B-FEST 2025: Are you outta your mind?!

The once a year occasion in which I blog about a weirdo movie festival!  For those somehow here through music, this one specific post is not about music; it's about an annual B-movie festival that I've been attending since 2004.  For those here specifically to read about B-Fest, hi, I'm Benjamin, this is my blog.  Normally I nerd out about rock music and try to put my impressions into words.  I like to think that I blog about the most random assortment of rock-related topics possible.  So, I'm close to the end of a series about my first listens to each and every album by indie-rock institution The National, and I've also written at length about my discovery of folk/death-metal greats Eluveitie, and I've also also done an album-by-album deep dive/fawning hagiography about the music of Scottish prog-rock writer and singer Fish.  More recently, I've just started up a series of posts going through Warren Zevon's discography, and a different series of posts exploring my conflicted relationship with the sub-genre of power metal.  So, yeah, that's normally what's for perusal here at http://isverbose.com

I've said many, many times that I'm not a movie person, really, I'm a B-Fest person.  Watching these particular sorts of films in February (or late Jan) in this particular auditorium on the Northwestern campus with this particular crowd is itself the subject of my nerdery.  Definitely an incredible way to take a break from a stressful time.  Now I am not only a regular sponsor, but have introduced my own retinue of hopefully frequent flyers to this ritual - my brother J making his second appearance, and actual legit movie buff Chris making his first - trying to pay it forward.

Every year B-Fest seems to be defined by some technical hiccup or other, and this time besides a bunch of last-minute shuffles and snafus, the big thing was that there was no film lineup released in advance.  Even as a high and mighty sponsor, I only knew the prelim schedule because I e-mailed specifically asking for the lineup.  Many Festies were going on the strength of the B-Fest name alone, and I definitely heard from a few who first learned the film lineup upon seeing it taped to the door on the way ino the student center.  Adding to the hilarity, we got an e-mail blast announcing the lineup something like halfway through the first movie.  Naturally, we responded by constantly yelling out riffs about it - a character picks up a phone, "no, they still haven't announced the B-Fest lineup," that sort of thing.  It probably seemed funnier in the moment than it actually was.  You had to be there.

But you know what else was funny?  Watching movies at B-Fest!  The film lineup that was announced in medias res was as follows:

Sheba, Baby (1975)

I was excited to see Pam Grier return to B-Fest.  Already oddly positioned as a Friday night movie rather than in the old post-P9FOS blaxpoloitation slot like in the old days, Sheba, Baby got even more oddly positioned as the opener after a last-minute swap with The Thing That Couldn't Die.  Sadly, SB is minor league blaxpo.  After a sequence of Pam being stylish and walking around Chicago (with the camera really loving her butt), the action then shifts entirely to Louisville where Pam's dad runs afoul of some small time crooks.  She gets involved and in one of the few highlights threatens a guy with an up close and personal car wash, but ultimately the minor villains are all working for a rich white guy with a yacht hosting "lavish" parties for rich white people with spreads that mostly seem to feature Ritz crackers (audience riff - "yeah, definitely a lot of crackers on this boat").  Our hero's plans all seem to involve ineptly sneaking into places, getting captured immediately, and hoping for one of the villains to screw up.

If nothing else, Sheba, Baby was proof positive that Festies are a weird bunch.  First, when the student organizers announced that they'd do subtitles "for every movie we can," they noted that the only subtitles available on this DVD were French and Spanish, promoting immediate enthusiastic shouts for one language or the other; I voted French, which ended up winning, because it just seemed funnier.  So that made it even a little easier to follow the not exactly convoluted plot (and to note that the translator translated every curse, however minor, as "merde").  Also, the final action sequence involves a harpoon/spear gun, setting up an unintentional running theme when a later film introduced a harpoon.  But most importantly, about twenty minutes into B-Fest, literally right as characters were taking off their clothes for the first sex scene of the festival, we got... a fire alarm!  It took people a moment to realize that this wasn't part of the movie, or a reaction to it.  In retrospect it's actually surprising that in a college building all the years I've been going to the Fest this is the first time that's happened.  So we all filed out to stand outside in the cold and see about twelve fire trucks arrive - I saw not the slightest trace of fire - and we returned to the knowledge that we'd be running really late.  But that ended up as the biggest running joke that would dominate the Fest, even more than the announcing the B-Fest lineup thing.  Every time anything got remotely sexy in that movie, or any other movie, or there was something not sexy that seemed to befit an ironic shout-out - a cavalcade of "Beep!  Beep!  Beep!  Fire alarm!  Fire alarm!" noises from the crowd.  Seriously, every movie got that treatment, for the next day.  

