The ABCs of B-Movie Monster Bullsh*t - A is for Atomic

A few months back I entertained the entire Internet with my in-depth look at The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t, and—because I don’t have time to write anything else—I’ve decided to recreate that magic by going back to that well and draining it of every last remaining drop by exploring—wait for it….

The ABCs of B-Movie Monster Bullsh*t!

I think it’s pretty self-explanatory and will let me get through the next month without tossing and turning in bed because I haven’t had time to update the website in weeks. So here goes.

A

is for

Atomic

Once humankind learned how to harness the almighty power of the atom, the world of B-Movie Monster Bullsh*t was never the same. Dracula may want to suck your blood, the wolfman may hunt you at night, and The Mummy might walk really slowly towards you, but none of them were as frightening as what scientists could bring about messing with forces they themselves barely understood.

Faster than you can say, “Allegory!” filmmakers across the globe came up with imaginative ways to discuss the potential dangers of atomic power. Sure, in most cases extreme doses of radiation would likely lead to slow, lingering, extremely painful deaths, but in B-Movies those powerful rays were much more likely to cause mutation. And by mutation we mean, “Shit got bigger!” To that end the world was given The Amazing Colossal Man, War of the Colossal Beast, Them!, Beginning of the End, The Monster That Challenged the World, The Horror of Party Beach, Attack of the Crab Monsters, just to name a small handful.

And then there were the monsters who weren’t created by atomic power, but whose subsequent wrath came about as a direct result of humanity’s introduction to the nuclear age. Everyone remembers Godzilla, but there was also The Giant Behemoth, Gamera and Mothra who wreaked all sorts of crazy havoc.

The message couldn’t have been clearer. Science is bad. The next time you see a nerd with a calculator and slide rule—kick his scrawny ass.

A

is for

Atomic

and

Atomic

is

All Sorts of

Armageddon-y

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- From A to Z

A is for A.I.P.

B is for Blaxploitation

C is for Canuxploitation

D is for Drive-In

E is for Exploitation

F is for Freaks

G is for Gore

H is for Hammer

I is for Italian

J is for Japanese

K is for Kicking

L is for Lost Worlds

M is for Music

N is for Nudity

O is for Out of Print

P is for Poster

Q is for Q

R is for Roger Corman

S is for Scream Queens

T is for Trailer

U is for UFOs

V is for Vincent Price

W is for Women in Prison

X is for XXX-Rated

Y is for Young People

Z is for Zombie

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- Z is for Zombie

Z

is for Zombie

Do you really need me

to tell you about zombies?

Really?

Z

is for Zombie

and

Zombie

starts with

Z

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- Y is for Young People

Y

is for Young People

 

It took Hollywood decades to discover what B-Movie makers knew from the very beginning. Adult viewers may bring prestige, but teenagers will make you rich.

The fact is that when people grow up their lives become busy and the opportunities they have to indulge their need for unconstructive entertainment can be measured in minutes per month. Teenagers, on the other hand, are so overburdened with free time that it’s the very thing that causes them to terrify their elders. Free time means mischief and mischief means reefer and jazz, which leads to murder in the streets.

Realizing this, enterprising low-budget producers started making films aimed directly at the young folks who had the time and allowance/babysitting money to go out see terrible movies over and over again.

To attract the kiddies, these producers threw in popular pop stars from the day and had them engage in silly, nonsensical plots involving popular fads like surfing, drag racing and dancing. The most famous of these were a series of A.I.P. produced films that starred Frankie Avalon and/or Annette Funnicello. The films were cheaply made cartoons that aped the style pioneered earlier by Frank Tashlin in such films as The Girl Can’t Help it and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter. They were also pretty awesome. Especially when they had Susan Hart in them.

Yowza.

Eventually, the studios caught on to this formula and it's now applied to most films made today. The only difference being that the amount of money being spent is that much greater than it ever has been before.

Problem is that while kids today still have a mega-buttload of free time to spend, they increasingly have access to better ways to spend it, which means the studios might eventually have to start making movies for the older audiences they have spent the past couple of decades specifically alienating.

