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ANDREW

B-Fest ‘99:
An Introspective

I am thirty-four years old. So when I found myself sitting at this year’s "B-Fest" trying to pick some lame dialogue out from the tumult of jeers and catcalls for the 7:35 p.m. feature film, Earth vs. the Spider, I realized that my life has been wasted.

I mean, this movie deserved every sarcastic and astounded proclamation that the audience heaped on it that evening. Yet it had somehow captured this entire theater-full of luckless viewers who had dared the cold and shunned the opportunity to spend Friday night in stimulating social engagements. In return, the movie offered up a gaggle of actors unconvincingly playing to a clumsily matted-on tarantula. I suppose that I should have felt sorry for everyone at the auditorium that night, but I was far too absorbed in feeling sorrier for myself. In fact, I felt as though my mere presence was the stamp of some irrefutable cosmological proof that thirty-four years of training and experience had been wasted on me, and that I was -- and am -- irredeemably stupid.

I guess that I should have come to the realization long ago -- when as a teenager, I had already watched Zontar, Thing from Venus for something like the twentieth time -- that any efforts to "better" myself would probably be futile. And I don’t mean that I watched a few minutes of this film on twenty different occasions. I watched it from start to finish, Empire carpet commercials, Earl Schieb (sp?) ‘we paint any car any color for $99.99’ commercials, and all. What a moron.

So, before I attempt to describe what I saw at this year’s "B-Fest," essentially twenty-four hours of some of the most incompetent cinematic efforts ever conceived, shown at Northwestern University (go figure), I would like to apologize. I would like to apologize to all of those taxpayers who contributed to my G.I. Bill educational benefits and to the college grants that I received. It was obviously all a huge waste of money. Sorry.

Anyway, I guess I shouldn’t be such a downer, and get on with the business at hand, briefly evaluating a few of the feature attractions. I suppose that I should also point out that I didn’t see all of the films since I arrived late and left early, at about 6 a.m. At some point during Reefer Madness, my brain started whining about not wanting to spend the next twelve hours having more stuff like Plan 9 from Outer Space crammed down its pie-hole, and how it hadn’t "transcended millions of years of hominid evolution to be demeaned like this," and bla bla bla bla. Well, you can imagine that I finally caved in, drove it home and tossed it on a pillow.

One of the movies that I saw before my brain started its self-absorbed harangue was Fearless Vampire Killers. Now, here’s a film about a couple of bumbling vampire killers, an older Van Helsing type and his young apprentice. The thing is, though, that they’re both really scaredy-cats... I mean they’re really not fearless at all... get it? Well, think about it, they’re not really fearless vampire killers at all. And the humor goes on like that.

O.K.!, now the next movie is Return of the Ape Man, one of many really lousy movies featuring Bela Lugosi. However, anyone who has ever sat through this flick would probably agree that it has one of the most memorable images in the history of pointless cinema. Namely, there is a scene with Bela Lugosi walking along a downtown street in Anytown, U.S.A., wearing a tuxedo carrying a lit hand-held blow-torch in the hope that he runs across his footloose thawed-out cave-man. And, of course, how can a plan like this not work? Hence, Bela is reunited with his aberrant anthropoid and shooshes him back to the lab. As if Bela wasn’t conspicuous enough before he was joined by his post-Mesozoic window-shopper. I would describe more of this film, but that scene is all that I can seem to clearly remember; I mean, it was boring the life out of me. Nor is this phenomenon unique to this particular ‘thawed-out cave-man’ movie, every attempt at which ends up hopelessly dull.

Regarding the next film which I examined, I remember once as an undergraduate having a teacher in modern French history who warned that no one should write a paper on the War of 1812, as it was a subject he had seen beaten into the ground by academics and students alike. I went ahead and wrote a paper on the War of 1812 anyway (because Napoleon is the coolest, igniting Europe with the Nationalist fervor which would galvanize Italia and reawaken the martial glory of Imperial Rome). Well, in the same spirit of flaying a dead horse, the next film I’ll address is Plan 9 from Outer Space. Although I’m sure that this film has been dissected numerous times by authors catering to the unfortunate few who would pay attention to its ilk, I have a few things to say if perhaps nothing to add.