The Thing That Couldn't Die (1958)

I've seen TTTCD a bunch with robots wisecracking over it - my very first episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 way back when - but never in its unadulturated, uh, glory until now.  Of all the dimly shot monster movies about dim people getting menaced by something, this is very much one of them.  Schlock movie bread and butter.  Unsurprisingly, the silly looking mumbling head that hypnotizes people while getting placed on rocks and trees and stuff got most of the laughs, and a steady string of puns as we all tried to get ahead of each other with the riffs.  Tried not to reuse any MST3K gags, and I got some laughs for a "sir, this is a Wendy's" during one of the villain's rants, and more laughs for my (admittedly not original) retitling of the movie as The Thing That Did Die.

At this point, soon to be birthday boy Tim introduced his movie - a repeater from 2019 of one of the best things he's ever sponsored, Truth Or Dare? - A Critical Madness, noting that he's spent half of his life going to B-Fest.  They cued up the DVD.  And we waited through some ads for other cheapo slasher junk that they attempted to skip.  And we learned that this film company's thing is to get DVD viewers stuck in an unskippable preview loop.  We quickly grew to recognize and loathe every one of these trailers until finally after about ten minutes the students gave up and switched to another movie.  Ah, B-Fest tech snafus on top of snafus.  I briefly got the desire to check out Knightmare, a slasher with a killer knight, until a quick post-fest viewing of the full trailer cured me of that one.  Anyway, on to...

Shack Out On 101 (1955)

More black and white '50s joy, but this movie, uh, this movie... it was certainly a filmed thing.  The volume was way down at first, making it even harder to figure out what was allegedly happening, but I gather that the movie is about "Slob," a seemingly inept line cook at a diner who's actually a spy, and various people come in and out of the diner all of whom are actually spies possibly working against each other, and every single guy in the movie is lusting after the waitress and taking every opportunity to get inappropriately handsy with her (we kept count of other appearances of women just to convince ourselves that no, she is apparently not the only woman in the entire town, because the other characters sure act like it).  I think that's the plot.  None of the characters are likable except maybe the waitress, although I'd argue that her telling everyone "I'm onto you, I know you're a spy" and not doing anything else about it is perhaps not the best strategy in this situation.  

Meanwhile, characters wander into the Shack and wander out.  The film's most famous scene, such that it is, comes early on when two of the guys engage in a bout of shirtless weight-lifting, just using the diner as a gym, as one does, and grabbing each other by different body parts.  Afterwards we spent the next few movies demanding "calves!' every time a movie showed us something sexual, and doing our "beep!  beep!" thing whenever anyone's calf was visible.    Both J and Chris said they ended up surrendering to the movie's particular breed of insanity around the time two characters put on snorkeling gear - I guess they're just excited to have snorkeling gear? - and start stumbling around the diner in their flippers and masks and shooting wooden fish off the walls.  The movie pretty much never leaves the titular Shack, so the effect is like a stage play crossed with a fever dream in which various '50s actors doing various shticks drift through.  

So, was Shack Out On 101 one of the surprise highlights of B-Fest, or was it one of the Fest's nadirs?  Yes.  It was.

Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, we then looped back around (with Tim acting like he was going to do his speech again) to...

Truth Or Dare? - A Critical Madness (1986)

Again, thanks to B-Fest 2019, I'd already seen this brainchild of a nineteen year old with no past experience with movies, marriage, or, well, anything.  I got to live vicariously though others' first taste.  We were prepared to "sing" along to the endless driving sequences (Tim brought an actual steering wheel prop this time with which to march back and forth across the stage) and marvel at our serial killer's ability to hallucinate people inspiring him to maim himself whilst summoning weapons like chainsaws from nowhere to cause gratuitous violence to all, including children.  The bit where the baby in the stroller gets run over got exactly the kind of appalled laughs I was hoping for from those who hadn't seen the movie before.  

