In which we meet others of our kind.

Is this B-Fest stuff still a mystery to you? Suffice it to say it is an annual gathering of bad movie lovers, during which 24 continuous hours of Crap Cinema^TM are shown. The weak need not attend.

January 28th, 2000

11:30 a.m. - We arrive in Chicago's Midway airport from St. Pete, FL. We spend the next hour wandering the Midway with a sign reading "Dr. Freex," looking for The Bad Movie Report's Freeman Williams. We get snickered at a lot.

By one o'clock we have collected Freeman and Chris Magyar, of Diary of a Tuber. It's time to get to Northwestern University.

2:00 p.m. - We get into our limousine. Yes, we rented a limousine to get to B-Fest -- and lest our readers get the wrong idea, let's just clear the whole limo issue up right here: you try getting five people, their luggage, and some nicely heavy promotional items from Midway airport to Evanston, and you'll find that it's actually cheaper to ride in style than to hire a couple of cabs to go the same distance. Chris kept that fact a secret, however, until the limo actually arrived. The impressed looks on the faces of the other guys was worth it.

3:30 p.m. – We arrive at B-Fest, to huge jubilant mobs. Actually, there were only a few lonely co-eds to notice our arrival. After emphasizing that we were not, in fact, the Backstreet Boys, we settled into the student center to wait until the auditorium opened. Call us curmudgeony, but wouldn't it be nice if MTV actually played music videos? We got down to the cafeteria in time to watch Total Request Live, but after that we were treated to stupid game shows with Dweezil Zappa. Ugh.

5:50 p.m. - We obtain our tickets and get our seats, simultaneously meeting in person all of the other folks we've known from electronic conversations. It's a large, happy group, including Mark "Apostic" Hurst, Andrew Borntreger of Badmovies.org, Ken and Paul of Jabootu, Joe Bannerman of Opposable Thumb Films and so many others. We start making the rounds with our Stomp Tokyo cups and the IGN.com t-shirts we brought to give away. It's not long before every person in the theater has their own Stomp Tokyo souvenir of B-Fest.

6:07 p.m. - Daddy-O, our first film of the evening, starts. Daddy-O was apparently on MST3K once, but we never saw it. It's a pretty standard film about the corruption of youth. Phil is a truck driver who loses his license after he enters an illegal drag race with a beautiful woman. The same night Phil's best friend dies in a car wreck that may have been caused by that same woman, during the drag race Phil has with her. But in fact the friend was killed by two local drug dealers who look like Sidney Greenstreet and a muscular version of David Letterman. Songs sung by Phil included Rock Candy and When I Get You Home. This film begins a running gag because when Phil is charged with "manslaughter in that accident last night." Unaware of the accident, he sputters: "Manslaughter?! Accident?!" Thereafter, any film character who was hauled to the police station or involved in a car crash was greeted with cries of "Manslaughter?! Accident?!"

Naked Fat Man? Yes, the Sidney Greenstreet character employs the David Letterman character as a personal masseur, and we got to watch.

Scott, Apostic, and Dr. Freex settle in for the night.

7:10 p.m. - Invasion of the Saucermen documents the Earth's first contact with an alien race and surprisingly, all exchanges take place in the form of petty vehicular vandalism. Necking teenagers are the only townspeople who know about the invasion, and they have a heck of a time convincing the police of what is going on. Frank Gorshin plays a drunkard who first spots the UFO. When Gorshin's character is apparently hit by a car, the two teens in the car are hauled off to the local police station. "Manslaughter?! Accident?!"

Naked Fat Man? Yes, we get to see an army general rousted from bed and get dressed.

8:30 p.m. - We love the Planet of the Apes series, but Beneath the Planet of the Apes is the low point. Can't get brand name Heston? You can still get the generic Fransicus, for half the price, though it comes in a smaller container. Watching Brent discover that he's on Earth is painful. Besides having more or less the same adventures Taylor had last movie, he also wanders into a cave. First he finds a phone booth, then he finds a subway station sign, and finally he finds a sign that says "New York" on it. And even then we can't be sure he's figured it out. "Apes that speak English, horses, guns. Now a phone booth, a subway station, and a sign that says 'New York.' I have to consider the possibility that I may be in San Francisco or something." And we were all confused by the humming ladder. See the full Stomp Tokyo review.

Naked Fat Man? Dr. Zaius takes a sauna.

Your chamber of hell for the next 24 hours.

