B-Fest 2005 Part 3





Because I've grown up to be a wuss, I slept through the two films after Black Caesar (Beauty and the Robot and Death Wish III), and didn't stumble back into the theater until the last half of Project Moonbase (1953). This moldy oldie is one of those "realistic" space movies where astronauts in t-shorts sit in hammocks and tell us which rocket is firing for minutes at a time. The gist is that a male and female astronaut are forced to make the first moon landing because of sabotage. They'll be stranded for months and are designated "Moonbase One," a fact that causes much consternation back on earth. Why? Is it because these brave people are rising their lives? Nope, it's because they'll be living together but aren't married! They're married by video phone, and then the President of the United States calls to congratulate them... and the President is a woman!!

I may have just dreamed this one up, I'm not sure.



Anybody love martial arts? I do! Too bad the next film was 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain (1998), perhaps the most star-studded of all the 3 Ninjas films. Our pre-teen heroes are trapped in an amusement park taken over by terrorists. It's just like Die Hard (1988), if you cut Bruce Willis into three pieces, and Alan Rickman was replaced by Loni Anderson in a leather fetish costume and Jim Varney. Oh, and replace the black cop with Hulk Hogan as a TV action star.



After that came Robot Monster (1953), the infamously bad sci-fi film with an alien invader that's played by a guy in a gorilla suit wearing a diving helmet. The alien quickly wipes out every human on the planet except for one disturbingly Aryan scientist, his family, and his assistant. The alien and the survivors trade crank calls every so often, and the alien hunts for the humans. Then we have our second shotgun wedding of B-Fest (the assistant and the scientist's daughter) , and finally it all turns out to be a dream the scientist's 10-year-old son was having, which makes everything that happened before oddly critic proof.

Coming in Part 4 - Why I still hate Troma. I sleep through a dog of a movie. Bruce Vilanch should never play a robot. Why it's okay to shoot a bazooka in a spaceship. And we end with some Bugaloo.

Posted: Tue - February 8, 2005 at      

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