B-Fest 2007 Primer, Part 1

It's during this time of the year that much of the film industry – including many of my fellow (and better-read) film bloggers – trundle off to the freezing wastes of Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. I'll admit a certain amount of jealousy at this. A healthy fraction of the year's best independent films make their first appearances in Park City, and I'd love to fight the crowds and inhale the reality distortion that surrounds the nation's most prestigious independent film festival.There's just one problem: B-Fest.

My beloved B-Fest – that annual 24-hour marathon of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror movies at Northwestern University – takes place during the second weekend of Sundance. The idea of missing the annual pilgrimage to those other snowy wastes (Evanston, IL) is as foreign to me as the thought of spending gobs of money to be part of the indie mob in Utah. Fortunately, until someone pays me to attend Sundance I don't have to choose. B-Fest wins.

This year's Fest has all the earmarks of a classic; organizers Wyatt Ollestad and Mona Yeh have pulled out all the stops and plunged deep into the catalogs of the campus film distributors to create a properly balanced B-Fest schedule. (The practice of allowing sponsors to pick films has been discontinued, allowing the festival chairs to more deliberately craft a program.) Of the fourteen feature films appearing at this year's B-Fest seven are in color and seven in black and white. We have good variation in genres, decades, and styles. Those who found last year's schedule too modern will heave a sigh of relief at the fact that there are a mere four pictures in the schedule made after 1980. It is, all in all, a very good thing.

As with last year, I will dispense with a B-Fest post-mortem and trump all those after-the-fact diarists with a B-Fest preview. This year's may be somewhat shorter than last due to time constraints, but I'll do my best to do each picture justice. Let's get started. You can follow along by consulting the festival calendar.

The first film on the docket will be familiar to most (if not all) of the auditorium's inhabitants. It's The Brain That Wouldn't Die, the movie that proves a little preparation and the right scientific know-how can overcome almost any problem. But hey, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Ahead! Bwa-ha!

Oh, never mind.

My own memories of this film focus mainly on the fact that, apart from the obvious obscenity of keeping someone's decapitated head alive and talking on a cookie sheet, the head in question is pretty unpleasant. Plus there's the horrible creature lurking behind the reinforced door. Like a single one of those doors ever failed to give way by the end of the movie.

All in all, a pretty good start for the event - black and white, classic, well-liked. Please, do your fellow audience members a favor and don't memorize the MST3K version of this or any other film at B-Fest before you arrive. The cute girl sitting in the next row up has seen that episode too, and she considers you completely pathetic for using their material.

Lest the masses find a black and white '60s yarn about a talking severed head too sedate, B-Fest pulls out the big guns with '80s fantasy-action fave The Beastmaster. Again, this one will be familiar to most of the crowd (in the '90s TBS played the picture so often that someone joked that the channel's initials stood for "The Beastmaster Station") but it is so ripe for the mocking that it's difficult to believe this won't be a hit. Marc Singer stars as the prince of prophecy blah blah animals blah blah Tanya Roberts topless.

After that, a mystery short, which is often the B-Fest staff's way of saying they don't know which shorts they'll get or will want to play in what order. Will Gavotte make a reappearance? Are we to be subjected to cartoon porn again? How about those hilarious "animals that talk" shorts? Sadly for some yet happily for others, What is Communism? appears to be lost for good. (If you really want to see it, the short is available on the DVD collection Target You: Cold War Educational Films from the Golden Age of Homeland Security.)



Then it's back into the features with a good old-fashioned monster movie in 3-D. Last year we saw the original Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3-D, which didn't fit the "bad movie" bill quite as nicely as this year's feature, Revenge of the Creature in 3-D! This flick is essentially a remake of the original, but the Gillman is captured and taken to Florida before he begins his reign of terror and his crush on a new love object. Given that they filmed the darn movies in Florida to begin with, I suppose it only makes sense to set the story there. My experience is that the 3-D in these movies is usually only mildly effective at best, and brain-splittingly annoying at worst, especially if the 3-D effect is the red-blue kind that gets lost as the film ages and begins to turn pink. We'll see what kind of shape this print is in.

At 11 p.m. the room will catch its breath for a bit while the B-Fest organizers give away some free crap – keep track of your ticket in case they call your number.

After that it's straight into the evening's main events, at least in terms of tradition: The Wizard of Speed and Time and Plan 9 From Outer Space. What can I say that hasn't been said dozens of times before? I haven't made up my mind whether I'll be sitting through Plan 9 this year or not. It's been a few years since I've done that and my batteries may be recharged to the point that I can endure a B-Fest showing. The other option is to hang out in the lobby with members of the B-Movie Message Board (one of the few real opportunities to socialize during the festival), so I'm keeping that option open.


The film after Plan 9 has to be big and loud to keep folks awake, and it looks like Savage Sisters, this year's exploitation flick, will perform admirably. Eddie Romero (The Twilight People, Mad Doctor of Blood Island) may be trying to catch that Black Mama, White Mama lightning in a bottle, but who can blame him for trying? Succeed or fail, the results will probably be entertaining. Gloria Hendry (Black Belt Jones, Black Caesar) and Cheri Caffaro (Ginger, The Abductors) provide the ass while Sid Haig and Vic Diaz bring the sass. I don't even know what that means, but it rhymes so I'm keeping it.

Mystery Short #2 (if they told you, they'd have to kill you) bridges the gap between Savage Sisters and the film to which I'm least looking forward, Invasion of the Star Creatures. Don't get me wrong, it's perfect B-Fest fodder. It's just that Invasion is a tame '60s comedy of the sexes in the same vein as Sex Kittens Go to College. It's also in black and white and scheduled to start at three in the morning, all of which adds up to Zzzzzzzz....

Next: melting hoboes and hypnotic eyes!

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