Awkward.

Y

is for Young People

and

Young People

are

Young

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- X is for XXX-Rated

X

is for XXX-Rated

Quick question:

What’s the most financially successful movie of all time?

Nope.

Not even.

Don’t make me laugh.

Nope, none of those come close. The truth is that no one actually knows how much the most financially successful movie has made. Some estimates suggest that it could be as high as a billion dollars.

“So what? A bunch of movies have made that much!”

Yeah, but how many of them cost $25,000 to make?

On the basis of pure cost to profit ratio, there has never been a film to even come close to the success of 1972s Deep Throat. And the reason for its success?

Well, it ain’t because it’s a good movie, that’s for sure!

It just so happened that the film came out at the exact time America decided to make good on the promise of the sixties and get its collective freak on. For one brief, shining moment everyone decided they wanted to see a movie where a frizzy haired brunette with an annoying voice inhaled an impressively large penis right down to the short and curlies.

The immediate result was several ridiculous legal battles, but the long term result was that pornography finally became a mainstream phenomenon, which it has been ever since.

“But that can’t be true! People only started talking about porn being mainstream when everyone started acknowledging the existence of Jenna Jameson!”

Yeah, but people are liars. The fact is that XXX videotapes were largely responsible for the home video boom of the 80s. Pornographic websites were the first to prove that online businesses could make money. Pay-per-view porn proved to be a major profit center for hotel and telecommunication companies. Throughout the 80s, 90s and early to mid-00s, XXX productions brought in just as much money as their untarnished Hollywood counterparts.

XXX was mainstream looooong before Pamela Anderson went all Linda Lovelace on Tommy Lee or we spent One Night in Paris. It was just something no one ever talked about. After everyone saw Deep Throat or Beyond the Green Door it became a cultural secret everyone agreed to keep.

The irony being that for most of the time we were keeping this secret, XXX movies actually had plots and occasionally attempted to look and feel like real movies. Today they are the equivalent of a Michael Bay movie—uncomfortable close-ups, weird edits and all-cumshots-all-the-time. It’s enough to make you long for the days of 1972. Just as long as you don't have to watch Deep Throat.

X

is for XXX-Rated

and

XXX-Rated

is an

XXXtremely sensitive subject

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- W is for Women in Prison

W

is for Women in Prison

 

Chicks in chains. Babes behind bars. Ladies in lockup. Slammer sluts. Hotties in the hoosegow. Kittens in a cage. Detention center dames. Whatever you want to call them, they’re a lot of fun to watch.

The formula is simple: Stick a bunch of attractive actresses in skimpy prison gear (bras definitely NOT allowed), have them fight, fall in lesbian love and/or lust, get tortured and/or raped by corrupt officials and then watch as they riot and/or escape. Sound misogynistic? Well, that all depends on the movie.

Take the infamous Ilsa movies, for example. Are they misogynistic? Hooboy, are they! Even their most ardent defenders can’t deny that Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks film the torture of its female characters with erotic glee, imagining the boners its audience members will get as Shannon Kelly is flogged to death, as Uschi Digard has her internal organs squashed while trapped inside a pressure chamber, as Haji has her breasts put in a vice, and as some actress who didn’t appear in Russ Meyer movies is slowly strangled with a noose while standing on a block of melting ice.

But you can’t judge an entire genre by its worst offenders. Just take a look at other famous women in prison movies. Is Chained Heat misogynistic? Well, maybe. The Big Bird Cage? Aum, there is the scene where Anitra Ford is hung by her hair. Delinquent Schoolgirls? Oh, yeah, definitely. Reform School Girls? It’s a spoof, so it doesn’t count. What about all those Jess Franco variations? Well, they were able to turn at least one into an unofficial Ilsa movie, so…. Wait! How about Caged Heat? It was totally directed by noted liberal Jonathan Demme! It isn’t misogynistic at all!

So, there you go. Don’t judge Women in Prison movies by a few bad apples. Judge it by one good apple—Caged Heat. And don’t mind us while we watch and enjoy the rest.