Now, I had not remembered that Truth Or Dare? sort of attempts social commentary, like the way our antihero gets released from the psych hospital mostly because they're understaffed and under-budgeted, and then after he's recaptured the arrogant docs remain fixated on "curing" him as their special test case.  J finds there's a certain kick from media that doesn't understand mental health care at all trying to depict it.  Also, at one point the beat cop who's constantly fucking up immolates an innocent man, and the detective running the case responds by calling him a moron a bunch but otherwise continuing to deploy him (me: "I have complete confidence in the Palm Beach PD's internal investigation!").

Other notes:  One minor character being accused of listening to "that jive-ass music" on his headphones inspired a minor running gag to be referenced later in the Fest.  I'd forgotten until J reminded me that an ad popped up on the screen leading to loud audience chants of "upgrade!" and Tim's going up to the screen to "press" the button.  B-Fest attendees are weird.  

Now half an hour behind schedule and surprised that it wasn't longer, we gamely continued on to the annual cardio of "running" along with the super-speedy title character of 1979 short "The Wizard Of Speed And Time."  This year's crop of film kids actually came up with versions of the short upside down and backwards!  I was impressed.  I'd thought that particular bit of shtick would be lost forever when we lost the physical film.  Despite the time crunch, we did a full four showings of the Wizard, in each possible direction and orientation.  

As far as the time crunch goes, though, due to a combination of aggressively skipping credits and jumping straight from movie to movie (and the organizers I guess having built some extra time into the plan), we actually crunched through the overnight slate and got to the breakfast break ahead of schedule!  I was doubly impressed.

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

This was one of the years when I wondered, as I often do, whether B-Fest has maybe outgrown Plan 9.  The rain of paper plates was about the feeblest I've ever seen, although the rest of the engagement seemed to be on par with the usual.  No new comments about the movie otherwise this year that I haven't made during one of my other B-Fests going back to 2004.  It's Plan 9.

Night Of The Comet (1984)

Less B-movie than cult favorite?  I'd never seen it and was able to stay awake for the majority before nodding off towards the end.  After the vast majority of the human population disregards any threat of a comet passing across earth and is wiped out or turned into zombies, Night Of The Comet uses two sisters' search for other survivors as mostly a frame upon which to hang scenes of them coming up with quips, trying on outfits in abandoned stores, dealing with their sibling rivalry, complaining about their love lives, and so on.  There's an evil corporation or something towards the end, but the parts with Reggie and Sam just hanging out seemed way more entertaining.  When looking up the movie, I've heard that the two protagonists are, between them, sometimes cited as models for the character of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.  Although I don't think I've ever heard Whedon say anything like that, I can totally see it.  Chris made a case for NOTC as a legitimately good movie.  I certainly had fun with the parts I was awake for.

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971)

I imagine that B-Fest 2025 will have three particularly divisive film choices (Shack Out On 101 being the first), and that Footmen will be the divisive-est of them all.  This is a Southern Baptist exploitation film made by a guy called Estus Pirkle based on one of his sermons; those making it had never made a movie before or even seen one, because they didn't approve of movies.  Such that it is, the "action" consists of histrionic depictions about what the inevitable communist takeover of America will look like, intercut with a young woman moved moved to renounce her sinful ways by this dose of brimstone; my seatmates mused that the actor may have thought this was going to be her big break.  The godless commies, mostly played by the same guy over and over (I dubbed him Comrade Mutton Chops for the... interesting choice in facial hair) break up families, murder, torture people, murder, rape, pillage, murder, indoctrinate (running camps that teach kids that only Comrade Fidel, not Jesus, can fill a table with candy; running labor camps that blare "COMMUNISM IS GOOD, JESUS IS STUPID, GIVE UP" over a loudspeaker), and murder, all depicted in loving detail.  Footmen is only 52 minutes long, but one feels every second as a sleep-deprived audience member.

