B-Fest 2005 Part 1



Once a year a trek to Chicago to be with my own. It's called B-Fest, a 24 hour ordeal/film festival held on the campus of Northwestern University. It's really an excuse to get together with a bunch of other b-movie fans from around the country.

I got into Chicago on Thursday and met up with Chris Holland (my partner on Stomp Tokyo, who now lives in Austin), Freeman Williams (of The Bad Movie Report) and Joe Bannerman (Opposable Thumb Films). Joe brought along his girlfriend Tina, who spent the entire weekend with a look on her face that varied from barely concealed horror to barely disguised horror.

On Thursday night we met up with our gracious host Ken Begg (Jabootu) and after the annual trip to a steakhouse we went back to his apartment. There he tried a to bring up the subject of a movie he'd seen called The Stabilizer (1984) using a couple of conversational gambits worthy of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and when those failed he just put the damn movie in and made us watch it. The Stabilizer is a surreally bad Indonesian action film, more or less a Rambo rip-off made with whatever white guys they could find. There were two stand out lines. Somebody asks the main character, "I hear they call you the Stabilizer. Why is that?" And the main bad guy congratulates one of his thugs by saying, "You did a good job, but this in no way makes up for the hundreds of mistakes you've made in the past!" and then shoots him.

As revenge for The Stabilizer we made Ken watch Attack of the Super Monsters (1982), a movie compilation of a Japanese TV series which combines animated characters with live-action special effects sequences. We'll be doing a full Stomp Tokyo review of this soon.

On friday we had the preliminary meeting and greeting of all the people from our message board etc. we filed into the auditorium and took our seats. I should mention that we met up with Amy Morrison, a friend from Eckerd College, and our friends Skip, George and Jennie among many many others.



The first movie was Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956), a classic sci-fi film about an alien invasion that occurs because the aliens can't figure out how to record peace messages at the right speed. The stop motion animation is by Ray Harryhausen, though his stop motion technique isn't really the suitable for some of the shots of destruction. The ending of the film is a blast, as our hero scrambles around Washington D.C. with a truck that scrambles the alien saucers, causing them to crash into various historical monuments. Good stuff.



Next up was The Apple (1980), an almost indescribably strange musical set in the future of 1994. Basically it's about this couple who are broken up by an evil record producer who makes the woman a star. But you see, the record producer is really the devil (occasionally he sprouts a horn, just to make sure we get it) and the whole movie is a weird amalgam of the Garden of Eden story and the Book of Revelations. It turns out that the forces of good and evil are actually represented by hippies on one side and glam rockers on the other, and at the end "Mr. Topps" flies out of the sky in a glowing Cadillac and takes all the hippies away. I once caught this on TV with my girlfriend, and to entertain myself I told her that it would make sense in the end. With a real audience the movie turned out to even more fun.

Coming in Part 2 - The raw sexual energy of Michael Caine, and why severed ears don't constitute restaurant health code violations.

Posted: Mon - January 31, 2005 at      

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