happen.  In the first vignette they very slowly line up for a drag race, briefly razz the kid who isn't a full member of the gang yet, and then very slowly have a race down the road at a speed as sedate as me getting to the goddamn point in one of my twenty-page posts.  Film logo, dissolve-cut to... another vignette that looks just like the last one.  Repeat a bunch of times.  With my coffee wearing off I think I very briefly dozed off here, but it's hard to tell with a movie like this.  I remember some of the tamest teases at orgies ever in which characters just kinda fall asleep on the floor together without taking off any clothes, some off-screen brutalization of one character that seems tasteless given how sedate the movie has been otherwise, and a few very brief cathartic moments of actual action including a beheading (but nobody gets their face ripped off).

She-Devils On Wheels was the movie that got the most enthusiastic "end!" chants this year, co erring at least the last ten minutes.  When the credits finally rolled, people noted that they didn't truly believe that it was finally over and I, thinking I was just being funny, said "there's still the post-credits movie," and someone to my left said "oh yeah, you're right, there is a post-credits sequence."  Sure enough, the "THE END" caption appeared... and then changed to "if you think this is THE END, you don't know the Maneaters" and there was another interminable scene to come.  The dismay in the room was palpable.  So, was this a "better" or "worse" experience than the other particularly bad films this year?  I can't say, but whilst one of the dubious "pleasures" of B-Fest is getting bombarded with something jaw-droppingly horrible overnight while defenses are lowest, another different "pleasure" is loudly hate-watching something with a group.  B-Fest contains multitudes.

 

Lunch break followed, listed on the schedule as 45 minutes for "lunch/raffle."  I skipped the raffle outright and took some screen-free/people-free time to eat and read.

 

The Monkey Hu$tle (1976)

Not what I was expecting here either.  Based on the incredibly cursory research I'd done, I expected a hybrid Blaxpo/musical in which a Chicago neighborhood put on a block party to stop an expressway from being built.  Instead, the block party barely factors into The Monkey Hu$tle, and the funky soundtrack seems to mostly consist of the "we got a monkey hustle goin'" song over and over and over.  The film is ultimately is a bunch of Chicago southside landmarks while the filmmakers give us a romanticized profile of the well, hustle that I guess goes into turning petty theft into an art form.  Sucks to be the record store owner or the easily bamboozled neighborhood cop, though.  Yaphet Kotto and Rudy Ray Moore both chew the scenery with aplomb, and the mix of Black street slang and '70s slang led one Festie to loudly question whether the subtitles had any subtitles available.  We did have a kid here this year, who lasted most of the Fest who did complain that this wasn't a B-movie.  I remember that Tim/Telstar (dressed to impress as usual, BTW) waxed rhapsodic on the film's skill at being a hangout movie, and on Kotto's character emerging as a role model to the teen characters, teaching them a certain work ethic while keeping them away from more serious crime.  I needed some more coffee because the cold drink I bought wasn't taking, but the parts of this I caught I was fine to vibe out with.

Props to Skip and company for their on-stage demonstrations of moving contraband along with the movie.

 

Arcade (1993)

Full Moon film #2, and my own little contribution to the B-Fest endeavor.  A young version of Megan Ward, with minor assistance from an even more ridicuously haired than usual Seth Green, faces the challenge of a video game that's sucking people's souls, as Hollywood imagined games did.  We marveled at the "incredible" graphics that looked like low-rent Tron, thrilled at the "fiendish" puzzles that were basically versions of Labyrinth except with someone telling it all wrong, and goggled at our hero being stymied by vivid scenes of her mom shooting herself in front of her in this family-friendly film.  But don't worry, Megan has an extra life!  

We were entertained by the fact that whenever anyone in this movie is going up stairs to someone's house, we see every step, every time.  I wish my voice carried more, but at least one person up front seemed to appreciate my best line of the Fest.  When Star Trek's John de Lancie (who plays the arcade owner) was flipping through some files or something kept on index cards, I commented that he needed to use his "Q cards." 