I felt like I started a thing when I responded to many of Pirkle's claims that these things had happened in communist countries "based on confirmed accounts" with a Wikipedia-inspired "[citation needed]," and then I heard other people doing it too.  Clearly he had a different definition of the word "confirmed" than its commonly accepted meaning.

I definitely heard people getting audibly angry at this movie's existence, as well as different levels of hostility or lack thereof towards organized religion, given this film's placement on the extreme side of that axis.  I also heard people glad to discover the, uh, joys of such a piece of cinema, and I was more or less one of them.  Footmen is hateful, so the level of hatefulness will hit uncomfortably close to home for some, I get it.  I think whether or not one can laugh at the melodrama of a young child expressing his willingness to die rather than denounce Christ and promptly getting beheaded by Comrade Mutton Chops very much comes down to the individual.

Death Wheelers (1973) [AKA Psychomania]

The overnight lack of sleep makes weird things more surreal, lowering one's defenses against craziness.  That effect is fun sometimes, but yeah, I do always wish I could fully catch everything.  An entirely predictable situation during a twenty-four hour movie festival.  Here I was noticing not only my inability to stay awake due to sleepiness, but also that annoying thing where one is awake but just slower.  I'd come up with what I thought was a clever riff a minute after a scene that would have benefited it ended.  And I definitely napped through quite a bit here.  As it turned out, this would be the last sleep I'd require during B-Fest 2025!  So, not a bad showing overall, really only missing parts of two movies.  

What I was able to absorb is that it's the '70s, there's a very British motorcycle gang (pleasant balance between dudes and ladies) obsessed with death and toads, and some of these young folks get resurrected as zombies.  Woke partially up for the ending which featured a second rampage through town where innocent traffic cones and produce aisles paid the price for being in a biker movie (I was so glad for a second town sequence, so I could bust out an Avatar [the cartoon] inspired "MY CABBAGES!" the way I was too slow on the uptake to do the first time), followed by a character's dramatic and nonsensical choice between life and death, followed by a batshit ending involving I think the gang turning into or getting absorbed into Stonehenge or something?  Whatever happened, it inspired a few references from us in later movies that also showed Stonehenge or other rock formations.  Anyway, B-Fest as always was there to render psychedelic drugs obsolete.

 

Killer Workout (1987) [AKA Aerobicide]

I took a break from inflicting teen movies on the B-Fest crowd to inflict this instead.  Movies that I found on my own have a special place in my heart, and the reason I knew this one was a drunken conversation at a bar about movies.   My track record as a sponsor remains spotted with stuff that got mixed reactions: reactions to this from those still awake were, well, mixed.  Speaking against it, Killer Workout is a slasher movie (even if set at a gym!), and like most slasher movies, it's very, very repetitious - setup, kill, setup, kill, with few of the kills being particularly imaginative.  Speaking for it are two things.  One is the pure 1987 pouring off the screen; I like to believe that Killer Workout could not have been made at any other year.  Very much a product of the peak of the aerobics craze that also gave us Jane Fonda's third career.   All those leotard-esque triangular spandex outfits!   (Comment from someone near me, possibly Mark but I don't remember for sure:  "Could someone please buy this woman some pants?!")  The other is quite a fun third act twist and ending, centering the killer whose backstory the movie cleverly hides in plain sight along with the hilariously inept detective who knows he's onto something but is incapable of actually protecting anyone or accomplishing anything.  You're welcome for another "classic," my B-Fest compatriots.

Shake, Rattle, And Rock! (1994)