10:00 p.m. - House on Haunted Hill stars Vincent Price as a millionaire who invites four strangers to his wife's birthday party at a haunted mansion. Each of the guests will receive $10,000 if they survive the night without leaving the mansion. Pretty soon Vince's wife turns up dead, and she was killed either by her husband or the ghosts of those who have died in the house over the years. House was produced by legendary Producer/promoter William Castle. The plot doesn't quite make sense, but it's miles ahead of the recent remake, which devolves into a monster-chasing-people-down-corridors movie.

Naked Fat Man? Nope.

11:15 p.m. - Wizard of Speed and Time is a short that is a B-Fest regular. The first half is the creepy wizard running around the world at incredible speeds (courtesy of stop motion effects), while the second half is a music video with more stop motion effects. Then the B-Fest people showed the whole thing backwards and with the image flipped horizontally.

Naked Fat Man? No, but we're pretty sure the Wizard is up to no good under that cloak.

11:20 p.m. - Break. Somewhere during the proceedings, long time reader Marty Busse showed up and then sneaked out again. Where'd you go, Marty?

Flying saucer!

11:30 p.m. - Plan 9 From Outer Space is the Rocky Horror Picture Show of B-Fest. Whenever a flying saucer appears, everybody throws paper plates in the air. Sometimes sited as the worst movie ever made (a claim made by people who haven't seen the Lonely Lady). We had plans to sleep during this bit, but it's kind of the heart of the evening, and the commentary is as loud as it gets: nobody sleeps through Plan 9.

Naked Fat Man? Tor Johnson is in the film but, mercifully, he remains fully clothed throughout.

12:50 a.m. - Swinging, baby, swinging! Dracula 1972 A.D. is a Hammer film starring both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. We are introduced to a descendant of Dracula with the name Johnny Alucard. Alucard? That should fool anybody who hasn't seen Son of Dracula. In any case, Johnny convinces his swinging friends to perform a blood rite that resurrects the Count, who then does the movie a great disservice by killing Caroline Munro. The Count is obsessed with performing some sort of ritual on busty Jennifer Van Helsing, and we don't blame him at all. One of the least of the Hammer Dracula films; the lack of a budget is made obvious by the lack of complicated sets and the fact that the vampires don't disintegrate when exposed to the sun.

Naked Fat Man? No, although you can sometimes see Peter Cushing's bones through his skin.

Matt Bradford, organizer of B-Fest. Thanks Matt!

2:30 a.m. - Hoo boy. Jungle Hell was popularly considered the worst movie in this year's B-Fest. Sabu (who was so good in the old Thief of Bagdad) plays an Indian elephant wrangler who helps an American doctor investigate the mystery of the "burning rocks." The rocks may be a new radioactive element, so a female scientist from Britain is also dispatched to the region, though she doesn't arrive until nearly the end of the movie, and her plane crashes. There is lots, and we mean lots of stock footage. There is stock footage of elephants and planes and alligators and pumas and planes and elephants and tigers and more elephants. Oh, and there's a UFO that is cut into the movie -- you guessed it, more stock footage. The combined minds of all the b-movie websites who were there could not even come close to figuring it all out.

Naked Fat Man? No, the producers couldn't find stock footage of one.

3:55 a.m. - A much needed break. It's amazing what a quick brushing of teeth and a change of underwear and t-shirt will do to your outlook on life.

4:00 a.m. - Gavotte is a strange little short about strange little French midgets in 18th century period dress fighting over a pillow. Our analysis? It was French.

Naked Fat Man? Nope. The midgets were weird enough.

Don't you want a cup?

4:05 a.m. - Who knew that Abbot and Costello rejected scripts? Tomb It May Concern was a short about an archeologist with a (sorta) midget helper named Joe. As the archeologist goes off to investigate the rest of the tomb, Joe splashes sacred water on two extremely well-preserved mummies in the main room. The first mummy is a servant, and because she has dark colored skin Joe doesn't care that she begins to gyrate. But the princess mummy, which is white, begins to belly dance, and Joe watches lustfully as the nearly nude princess goes through a dance routine. After she finishes, Joe decides to go party with her. Then the archeologist comes back, and wants to know who he's supposed to party with. Well, it was established earlier that he's color blind, so Joe reanimates the servant for him in the short's final racist joke. Ha ha! So funny! Please kill us!

Naked Fat Man? This short wasn't intended for an audience interested in naked men.

4:15 a.m. - The Quest is the first movie Jean Claude Van Damme directed himself. Van Damme plays a good-natured street criminal who ends up fighting in an international fighting competition in order to... Let's see... get money for orphans, avenge the death of his friends, save the lives of two British friends, to get the girl, for New York, and probably a couple of other reasons we're forgetting. As Van Damme films go it isn't that bad. There are lots of fights, which is nice, though the last one is a gyp.