W

is for Women in Prison

and

Women in Prison

are

Wonderful

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- V is for Vincent Price

V

is for Vincent Price

 

I’ve spent the last hour trying to explain why Vincent Price is my favourite actor. The problem is I could write a whole book on the subject and I don’t currently have the time to undertake such a worthy project. So, instead I’ve decided to put my feelings under high heat and reduce them to their very essence—the one concentrated phrase that sums up why I adore this one actor more than any other.

Watching Vincent Price makes me happy.

I realize this is probably not as profound as you might have hoped, but it’s true and if you want something deeper, then you’re just going to have to wait until I have the time to write the book.

V

is for Vincent Price

and

Vincent Price

is

Too great to explain

In just one lame blog post

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- U is for UFOs

U

is for UFOs

 

Thanks to George Méliès, aliens have been a part of movies from cinema’s very beginning, but they didn’t really start getting their B-Movie due until the 1950s, when the gothic horror films of the 30s and 40s gave way to the sci-fi terror of the post-war, nuclear-threatened world.

During this time, aliens could be actual killer vegetables (The Thing From Another Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) or ones who just looked like killer vegetables (It Conquered the World’s walking piece of okra). They could be big-headed mutants (Invasion of the Saucer Men) or horny Martians (Mars Needs Women). They could be misunderstood messiahs (The Day the Earth Stood Still) or easily understood maniacs (Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, War of the Worlds).

But the “new horror” of the 60s and 70s didn’t have much use for such fantastical monsters and it took George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to bring the alien back into the pop culture zeitgeist. Their efforts were so successful that reports of people seeing and being abducted by such creatures increased by a shocking degree, with most reporting that their otherworldly kidnappers looked just like the aliens seen at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Since then aliens have appeared in every single genre of B-Movie, from slashers (Evil of the Night) to kid flicks (Mac & Me) to buddy cop movies (Alien Nation, The Hidden) to westerns (Oblivion) to sophomoric unnecessary comedy sequels (Meatballs II). They aren’t going anywhere and we’d all miss them if they did.

U

is for UFOs

and

UFOs

are

Ultra Cool

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- T is for Trailer

T

is for Trailer

 

The only thing keeping movie trailers from being as vital a part of the B-Movie experience as movie posters is the fact that—with a few exceptions here and there—filmmakers are obliged to include actual footage from the films they are selling. Unlike a poster, where pure misrepresentation is easily achieved, a trailer has to work much harder to trick an audience into wanting to see it.

That said, there is a proud tradition of crafty trailer editors spinning worthless celluloid into pure gold. These devious Rumpelstilskin’s of the flatbed were not afraid to completely misrepresent the films they were selling or even insert shots from totally unrelated films. There is the oft-told legend of how during a period in the 70s, virtually every trailer from Roger Corman’s New World cinema featured the same shot of an exploding helicopter. Even if this is apocryphal, it still feels like its true.

For this reason, the B-Movie trailer is its own genre, as important and worthy of study as any other. For the enthusiast, 90 minutes worth of trailers is as good as any one movie you can name.

T

is for Trailer

and

Trailers

are

Terrific

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- S is for Scream Queens

S

is for Scream Queens

It’s said that the term “Scream Queen” was coined in reference to Jamie Lee Curtis, whose run of 70s-80s horror movies (Halloween, Prom Night, The Fog, Terror Train, Road Games, and Halloween II) more then earned her the nickname. Since then, though, the term has been co-opted to apply to any attractive actress who has spent a significant portion of her career running away from masked maniacs baring lethally sharp instruments of bloody impalement.

The one difference between the original SC and her future descendents is that Curtis famously made her way through horror movie stardom without once giving up the goods (she saved that for her big time Hollywood debut, Trading Places), while a modern SC generally spends more time naked than otherwise. In fact, their open attitude regarding their bodies is generally responsible for the ubiquity that will eventually earn them SC status.