Not to be confused with a "real" '50s movie with that title, this SRAR! is a 1994 TV movie that was apparently part of a series of some sort.  The film is a gleeful send-up of the '50s movies about how this new rock-and-roll fad and youth culture in general are totally wholesome.  Pre-fame Renée Zellweger stars as a kid who just wants to express herself through music and brings pure joy to the role.  A group of disapproving moms, whose actors are clearly having an absolute blast hamming it up, lay it on as thickly as possible that no, they're totally not racist or anything, they just have incredibly reasonable concerns about their kids being exposed to that jungle music.  Why, sometimes, they might actually be in the same room as a negro; can you even imagine?!  Highlights include Judge Patrick Boone overseeing a rigged courtroom style trial of rock-n-roll itself, the plucky less conventionally attractive best friend who of course gets pushed to the side because it's Renée's movie, the aspiring all-Black rhythm-and-blues girl group who get a subplot that could easily have been the main plot but of course get pushed to the side because it's Renée's movie, the worthless sidekick with the fedora, the misunderstood biker hoodlum whose actor is about thirty years older than his character, and a killer soundtrack packed with a mix of actual '50s rock and lovingly crafted facsimiles of '50s rock.  And have I mentioned how much fun everyone involved seems to be having?  Or how charming the performances are across the board?  "NOT THE END" (as the title card has it after the defeated but unbowed kids ride off into the sunset) indeed.

I mentioned that there were three movies I imagine being especially polarizing, and this was the third one.  I can see someone taking the movie more seriously than I think it should and being turned off by how smug the '90s moralizing is; any "serious" points this movie makes are kiddie-pool shallow, readily dismissable as a relic from an era where all the answers were clear now that the privileged had solved racism and all the other societal ills.  I'd argue against this read.  For me, Shake, Rattle, And Rock! is no more or less than a laugh-out-loud funny movie that can only be described by the adjective "delightful."   Great pick-me-up amidst the usual grueling B-Fest experience to move us towards the last big leg.

Transformers: The Movie (1986)

In all my years attending B-Fest, this is the first feature-length animated film that's been shown.  However, I'm told it's actually the second in B-Fest history, not the first.  I have never in my life cared in the slightest about anything related to the Transformers franchise, so I was fine to linger over breakfast attempting to sort out the nuanced differences between gialli and krimi thrillers, and speculating on which one a later film at the Fest would turn out to be.  I did catch a representative sample of Transformers: a bunch of toys they wanted to sell having fight scenes, a bunch of obvious Star Wars references, and one fight scene set to "Weird" Al's "Dare To Be Stupid" for some reason.  Spent more time outside the auditorium reading my book, as is my wont, than I did watching this.

Six String Samurai (1998)

The "I love the '90s" block continued with... well, yeah.  SSS gets some mileage out of its wackadoodle premise, even though it doesn't have the budget for anything other than a few desert sets.  See, the last refuge of what was once America is Lost Vegas, and with the death of King Elvis a hero patterned after Buddy Holly except with a sword is here to travel a long distance to become the next king.  SSS only knows a few tricks and soon devolves into about fifty fight scenes that're all the same.  I've mentioned in the past that one of the things that's changed as I've become old is completely losing my interest in big dumb action movies.  Not only do action movies now bore the living shit out of me, but I maintain that the single dumbest type of movie for dumb people is the kind of movie in which the hero single-handedly fights off scores of dudes, fight scene after fight scene after fight scene, without the goons ever even landing a blow.  How can such a thing possibly be entertaining to a sane adult for more than thirty seconds?  Six String Samurai provides no answers.  My main other memory is that "The Kid," whom Buddy ends up reluctantly taking along on his trip, sometimes is likeable but has a habit of making this wordless scream sound whenever Buddy is about to leave him behind, a sound that made me long for the soothing tones of a cat yowling instead.  Anyway, my point is that a little bit of SSS goes a long, long, long way.  

The last few fight sequences pitting Buddy against "Death" are a little more entertaining, I guess, and the ending kinda follows from what's been set up, I guess?  J and Chris had left for some sleep during the overnight, but came back in time to catch the last half hour of this, and I was one of many to assure them they'd caught all that was necessary to see here.

Double Team (1997)