We all know the plot... kind of. Well, it’s about a plan to conquer Earth conceived by aliens who act and look remarkably like lazy, pasty-skinned, flabby humans. You guessed it... plan nine. What I can’t figure out is what happened to the first eight plans; were they scrapped because they weren’t as good as plan nine?; if so, they sucked. I mean plan nine apparently involves bringing an anemic old guy (Bela Lugosi), a really weird-looking woman (Vampira), and a morbidly obese policeman (Tor Johnson), back from the grave by remote control to... somehow take over the world for three of these really lazy aliens. If you think about it, those other aliens who published that book, To Serve Mankind, had a much better plan. So, it should hardly surprise us when the flagship of the invasion is set ablaze during a truly girlish fight between the main alien guy and the main protagonist.

What does come as a surprise, however, is that the huge strings visibly holding the wobbling saucer aloft during its final flight are not severed by the flames (my guess is that the strings extend from the mother-ship hovering further above the Earth and are fashioned out of some sort of alien high-tech-flame-resistant material). What also does not come as a surprise, however, is that this is not one of those movies where there’s a big question mark on the screen at the end of the film, like "is it really over?;" yeah, right, these guys are coming back; I mean, this must have been like their Gallipoli or something. Flabby aliens on the home planet are reading about the plan 9 fiasco in the papers and saying, "We spent how much?" Ironically, after the film, audience members are thinking the same thing.

Well, the next film I would like to discuss is a personal favorite, a sort of ‘Holy Grail’ of atrocious cinema, Zardoz. Zardoz is not one of those casually bad films like Plan 9 or Earth vs. the Spider, which are bad because they are done almost thoughtlessly on a shoestring budget without much ambition or direction. Something like Zardoz soars to the peaks of unwatchability because it is so intellectually ambitious, so well-funded, so seemingly fortified against failure by talent like Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling; yet, it is s-o-o-o-o pretentious that any semblance of a coherent movie is devoured by the ravenous ego of its maker (John Boorman’s in this case); the product is then regurgitated as a jumble of nonsense to anyone but the director who is too busy crafting scenes to celebrate his cinematic acumen to realize that just because he is stupefied by the depth of his vision, doesn’t mean I will be. This approach lacks the true genius of, say, a Michelangelo Antonionio whose work occasionally reveals a playful absurdity which negates any pretense other than a revelation of the, often absurd, condition of human nature. It is therefore as pleasant and interesting to watch The Eclipse as it would be to project one of the dream scenarios from Interpretation of Dreams onto a screen for analysis. In short, the difference between The Eclipse by Antonionio and Zardoz by Boorman is that the former is showing us one vision of the human psyche, take it or leave it; Zardoz, on the other hand, is so impressed with itself and its instructive value for the untrained masses that it is not only intellectually offensive but it is really really boring. Did I mention boring?

Anyway, enough of how and why I think that Zardoz is epically bad in theory, let’s see how that translates on the ‘nuts and bolts’ level, emphasis on the ‘nuts.’ For starters, the film centers around a giant floating head. The very first scene of the film is a side-splitting depiction of this giant stone head just kind of floating around; what makes the scene so hilarious is that Boorman tries to shoot the floating head like it’s the obelisk from 2001 or something, and, man... it’s a giant floating head. As soon as that giant head came floating across the big screen, my disbelief came running up to the front of my brain with a ‘val-u-bucket’ of popcorn yelling like a maniac, "don’t even think about suspending me, not for a second!," and plopped itself down for the duration. And that was just the beginning.

