Just because you can’t respect a movie doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. The Golden Age of Crap serves up a sampling of junk-food flicks that gained their audiences on videocassette rental shelves during the ’80s and ’90s, a time when one couldn’t visit the video rental store without being tempted by Italian post-apocalyptic adventures, ninja revenge yarns, and zombie-filled “camcorder epics.” The movies covered here run from sleeper hits (Phantasm II) to cult favorites (The Dead Next Door), from unknown stinkers (Plutonium Baby) to undiscovered gems (America’s Deadliest Home Video), all examined with a critical but fun-loving eye.
Archive for category Hoopla
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…on behalf of my colleagues, to wish all of our visitors to this blog, whether they be chatty or silent, a very happy New Year. Thank you one and all for your support – it is very much appreciated!
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FLASHBACK—-
It was the mid-1990s. The internet was more than just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, but only just. It was a time when hour-long page downloads were barely even irritating; a time of getting lost in the cul-de-sacs of Geocities; and a time when the line, “It’s a UNIX system! I know this!” in Jurassic Park didn’t necessarily provoke a groan from the audience.
It was also the time when the appreciation of marginal cinema came into its own. B-movie websites sprang up like mushrooms; but it was not long before a handful of them separated themselves from the pack.
These webmasters and their works, the depth and breadth of their knowledge, their unabashed obsessiveness and perhaps above all their sense of humour would set a glorious example to those who would aspire to follow in their footsteps: Alan Gallauresi and Rob Trevino of Oh, The Humanity; Scott Hamilton and Christopher Holland of Stomp Tokyo; Kenneth Richard Begg of Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension (which started life as Ken’s World Of Awful Movies); and Freeman Williams, aka Dr Freex, of The Bad Movie Report.
In those days, giants walked the earth.
And even as the experts were decrying the “de-socialisation” supposedly caused by the internet, lovers of weird and wonderful movies were making new friends and enjoying an unprecedented sense of community. Inspired by the examples before them, others would found their own B-movie websites and bring their own peculiar perspectives to the reviewing table. It was not long before these webmasters, scattered all over the world, were corresponding by e-mail, coming together in an unofficial kind of mutual admiration society.
And then one day, one of them had an idea: suppose they came officially together? Why not hold a Roundtable, in which each of the participating sites reviewed the same movie? After some back-and-forthing, seven websites agreed to tackle the 1957 schlock masterpiece, The Brain From Planet Arous.
It was November, 1999. The event was dubbed BRAINATHON ’99. It was the birth of the B-Masters’ Cabal…
FLASHFORWARD—-
It is now November, 2009: our 10-year anniversary; and to celebrate, our member websites have again come together to wreak terrible vengeance upon a single, unfortunate movie. And not only is the occasion marked by the rare – unique? – participation of every single member site, but we have also succeeded in luring back to the fold the man whose suggestion started it all, way back in 1999: Andrew Borntreger of Badmovies.org. This time, the film in question is William Grefé’s drive-in non-classic, Sting Of Death.
Welcome, one and all, to STINGATHON ’09!!
Click the banner to do the jilla-jalla-jellyfish with the B-Masters’ Cabal!
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Ta-dah! The unveiling:
Tachyon City Retro-Futuristic Cinema offers movies which have fallen out of distribution since their initial release on VHS (or in some cases, without even that distribution). For years, movies like this were fodder for bootleggers, who offered dubs or DVD-Rs for outrageous sums. But now, you can download these movies for free!
The initial offering includes Mind Warp (1990), The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978), Attack of the Beast Creatures (1985), Moontrap (1989), Untamed Women (1952), and more! New titles will be added at least one per week!
Did I mention that it’s FREE?
It's a disaster!
Jan 25
My friends, I need your help.
While I have no qualms about ‘fessing up to my passion for shark films, Exorcist rip-offs and manskirts, I am just a little shame-faced about admitting to an equal passion for disaster movies, whether the man’s-hubris kind, the nature-strikes-back kind, or the transportation-out-of-control kind – and worse still, particularly for the dreadful, last-gasp-of-the-first-wave ones, like Beyond The Poseidon Adventure, When Time Ran Out and Cave-In! But so it is; and today I make good on a long-standing promise to myself, and welcome disaster movies into the AYCYAS! reviewing fold.
How do you define a disaster film? The line between genres can be very thin, but to my mind the answer is, focus and attitude. Thus, Airport ’75 is a disaster movie; Die Hard 2 is not. The Poseidon Adventure is a disaster movie; Titantic is not. Earthquake is a disaster movie; San Francisco – despite having (in my opinion) the best realised film earthquake ever – is not.
The curious thing about the disaster movie is how long it took to find itself as a genre. After the first ever disaster movie, it was two decades before 1954’s The High And The Mighty inspired a crop of borderline, transportation-related disaster movies, Zero Hour! (1957), The Crowded Sky (1960) and The Last Voyage (1960) among them. The disaster movie as we know it today did not come into its own until Airport which, while not in fact a disaster movie itself, was certainly the catalyst for what followed.
So my first question to all of you is this: what other films, before Airport, would you classify as disaster movies? What have I missed?
My second question is more specific, and probably (unfortunately) much harder to answer. By now, pretty much everyone is aware that Flying High! / Airplane! is a twisted remake of Zero Hour! What you may not know, however, is that Zero Hour! was itself the remake of a teleplay called Flight Into Danger, filmed for and broadcast on Canadian TV in 1956, and starring as the reluctant hero – James Doohan. Since discovering this factoid, Flight Into Danger has become one of my film-hunting Holy Grails, although sadly I have discovered no evidence that it was ever commercially available, or even that it still exists. If anyone out there has any information, please drop me a line!
And now, our feature presentation:
DELUGE (1933)The great-granddaddy of all disaster movies, focussing upon a love triangle in the aftermath of a worldwide catastrophe, which climaxes with the destruction of New York City.
Some clichés have awfully deep roots…
The first is that I get an extra seventeen hours at the end of every Roundtable – mwoo-ha-ha! The second is that I get the privilege of wishing all contributors and visitors to the B-Masters Blog a very happy New Year. Thanks to all those who dropped by (hey, lurkers! – resolve to de-lurk!), and especially to those who shared their thoughts with us. Here’s to another year of the living dead, killer dolls, murderers in skull masks, nature in revolt, zombie gorillas and manskirts.
(P.S. I don’t know who got “The Theme From ‘Shaft'” onto the NY playlist here, but thumbs up.)
Back by popular demand!
Jun 1
Due to personal issues for one of us, and technical issues for others, the RUBBER SOUL Roundtable has been officially extended until Sunday, 8th June. So expect to see one, hopefully two, maybe even three—
No, I guess that’s overly optimistic. Let’s make it, expect to see two more Roundtable entries during the upcoming week!