The crowd that gathered for the 24th anniversary of B-Fest, the 24-hour marathon of so-bad-they’re-good movies at Northwestern University, was the greatest collection of indoorsmen ever assembled in one auditorium. They began filing into the Norris University Center just before six, carrying sleeping bags, pillows, laptops, Cheetos, bags of paper plates, and inflatable mallets with American-flag designs. Every kind of trash-culture mania was represented, often on the body of a single person: one man sported a soul patch, a crew cut, and a Hawaiian shirt worn over a T-shirt with the command cut your mullet. The burly leader of C.H.E.W.–the Consortium of Hammy Entertainers of the World, which was sponsoring the festival’s screening of The Swarm–wore a safari vest containing a water bottle, a toothbrush, a flashlight, a sleep mask, a pen, and his business cards, all to help carry him through the 16 features and five shorts, starting at 6 PM last Friday.
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Singer, a slight man with thick-framed rectangular glasses, was standing outside the door, next to a stand selling B-Fest T-shirts. “All the T-shirts they’ve sold are, like, really small, for people like me, or really huge,” he said. “There are no normally proportioned people here.”
He excused himself. The Apple was about to start. Produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, Israel’s greatest and wealthiest enemies of good taste, The Apple (1980) is a disco musical set in the dystopian future of 1994, when Earth is ruled by the music corporation BIM and its satanic chief executive, Mr. Boogalow. His hegemony is threatened by a wholesome folksinger who won’t sell out to his star machine. The dance numbers and costumes steal from Hair, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Can’t Stop the Music. The movie, which features buff male lead George Gilmour (who never acted again) in butt-floss briefs, is so bad that at its premiere the audience damaged the screen by using their free sound-track LPs as missiles. But one era’s trash is another’s camp. After the big finale, in which a tribe of hippies follows a golden Cadillac into the sky, the B-Fest crowd erupted in a standing ovation.
“I use ketchup for blood,” he continued. “I use 25-cent fangs for vampires. I’m not worried about realism. They can take that Oscar and stick it where the sun don’t shine. I’m going to do it my way, like Lucas or Altman. I may not make as much money as those guys, but that’ll come around. I’ve sold more tapes this year than ever. I’m selling four tapes a month.”
“Bela!” they shouted, when Lugosi appeared.
It’s hard to say which is the worst movie at a bad-movie festival, but the most hated at this year’s B-Fest was easily Lassie: The Adventures of Neeka, in which an orphaned Indian boy learns about life through his relationship with the collie. The flagging B-Festers rose up and heckled.
“Can’t we just skip this and get to The Ice Pirates?” someone moaned.