Originally supposed to be the finale and moved up in the lineup for reasons that were never revealed.  Oh, great, an action movie about dudes kicking and shooting things!  I think I've made it clear how much I love those.  However, this legendary bomb starring the duo of Jean Claude Van-Damme and Dennis Rodman facing off against Mickey Rourke I... actually quite enjoyed watching?  I loved how nonsensical the plot is.  I loved how the movie got the most anyone could out of Rodman's limited acting acting range, casting him as a flamboyant arms dealer who secretly has a heart of gold, and not so secretly has ten different hairstyles (and a fucking amazing look later on including a fedora!).  I loved the basketball-shaped parachute thing.  I loved the staging of the shootout in front of a Roman wedding as our heroes and villains spread carnage everywhere.  I loved the fight sequence in the hotel room in which Van-Damme is accosted by a guy with a blade in his shoe and every possible mirror or glass wall that could shatter does.  This is the kind of movie in which our heroes are aided by an order of internet-savvy monks.  This is the kind of movie which almost makes up for its total lack of interest in its female characters by managing to find three minutes for a sequence that lets two ladies - a character who's just given birth and an obstetrician - fight off a semi-automatic-toting goon.   This is the kind of movie that telegraphs that the climax will feature both Jean-Claude fighting a tiger and the near-destruction of the Coliseum, and then delivers exactly what was promised.  B-Fest 2025 included a few movies that I liked better than Double Team, but none that surprised me more with how much better they ended up being than my expectation.  In the world of big dumb action movies, solid thumbs up from my inner Ebert. 

Got lunch, completely skipped the raffle as I usually do because I don't care about movie swag, and got back just as the penultimate feature was starting.

College Girl Murders (1967) [AKA The Monk With The Whip]

I have to say that this one dragged.  I was fine and cheerful once I accepted that I was never going to figure out what was going on or why I should care.  Dozens of interchangeable "schoolgirls" played by actors in their late twenties and thirties get menaced by multiple interchangeable lecherous professors, multiple serial killers with multiple motivations including but not limited to the titular orange-clad Monk who kills people by strangling them with a whip and a different killer who puts poison gas in bibles.  And a bunch of other shit happens.  In the end a disembodied voice leads our detective hero to both have a fun showdown with one of the many killers and show up the comic relief idiot holistic psychiatrist consultant.  Some alligators menace people.  We made a bunch of the same jokes we'd been making over and over all Fest, and during a crowd scene I got to make a well received "they just announced last year's B-Fest schedule!" joke.  I remember nothing else of note.

It was somehow only about 1600 at this point, with the Fest on track to end like forty minutes shy of the full twenty-four hours.  So the organizers filled the time with a chance to pick a short by audience fiat.  We ended up with a choice from a member of our coterie, Hannah, "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," from 1986.  This is a long series of interviews with drugged-out teens outside a Judas Priest gig (plus a few with the bemused event staff).  I guess if it'd been longer this could've been the fourth big divisive choice.  I could feel the hostility building from some sectors of the audience as they quickly met and exceeded their white-trash quota.  I was fine to embrace the guy in the zebra-striped spandex yelling incoherently about how punk music needed to die and go to Mars.  Basically, as one who does in fact believe that heavy metal fucking RULES!!, man, I was glad to spend some time with those who are unfortunately my peers in holding that belief.  Now, this was today's version of "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," so it turned HMPL into the only documentary short I've ever seen that includes an amazing plot twist:  thanks to the filmmakers' attempts to make follow-ups, we go back to that same parking lot ten years later for a taste of "Neil Diamond Parking Lot!"  Very different crowd to say the least.

Curse Of The Demon (1957)

Bit of an unusual choice for a B-Fest closer, an old black and white cheapie about a pseudoscience expert or something running afoul of a real cult with a real curse... or is it?  A bit of a surprise in how much I got sucked into it (the subtitles helped).  Not being able to show the demon much forces the movie to take a cerebral approach, actually paying attention to its characters and staging scenes full of atmosphere.  I do wish it didn't have that opening wherein we do see that the demon is real, because I do like a good "actual supernatural or elaborate hoax?" plotline, and Curse could have easily given us that.  Otherwise, though, the filmmakers make the right choice on almost every occasion, from the give and take between the skeptical hero and the more credulous sister of a prior victim (who don't hook up out of movie-obligation at the end, even though things are leaning that way!) to the character of the demonic-or-is-he cult leader.  The actual climax of the movie really rests on a fast paced attempt by one character to make another character take something from him, with both guys clearly knowing exactly what the other is doing, that actually got me to say out loud "this is great!"   Afterwards, I overheard the comment that this was a good ending movie for the festival because "it's just a good movie, simple as that."  I wasn't sure if I was quite ready to go that far at the time... but, yeah, I think I am.  Way more engaging and smart than I had any right to expect from a dialogue-heavy '50s movie called Curse Of The Demon.

