Page 16, Attack of the killer B's

Features Column by George Eckart, 01/26/94

EVANSTON--Last weekend I accomplished what I consider to be one of the
greatest achievements of my entire life (besides getting a high score on
Galaga). I sat through 24 straight hours of the worst movies ever made.
I'll never look at Godzilla the same way again, thanks to Northwestern
University. Last Friday, they presented a truly stunning lineup of
ill-conceived cinematic disasters in their 12th Annual B-Fest.

Much like the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" phenomenon, many people can't
comprehend why anyone would subject themselves to a day of terrible
movies. Conversations like this are as common as the common cold:

Cagey Veteran of B--Movie Circuit: "What did you think of Rocky Horror?"

Non-Knowing Neophyte: "I was surprised! It was really bad, the acting was
horrible and the script was poor! There was also a lot of loud
cross-dressers throwing toast at me. I should've rented 'Cop And A Half'
instead."

Cagey Veteran (buttering toast): "Christ, you're stupid--Mmmm, wheat. My
favorite."

That's the whole point of bad movies. They're so terrible that you enjoy
laughing at poor special effects, hamfisted dialogue, editing gaffes,
slumming movie stars and blatant logic and continuity errors. The best way
to watch a bad movie is with many of your obnoxious friends and possibly
some form of chemical stimuli. (Note: This writer in no way endorses the
use of chemicals.) Here are some of the highlights of the B-movie assault
that I endured:

A group of my friends made the trek, and one even faked a basketball ankle
injury to skip work just to endure the B-movie marathon. Ironically
enough, he injured his ankle playing basketball after B-Fest. We walked
into the huge auditorium and "The Crawling Eye" was on. This one was tres
terrible as a huge eye with tentacles was terrifying a mountain
laboratory. They combatted it by throwing molotov cocktails in the eye
(insert eye puns).

"The Angry Red Planet" was next, and it was filmed in the ground-breaking
yet little known cinematographic process known as "Cinemagic." This
stupendous technique involved placing orange cellophane over the lens to
produce a Mars atmosphere effect. The budget of this movie must have been
sapped by the "Cinemagic" technology because the astronauts were shooting
at the Martian plants with invisible death rays.

Following the Angry Red Movie was B-movie auteur supreme Ed Wood's "Bride
of The Monster" featuring Bela Lugosi and Tor Johnson (a former Swedish
pro-wrestler). Bela creates a giant rubber octopus and tries to brainwash
people with a device that looks surprisingly like a noodle strainer with
fishing bobbers on top of it. Many members of the audience (including
Yours Truly) hopped up on the stage and reenacted the fight scenes while
they were going on onscreen.

The disappointment of the evening was the last-second change from
"Invasion of the Bee Girls" to "The Undertaker and His Pals." While the
latter was a fine movie, the former was a classic featuring crazed women
who have sex until somebody dies. There are worse ways to die.

After a small break to consume more caffeinated, sugar-based products, at
midnight they showed "Dance Hall Racket," a seedy little film starring and
written by pioneering shock-comedian Lenny Bruce. The only thing shocking
about this movie was how lousy and incoherent it was. Lenny wanders around
cutting people with a shiv and spouting lame wisecracks like, "If you got
the money, I've got the time." The funniest part of the film was that
previously viewed scenes would pop up again for no reason a la Groundhog
Day. Adequately briefed, the entire audience would then shout out the
lines, and a few brave souls would act out the scene on stage.

A short called "Wizard of Speed and Time" would pop up from time to time
during which everybody in the theater would race to the stage and lie
underneath the screen in order to fully absorb the speed effects. It
featured a guy dressed like Robin Hood/Merlin who would run across the
country at high speeds and then make various cinematography equipment
(cameras, tripods, clapper-loaders) do a little stop-action dance while he
sang his theme song. Poignant.

"The Corpse Grinders," a garish '70s schlock slasher debacle was on around
2 a.m., and it featured people who would kidnap scantily clad females,
grind them up and then serve them at a local greasy spoon fittingly called
"The Greasy Spoon." The victims would then be the special of the day and
it would be called "Leg o' Lamb," after Shirley Lamb.

In the wee hours were "Robot Monster," featuring a guy in a gorilla suit
with a diving helmet terrorizing the last family on Earth with a bubble
maker; "This Beast Must Die," which looked like Shaft meets the Werewolf;
and "Equinox," starring Herb from WKRP. The crown jewel of B-Fest was Ed
Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space." Bela Lugosi died during the filming and
was replaced with a man a foot taller than him. The scenes change in and
out of day and night so fast that the crowd yells, "Day!" or "Night!"
accordingly. Each line is memorable (ex: "Murder! And somebody's
responsible!") The space ships look like paper plates. Easily the worst
movie ever made. A mess-terpiece.

Following "Plan 9" is an impossible task, but "Kingdom of The Spiders"
tries its best. It stars a post-"Star Trek" William Shatner and a bunch of
spiders that attack a small ranching town. It features Spider-Cam angles.

The whole fest wound down with "The Woman Eater," which is a tree with
tentacles that only eats Ford models; "Married Too Young," a parable about
teenage marriage that features the line: "Boys were made for loving"; and
"The Devils Hand" starring Commissioner Gordon from the old Batman series
who leads a voodoo cult that worships the Devil God "Gamba."

At 4:40 p.m. Saturday, B-Fest finished off with the epic "Godzilla vs. the
Cosmic Monster." While Godzilla was battling Mecha-Godzilla (a robot
duplicate of himself,) a tear came to my eye as I realized what I
accomplished. I have seen what few have seen or ever would see. Summing up
the moment, the words of the balding, potbellied alien to us humans in
"Plan 9" kept echoing through my caffeine-riddled brain: "Your juvenile
minds could not comprehend what you were doing. You're stupid! Stupid!
Stupid!"