Naked Fat Man? Yep, the Japanese fighter is a sumo wrestler, and we first meet him in his bath.

Dr. FreeX, Scott, and Jeff get a taste of cold weather.

5:50 a.m. – By the time we got to Creature From the Haunted Sea, we were pretty sleepy. It seemed to be some kind of spy spoof, just not terribly funny. Characters kept being added to the cast, and the plot was more or less incoherent. There was a standard Roger Corman monster that killed people. We remember that.

Naked Fat Man? No. Probably not. We don't remember.

7:10 a.m. – Next we saw a short about how to apply for a job. The main part is an employment manager interviewing applicants for a job at his company. As each applicant comes in, the manager destroys him or her with withering analysis of their application and attitude. If we had to guess, we would say that the corporation was fronting for Hell.

Naked Fat Man? There were no positions open for unclothed portly gentlemen. And if your attitude weren't so poor, you might have a better chance of gaining employment yourself. When was the last time you had a haircut?

7:25 a.m. - Break. We were hoping this was the breakfast break, but alas, it was not to be. We briefly considered eating Jeff before spotting some beef jerky and a half-eaten bag of Bugles. Mmmmmm.... Bugles.

There are people in Baltimore who don't think we know what snow is. See? Snow!

7:35 a.m. – Our next short was What is Communism? by Herbert Philbrick, who also wrote a memoir about Communism called I Led Three Lives. What is Communism? According to a helpful checklist we have drilled in to our heads, Communism is a:

Lying,
Dirty,
Shrewd,
Godless,
Murderous,
Determined,
International Criminal Conspiracy

Fact-wise, the short is a little suspect. We are shown a "communist-inspired" rally in San Francisco, but the participants are obviously giving the Nazi salute. And how do we know Communists are liars? It can be assumed they are lying, we are told, and that's the end of the subject. We were given American flags, and there was much chanting of "USA, USA!" during this one.

Naked Fat Man? Not in America, you commie!

Oooooo movies in 3D....

7:50 a.m. - It Came From Outer Space, presented in 3-D. Actually, the 3-D doesn't work very well, but it's a pretty good movie. Aliens crash land on Earth and take the form of local humans, and the Professor from Gilligan's Island. As was usual in these types of films, one young guy figures out what's going on, but the authorities won't listen to him. It Came is optimistic, in that the aliens aren't hostile -- they just want to avoid a misunderstanding. (All we are saaaaaaying... is give peace chance...) Chris took a long break from the eye-splitting 3-D effects to post an update to the message board, letting everyone know just how much pain he was in.

Naked Fat Man? Mercifully, we were spared a 3-D gut protruding from the screen.

8:10 a.m. – Next up were "excerpts" from The Raven, a movie allegedly based on the Edgar Allen Poe poem. Bela Lugosi performs plastic surgery on Boris Karloff, making him ugly(er). Then Bela kidnaps a bunch of people and begins to torture them in elaborate ways. What any of this had to do with The Raven is anybody's guess. But the pendulum from The Pit and the Pendulum is in here. For some reason, Lugosi screams out: "Poe! You are avenged!" at the end. Just why Poe needed avenging, and why Lugosi was the one to do it, is anyone's guess.

Naked Fat Man? Were there any in the poem?

He just loved seeing the Blob eat that wheelchair guy.

9:10 a.m. - Son of Blob was directed by Larry Hagman, and you'll never look at I Dream of Jeannie the same way again. Made in the early seventies, Son of Blob has tons of hippies and freaky parties, weird stereotypes, and cheap special effects. We were usually happy whenever the blob ate anybody, because it made the world seem a better place. Andrew Borntreger from Badmovies.org got particularly excited when the wheelchair-bound bowler was eaten by the blob. In one scene, one of the leads was fitted with a viking helmet, complete with long blonde braids, at which point Chris decided the sleep deprivation was causing hallucinations. Either that or Ken had spiked the drinking water.

Naked Fat Man? Yes. Just about the last guy you would ever want to see au naturale goes prancing down the street in the buff. We called him "Naked Tor."

10:55 a.m. – Break for breakfast. Or actually lunch. At this point time has no meaning, lunchtime doubly so.