Take for example, Michelle Bauer. Never a particularly talented or convincing actress, she still managed to work a lot throughout the late 80s and up to the mid-90s (and even now makes the occasionally appearance here and there), largely because she was a trooper who low budget filmmakers understood was a guaranteed commodity. Casting her meant not having to worry about the sudden cold feet that sometimes affected less experienced actresses just before the film was about to roll on the nude scene for which they were specifically hired. Michelle would drop her top anywhere, anytime, for as long as you wanted and she looked great doing it. So what if she wasn’t that great at delivering her lines?

Throughout the 21^st century the role of the SC has declined significantly from its 90s peak. By the turn of the century many SCs had either aged out of the roles previously available to them or had ended their careers prematurely by refusing to do the only thing people previously hired them to do (see Jewel Shepard for the best example of this).

But the biggest factor in their fall from prominence is the diminished presence of low-budget independent genre films in popular culture. A present day SC like Tiffany Shepis, for example, may have almost 100 credits to her name, but even the most dedicated genre fan is unlikely to get the chance to see more than a handful of them. This stands in contrast to an 80/90s equivalent SC such as Linnea Quigley, whose most obscure films could still be found in the majority of video stores of the period. It was easy to be a SC fan back then. It takes a lot of work to admire them now.

Still it is worth the effort.

S

is for Scream Queens

and

Scream Queens

are

Sensational

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- R is for Roger Corman

R

is for Roger Corman

We'll keep this one simple.

If you don't know who Roger Corman is,

You're

on

the

wrong

fucking

blog.

R

is for Roger Corman

and

Roger Corman

is

God

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- Q is for Q

Q

is for Q

 

Since he first burst upon the scene, Q has had his detractors. They’ve accused him of being derivative (at best) and a plagiarist (at worst). They’ve made fun of his absurd acting ambitions and gleefully produced handwritten notes that suggested one of Hollywood’s most respected writers is actually illiterate.

All of this fair and probably true. It is also completely irrelevant.

Like a master DJ who is able to sample a beat or melody from someone else’s song and turn it into something exciting, thrilling and new, Q eagerly ripped off his vast array of influences and created works that transcended their unoriginal origins and became something entirely unique and unmistakably his own. For this alone he must be ranked amongst the best of the best, but that’s not the reason he made this particular list.

No, this honour is due to one glorious fact: Every single B-Movie fanboy has dreamed of turning their obsessions into art, cataloguing vast archives of character and plot for the sole purpose of someday creating their own piece of genius. Virtually none of us will ever see these dreamplays inside our minds come to life, but we are able to take solace in the fact that one of us did. Q succeeded where 99.999% of us failed, and the only possible reason anyone could resent him for this is a lack of generosity in their heart.

Jealousy is an ugly thing. Especially when it only makes you look silly and stupid.

Q

is for Q

and

Q

is for

Quentin

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- P is for Poster

P

is for Poster

I suppose it is possible to be a fan of B-Movies and care not one whit about how they were marketed, but I truly do not understand how. For me, B-Movie advertising is such an essential part of what I love about the field that if I actually had to choose between it and the films themselves, I would have to think about it.

And then I’d pick the marketing.

If you’ve searched around Vanity Fear, you’ve probably come across my bio, in which I describe how my obsessions came to be. The truth is that I became a fan of B-Movies as an idea long before I’d seen enough of them to appreciate them on their own merits. And the reason for this is because of how ably producers and distributors were able to excite my imagination with their advertising.

In a world where the product was so often lacking, a good poster often meant the difference between success and failure. To my mind the best of their kind aren’t actually selling a movie, but a dream. The fact that the films almost never live up to them is irrelevant, as the art of the poster is just as satisfying, if only for inspiring the movie you got to see play in your own imagination.

When I was a kid, video stores were my favourite places in the world. There were literally dream emporiums, filled with shelf after shelf of video covers specifically designed to demand my attention. Today I relive that sensation by visiting a site like Wrong Side of the Art, and collecting posters myself. At this point my collection far outnumbers my ability to display it, but I am helpless to the pursuit. The movies can never be anything but what they actually are, but the posters will always be whatever we want them to be.

