B-Fest 2005 Part 4



The last 8 hours, or what we like to call the home stretch.



Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986) is about as funny as the title suggests. I don’t like Troma films very much, because they intend to make a bad movie to start with and use that as an excuse for why their movies have no wit. Relatively speaking Class is one of the better Troma films, with something approaching a plot and an attempt to have pleasing production values, but I still slept through most of it.

Lassie: Adventures of Neeka (1968) is a collection of TV episodes, and it played without sound for a while. Neeka is a little Native American kid from Alaska who comes to visit with the park ranger who hangs out with Lassie and Timmy, I think. The park ranger, Neeka and Lassie go to a ghost town, where Meeka becomes bizarrely concerned about some native ghost creature. (Because Native American beliefs were completely homogenous, even as far away as Alaska.) I fell asleep, and when I woke up Timmy or possibly Neeka was pestering some disgruntled hermit, the kind we now associate with the UNABOMBER, for help identifying leaves. I realized I hadn’t missed anything worth seeing.



Ice Pirates (1984) is a movie people my age remember seeing when they were kids, mostly because it was one of the three movies HBO had in its schedule in the early days of cable. (The others were The Beastmaster and Friday the 13th Part II) The strange part is that the movie isn’t really suitable for children. Come to think of it, I’m 32 and it still wasn’t suitable for me. The movie is something about is Robert Urich is a swashbuckling spaceship captain who trades in online copies of the 1990’s rap album To the Extreme. There is a very long set-up for a joke about a Space Herpe, and awards show patter writer Bruce Vilanch appears as a severed head. A talking severed head, don’t get your hopes up. The movie has one of the worst endings ever, with some silliness with a time warp causing a frantic and unfunny fight scene where everyone ages at an accelerated rate.

It the Terror from Beyond Space (1958) is one of my favorite 1950’s sci-fi movies. Stomp Tokyo did a review here.



Finally, the last movie of the festival and the one I’d really been waiting for: Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984). Kelley, Ozone and Turbo are back, trying to save a community center from evil developers who want to knock it down and build a supermarket. There’s a subplot about Kelley getting a job in Paris but turning it down to stay with Ozone, but beyond that the film does nothing but build up to the long and not very interesting fund raising show that saves the community center at the end of the movie. Breakin’ 2 is neither as good nor as bad as I might have hoped. The dancing scenes this time around are fairly disappointing, especially the “dance off” type gang confrontation that would later form the basis of You Got Served (2004) and the interminable final show. I did like the scene where Turbo (ripping off Fred Astaire for the second time in two movies) does some dancing up the walls of his apartment, and there’s a funny dance scene in a hospital, but whatever fun those few slightly creative dance numbers is destroyed by others, like the one where Ozone and Turbo compete to dance with a doll, which is inter-cut with their human lovers. That doesn't sound too bad, but when they tear the doll in half it's edited between shots of the real people, and that's just disturbing.

It's over! It's finally over! Now to go hang out with everyone and watch even more movies! That's because I'm a complete masochist. But I did get to watch Forever Evil (1988) with writer/star Freeman Williams, so it was all good.

As usual it was a great weekend and I had a terrific time catching up with everybody. I'll see you all at B-Fest 2006!

Posted: Sun - February 20, 2005 at      

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