As nearly as I could gather, the giant head was controlled by some race of super-beings who had learned in the post-nuclear apocalypse to control time and space; these super-beings apparently used the giant head to act as a makeshift god to control -- and supply weapons to -- a group of savages called the Exterminators, who in turn predated upon a large slave population to keep it in check; this slave population, if I have the story-line right, produced goods for the super-beings; of course, the basic plot was even more convoluted than this, to the point that I may not even have it right as to the relation between the super-beings, the Exterminators and the laborers the giant head told the Exterminators to predate upon. The trajectory of this film is difficult to plot because it seemed to induce a kind of logic narcolepsy, inducing the brain’s higher functions to keep passing out uncontrollably. This condition was probably induced by the skillfully crafted isolation of each scene from any connection with any other scene, and of each line of dialogue from any connection with what the last actor had just finished saying. In short, Zardoz was one big ego trip for Boorman and one long painful descent into movie-hell for its audience.

The next feature I’d like to discuss is the last one I watched in its entirety (coincidence?), namely Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Like Zardoz, Beyond The Valley of the Dolls (hereinafter referred to as Beyond) is an exercise in self-indulgence by its author. Unlike Zardoz, however, Beyond makes no apparent attempt to convey a ‘message’ in any conventional sense but rather seems to be simply an outlet for a bizarre and depraved personality set against the backdrop of a stunningly unimaginative underlying plot. That this movie was apparently written by Roger Ebert, who survived Gene Siskel, seems to validate the axiom posited by Billy Joel that ‘only the good die young.’

Well, as I suggested, Beyond is pretty much a generic story-line ornamented with disturbingly numerous and profound fits of ‘sick and wrong-ness.’ As for the generic story-line, the film is apparently about this really naive [and talentless] songstress who comes to the big city full of hopes and dreams [but did I mention no talent?] with eyes as big as saucers but who ends up graduating from the School of Hard Knocks summa cum laude with a degree in tough-as-nails-I’m-a-big-female-rock-star-but-I-paid-my-dues-and-nobody-better-ever-get-in-my-way cynicism. Man, what’s Ebert gonna write about next, a really naive prize-fighter who comes to the big city full of hopes and dreams with eyes as big as saucers but who ends up graduating from the School of Hard Knocks summa cum laude with a degree in tough-as-nails-I’m-a-big-heavy-weight-boxer-guy-but-I-paid-my-dues-and-nobody-better-ever-get-in-my-way cynicism?

Now for a sample of the ‘sick and wrong’ ornamentation which bedecks the foregoing and insipid backdrop. Right out of the box, the movie starts with a woman from the female protagonist’s band being awakened from bed with a pistol shoved in her face and having her brains blown out... with the whole scene shot in really graphic and gross manner. This scene is apparently good enough to be shown again later on in the film. But it is revealed during the re-screening that the assailant is the female protagonist’s agent, who goes nutzoid, discloses that he is "Super Woman," and proceeds on a killing spree with his shirt open to expose his false breasts. Need I say more? Come on, film critics across the country should have risen up with one voice in the wake of this film’s first previews and banished Ebert from their ranks forever, after having branded or tattooed him with some kind of identifying mark of shame.

As an added bonus, this film somehow also manages to cram in a bounty of baffling scenes. Just for instance is one scene during the montage of the up-and-coming songstress’ watermark gigs where she seems to be playing to the patrons at some kind of up-scale black-tie restaurant. And these people appear to be digesting their food. Given the starlet’s slavish devotion to superficial trends in technical presentation, devoid of any genuine lyrical content or individual creativity, it is as easy to imagine a contemporary banquet-hall-full of sophisticated diners patiently abiding the musical stylings of the Spice Girls without rocket-launching their guts. My solution for this enigma is that the scene means to depict a restaurant which caters exclusively to the well to-do of the (happily) hearing impaired.

Suffice it to say that Beyond was the most unpalatable movie of the evening (morning?), which is saying something powerful, given its adversaries. In fact, I honestly believe that it was this film which finally broke me, my Chateau de Hougoumont, before which I hesitated, then faltered, and then finally broke ranks and fled. Shortly thereafter, a few minutes into Reefer Madness, after 6 a.m., my brain started into its ‘evolutionary scale’ tirade; I had no energy left to resist its seemingly irresistible pleas for sleep. All in all, however, I’ll probably be at B-Fest next year, when I’ll be...35. Oh well, maybe they’ll show Zontar, Thing from Venus.