P

is for Poster

and

Poster

is

Perfection

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- O is for Out of Print

O

is for Out of Print

There was a time where being a serious movie buff required true dedication and hard work. There were no such things as VCRs or Laserdiscs or DVDs or Blu-rays or Netflix streaming or iTunes or YouTube or Bittorrent. If there was a movie you always wanted to see, you had to hope that someday a local revival house or TV station decided to show it. Problem was that the first option tended to focus more on well-respected critically acclaimed junk and the second guaranteed you’d see an edited version with all of the good stuff cut out of it.

Thankfully, those days are long past, but not all is golden in movie buff land. For all of our options, we’ve grown accustomed to certain levels of presentational quality and access. We want to watch what we want to watch now and we want it to look better than it did when it was actually released.

And the world simply doesn’t work like that.

Out of Print means being denied. It means wanting. It means desire.

It also means having a reason to go on. In a land of plenty where all is available purely by whim, there is no joy of anticipation or satisfaction of achievement. Searching for the Out of Print keeps your love of movies alive. It forces you to appreciate films that you might have once dismissed out of hand as terrible. It make you think of the ways the world has changed so that what was once considered a marketable product, is now an unviable property, unworthy of release.

Out of Print makes the IMDb the most fascinating website in the world, allowing you to discover previously unheard of projects whose worth you can only estimate until you finally get the chance to see them for yourself.

Perhaps someday soon Out of Print will cease to be and we will all have access to every single thing ever recorded by a camera. It’ll be cool at first, but soon the novelty will fade, taking our passion along with it. It’s just so much easier to love that which you cannot have.

O

is for Out of Print

and

Out of Print

is

Our Blessing and Burden

The ABCs of B-Movie Bullsh*t -- N is for Nudity

N

is for Nudity

 

There are some who tell us that the purpose of art is to hold a mirror to society and expose us to the truths we cannot see in the workaday world. They are wrong. Art is about naked ladies. Anyone with a working brain can tell you that.

Show me a time and place and I’ll show you a bunch of artists depicting the glory of the unclad bod. From the Venus of Willendorf to Marilyn Monroe’s famous calendar, the truly wise have always known where true art lies.

People forget that pre-Hayes Code it was possible to spot nude bodies in mainstream films like Ecstasy and Tarzan and His Mate, but once studio self-censorship took over it was up to the independents to give audiences the art they craved.

How badly did people want to see the naked parts of a lady? Bad enough to willingly pay admission to see Mom & Dad, a film that showed a woman’s vagina in close-up detail—all you had to do was ignore the baby coming out of it, which many members of the all-male audience (the sexes were strictly segregated during screenings) were only too happy to do.

Fortunately for pervs art aficionados everywhere a new breed of “educational” films arrived in the form of the “nudie cutie”, which exploited the popularity of naturalist colonies for the enjoyment of all. Eventually filmmakers tired of the fake documentary format and decided to add comedic plots to their collections of artfully composed T&A. Most prominent of these innovators was former battlefield photographer Russ Meyer, whose The Immoral Mr. Teas and Eve and the Handyman proved to be the true classics of the genre.

When the Hayes Office reluctantly allowed a bare breast to appear in Sidney Lumet’s 1964 drama The Pawnbroker, it was only a matter of time before the floodgates opened and the art began to freely flow. By the end of the decade, nudity was a regular part of the mainstream film going experience. In the seventies it almost became de rigueur.

Never ones to be left behind, low budget B-Movie filmmakers rededicated their efforts in providing audiences with the art they craved. Meyer flourished and rose to the level of offbeat auteur with such efforts as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and SuperVixens. Entire subgenres arose based on the promise of female flesh, including those devoted to the adventures of cheerleaders, nurses, teachers and female prisoners.

In an age where the image of a naked lady is only ever a single mouse click away, Nudity has never gone out of style. Whole websites exist only to document the history of unclad cinematic flesh and softcore “art” is frequently the only lucrative market available to the filmmakers who first made their names in the 80s and 90s B-Movie marketplace.

It just goes to show you that our need for art is constant and eternal and if there is a potential point of over-saturation, we’re far, far away from reaching it.

N

is for Nudity

and

Nudity

Is

Nuthin’ But Art