I heard many comments afterward like "well, that was certainly a movie," and "yeah, that was terrible."  Point taken.  But Arcade is a bad movie in exactly the way that I find stupidly entertaining, and it sparked the best audience interaction of the late slate.  So I really enjoyed inflicting it on the Fest, and would do it again.  Sorry-not-sorry.

 

Tammy And The T-Rex (1994)

I kinda figured I might never see T&TTR; it can be hard to find.  But here it was, a feel-good wacky comedy about teenage violence culminating in attempted murder, further culminated by a kid having his brain implanted into a robot dinosaur and wreaking murderous vengeance on his way to a tearful reunion with his girlfriend.  As one does.  I know we watch a lot of insane movies at this festival, but I can't really believe that this exists.  Whether or not the movie is a total failure at everything sort of depends on how you define failure.  For example, how do you react to a scene in which a our hero wakes up before the mad scientists can remove his brain under anesthesia, so they just slug him in the face to knock him out?  I mean, I did laugh, and the movie is a comedy.  But it was more of an aghast "can you believe this shit?" laugh.  Audience interaction was mostly limited to shocked laughter at the film's excesses.  I remember some dismayed reactions to one character (a villain, to be sure) dropping a slur to refer to the superfluous gay best friend.

This was the "gore cut," an early cut of the movie that goes over the top with the fountains of blood, still more faces getting ripped off, and so forth; later it was re-cut to be theoretically pitched at a younger demographic.  Also the title card and the credits in our version of the film call the title character "Tanny."  

 

Well, the last movie was a little grueling just because it was 1900 by the time things finally wrapped up.  Twenty-five hours is a lot of B-Fest.  But honestly, I'd be fine if these 24-"plus"-hour Fests become the norm.  I'm a glutton for too much of a good thing. 

 

Ephemera:

- Seemed like a bigger crowd this year than last, like the Fest has reverted to its usual baseline size.

- As I note every year, it's a different crop of student organizers every year, so what they get right and wrong is always different.  Highlight of the way things were run this year was showing the end credits of almost every movie rather than cutting them off - much appreciated.  Lowlight was the schedule being just so packed that there wasn't much time to breathe between movies, turn on the lights, mingle, decompress... just boom, into the next one.

- We were told they'd put on the captions/subtitles for "every movie we can."  That ended up being a scattered mix here and there.  I've definitely come to appreciate having them.

- Running joke that I can't say I actually “got,” but was impossible to ignore:  Every time, and I do I mean every time, that a character took a phone call (and on various other occasions too), Tim would, as the caller, ask "have you heard the Good News about Joe Meek?"  By about the third time, the customary response from surrounding Festies had solidified into "YES, Tim!"  *shrug*

- There was a street kid coordinating the assassinations of people early in one movie who abruptly disappeared after a few scenes.  I had no memory of the character's existence until reminded during a conversation about the films many hours later.  And I could not for the life of me remember whether that subplot was from Hot Potato or Wonder Woman.  The weird side shit just all blurs together.

- Stunt Rock was the first movie sponsored by a group called the Racine Guys that I didn't think was the weak point of the whole experience; I usually have their picks marked as lowlights.  Sorry, I'm sure you're very nice Racine Guys, I just usually hate your movie choices.  (This year's was fine!)  Meanwhile, She-Devils On Wheels was sponsored by our newbie from last year, Hannah, who's become a core shaper of the B-Fest experience in record time.

- Being in Evanston on my own after Fest meant that I eschewed the usual post-Fest meal with Ms. Tweet and instead joined in the post-Fest breakfast-for-dinner meal with the group of casual friends formerly known as the BMMB group.  It takes more than a hour and a half to get served food when you're a group of 25-ish on a Saturday night, but it was worth it.  Well Fested, gentlemen and ladies.

 

- Best of Fest (as a B-Fest movie):  The Apple.  What can I say?  I love The Apple in a barely-ironic-anymore way.

- Best of Fest (as an actual movie):  Runaway

- Worst of Fest:  A Boy And His Dog (barely edging out about five other candidates)

- This year's C.J. Cherryh book:  Alliance Rising (with Jane Fancher)

This was one of the great ones.  ‘Till next year!