I did have my own personal riffing highlight towards the beginning of this one.  See, for weeks J has been low-key obsessed with an old series of Denny's commercials for a $1.99 deal that feature a guy chant-singing "one ninety nine, are you outta your mind?!" over and over.  I guess the blaxpo dialogue in the first movie made it resurface, and so that line was sort of floating around our area.  Well, during this final movie, when the camera panned over a sign with "499" on the address, I just perfectly timed a "four ninety nine, are you outta your mind?!" that got enthusiastic laughs from the three people in my immediate vicinity who could actually hear.  It was like a joke that had spent a full day marinating, building up to that punchline.  Well, it seemed really funny, anyway.  As always, maybe you had to be there.  We'd been watching movies for a full day without sleep, okay?

Miscellany

- COMMUNISM IS GOOD.  JESUS IS STUPID.

- Everyone who has ever been to B-Fest has said that it's not just about the movies, it's about the people.  Well, yes, it is indeed about the people.  Heartfelt thanks as always to everyone who shared in B-Fest 2025 with me.  Chris, welcome to our cult, glad you enjoyed yourself.  I'm still insecure enough that whenever I'm temporarily or permanently on my own I feel especially indebted to anyone who's willing to hang out with me during these single serving encounters, so special extra thanks to Mark, Hannah, Tim, Scott, and Jess in particular.

- Movies released under different titles in different countries was a definite running theme of this year's event.

- Besides sponsoring a Fest classic, Tim also provided some great butterscotch cookies.  Apparently he normally saves that for Telstar Day, but "the orange motherfucker will have us all dead by then, anyway."  On that cheery note, thanks for the treat!

- So, in honor of my wife (in these recaps I've called her "Ms. Tweet."  She used to drop by B-Fest for a few movies, but she was never really One Of Us), I always sponsor movies under our couple moniker, "Team Ratbird."  The story of the name isn't interesting enough to type out.  What was a highlight this year, however, was that those still awake greeted the slide introducing my movie with dueling chants of "rat!"/"bird!"  I was so happy and proud.

- Speaking of sponsor names, some groups seem to wait to pick a new sponsor name for the year until after the organizers have announced which of their suggestions will be shown.  I assume that's how we ended up with College Girl Murders being sponsored by "The Completely Harmless Men Who Just Like To Wear Orange Robes," or some such.

- I've never seen Rock & Roll High School, but some people online make Shake, Rattle, And Rock! out to be a near-canon prequel due to some common actors and filmmakers, for whatever that's worth.

- Transformers was shown with Korean (I think) subtitles, because why not?

- College Girl Murders was like a sleazier, less supernatural version of Werewolf In A Girls' Dormitory from B-Fest 2012 - sensationalist title, multiple plot threads, indistinguishable characters - and provoked an almost identical reaction from me of a sort of affable disinterest.

- The internet tells me that "Heavy Metal Parking Lot" was a favorite on Nirvana's tour bus.

- Speaking of the short, I don't want to self-aggrandize too much, but I felt very virtuous during the selection process.  Not knowing how many shorts they were going to play, I threw Rifftrax favorite (of mine, anyway) "Sentinels Of Safety" into the ring.  They had us do a voice vote, and "Sentinels" won.  But once it became clear that we were only getting one short, I then lobbied the organizers to go with "Heavy Metal Parking Lot" instead.  Hannah was very keen to show it, to the point of having considered sponsoring it for years, whereas "Sentinels Of Safety" was a totally off-the-cuff suggestion.  So, seemed like the right thing to do. 

- Best of Fest (as an actual movie):  Curse Of The Demon

- Runner up:  Shake, Rattle, And Rock!

- Best of Fest (as a B-Fest movie):  Tie - Shack Out On 101 and Truth Or Dare? - A Critical Madness

- Worst of Fest:  Six String Samurai

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

- Heavy metal fucking RULES!!!

- Even adjusting for inflation, $1.99 (in mid-'90s money) for a Grand Slam Breakfast is honestly a pretty great deal.