11:30 a.m. – Yeah, more Commie bashing! Red Nightmare is a half-hour short introduced by Jack Webb. Webb tells us that Commies have a secret training base for spies somewhere in Russia that looks like a perfect replica of an American town. Actually, we don't know it exists, Webb tells us, but we can assume it does. Apparently the standards of proof and evidence that inform our justice system don't apply in the fight against Communism.

The story proper starts with Joe. Joe is a guy who takes his American liberties for granted (the lazy cur goes bowling instead of to PTA meetings), and one morning he wakes up in a town controlled by a lying, dirty, shrewd, Godless, murderous, determined, international criminal conspiracy. After finding out how bad it is to live under the Commie system (Surprisingly, it turns out that disobedient children will have an easier time eloping under the authoritarian Communist system. Who knew?), Joe commits treasonous acts and is tried. While there was much chanting of "USA, USA" during the short, there was bigger applause when Joe was executed for his crimes.

12:00 p.m. - Five Million Years to Earth is one of our favorite films, and it was great to see it on the big screen. There was a little scare at the beginning of this one when the film caught on fire. Why couldn't that have happened during The Creature from Haunted Sea? In any case, our full review is here.

Naked Fat Man? In a movie this classy? Not bloody likely.

1:35 p.m. – Leave it to Roger Corman to make the world's first prehistoric legal thriller. Teenage Caveman is about preppy Cro-Magnon Robert Vaughn's quest to acquaint his terrycloth-clad brethren with the fact that the laws given them by the gods are outdated. There is so little action in this movie that you actually look forward to the Corman-standard walking scenes because at least that means the cave people will shut the hell up for once. And if you look real hard at the background of some scenes you can actually see James Fransicus trying to figure out where he is.

Naked Fat Man? Every fat man in this film is protected from our sensitive eyes by nothing more than scraps of towels.

2:30 p.m. – Dr. Freex seems to have some major problem with The Slime People, just because it's cheap, kind of incoherent, and the last half hour looks like it was shot through someone's cataracts. Pre-human humanoids attack LA, demanding an end to Veronica's Closet. An ex-marine holes up with a scientist and his two supermodel daughters to fight off the threat.

Naked Fat Man? Tolliver, the comic relief, keeps his clothes on.

Leave us alone in your mom's house and look what happens.

3:45 p.m. - Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was the closing film, and it may just be the greatest movie ever made. In the first 15 minutes, large breasted Asian woman Varla drag races against a guy, and, after the race, beats him to death with her bare hands. ("Manslaughter?! Accident?!") If only Steven Spielberg would make a film that started so well! Varla and her two generously-endowed drag-racing friends then kidnap the dead man's girlfriend and try to use her in some complex scheme to steal money from a crippled coot and his two manly sons. The coot and his family play kind of like an early version of the family in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When the coot opined, "Women! They let 'em vote, smoke and drive - even put 'em in pants! And what happens? A Democrat for president!" there was much chanting of "USA, USA."

Naked Fat Man? No, but Varla does kind of look like two bald men bending over.

After the great Post-B-Fest Cleanup, we retired to the domicile of Ken Begg's mom -- she graciously cleared out, allowing we sleep deprived movie mavens to hit the floor in exhaustion. Ken, please thank your mom for us. After feeding us, Ken departed back to his own house, leaving us to talk into the night and, one by one, collapse into heaps.

Things we learned from B-Fest:

Your flashlight is your friend. It's awfully hard to open beef jerky in a darkened theater at 5 a.m. without one. Get a small, sturdy one that won't crap out on you in the middle of things (we suggest a mini Mag-Lite), and bring extra batteries.

The Stomp Tokyo crew.

Dr. Freex is even cooler in person than his columns suggest.

When you develop your pictures of 21-year old tv critic Chris Magyar, your wife/girlfriend/whatever may opine that he is "kinda cute!"

Maybe you don't know the difference between wicker and rattan.

Everybody likes free stuff. Give away free plastic cups and t-shirts and watch the fun begin.

Take plenty of food and drink. You need something to compensate for the sleep you're not getting. Try to bring along some "real food," i.e. something with protein. Some vitamins are probably a good idea too.

If you can stay awake through the doldrums of 2 a.m. - 6 a.m., you're probably going to make it through the whole festival. Pace yourself and drink lots of water along with all that caffeine you're ingesting.

B-Fest is a participatory sport. If you think you'll become annoyed at the running commentary or laser pointer antics, you might as well stay home. That's not to say you can't threaten some idiot for accentuating the breasts on every woman in every film with his little red dot, but let's face it: B-Fest was likely the inspiration for MST3K.

Attending one B-Fest just leaves you hungry for more. Has anyone seen next year's lineup yet?