B-Fest 2007

Last weekend I attended B-Fest 2007, a 24-Hour B (as in Bad) Movie Festival put on by A&O Productions, which is a student group my brother was a part of while attending Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. So basically I got real cheap tickets to Chicago, stayed with a friend Thursday night and spent Friday night through Saturday afternoon in a Theatre in the Student Center at Northwestern watching movie’s that by definition are not very good.

The Schedule is available here, but I’ll give you a walk-through of the event:

4pm Friday - My Brother and I arrive two hours early to find that many hardcore bfesters are already mulling around, working out strategy, planning, etc. There are people who attend this festival Religiously and they chat online all year while waiting for the day in January when they come together for this festival. I’ll let you imagine what these people look like. Around 200 tickets for this event go on sale every year, and sell out within 2 days. This year, only around 20 of those tickets went to actual Northwestern Students, and that was way more then normally attend.

5pm Friday - My Brother and I decide to take a long walk on the lake-fill because we don’t want to be sitting in that theater when that’s all we’ll be doing for the next 20 plus hours.

6pm Friday - They kick out everyone who’s been hanging around in the theater, we all go outside and get in the line to get officially admitted to the festival. Again, I’ll let you imagine what this line looked like. We go back into the theater and there’s a short introduction.

The other thing to realize about b-fest is that the projectionists are all students that have, at best, run one or two films a weekend throughout the year. They are not as skilled at splicing or running movies as the guy that makes $8 an hour doing it at most movie theaters you go to. The problem is compounded by the fact that some of these movies are 40+ years old and have become brittle and warped. When you run them they will randomly get out of focus.

6:05pm Friday - After several false starts that I later found out may have been planned, the first movie starts rolling the people start yelling. If you’ve ever seen Mystery Science Theater 3000 you can imagine the type of things people were yelling, but only about One in Ten outbursts got laughs from the rest of the audience. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die was definitely entertaining, despite the film going in and out of focus, the yelling, etc. Towards the end of the Movie, the Mad Scientist brings a women to his secluded mansion with the intention of later attaching his Girlfriends disembodied head to her body. He drugs this women by offering her a drink, and that was my queue to slip some rum in the Coke I’d been drinking.

7:30pm Friday - We roll right into The Beastmaster which I’d seen parts of on TV before, but it was way more fun to see in this setting. The other thing I want to mention is that sitting one row ahead of us was probably the only Family in the theater. A Mother, Father, 16 year old daughter, 14 year old son and another daughter who couldn’t have been much older then 11. This was the first movie of the evening with female frontal nudity, but it wouldn’t be the last. The family left at some point in the night before Street Trash came on, but there was several moments where I questioned the effects this festival was having on these kids.

9:30pm Friday - Mystery short one was a black and white cartoon featuring a frog having a somewhat romantic relationship with a car. It was weird enough and I had a pretty decent buzz at this point so I enjoyed it.

9:40pm Friday - Revenge of the Creature (from the Black Lagoon) in 3D was sort of a mixed bag. 3D movie can be really fun, especially when you are drinking, but they can also sort of give you a headache, especially when they were made before they completely perfected the art of 3d film, and again, the old movie tend to warp. I mean I was drinking, but I’m pretty sure I was watching a 3d movie that was out of focus at some points which really got messy.

11pm Friday - I didn’t have an actual ticket because my brother got me in so I didn’t get the chance to win any other the dozen’s of door prizes that ranged from this to this. There were also some packages of unused Christmas cards.

11:45pm Friday - I was told that I needed to go down on stage for the Wizard of Speed and Time. This is the only movie I’ll be talking about that you can see in it’s entirety on Youtube. So this point I was at the height of drunkness and I run down to the stage and lay down with my knees bent like everyone else. My brother actually ran the projector for this film, probably because he was wanting to show off a little. So he starts the movie and we’re all laying facing the screen on a stage. We run in place as fast as we can along with the wizard, then stomp with the beat at the end. It lasts three minutes, but no one gets up after its done… Then the film is run again, except this time it’s backwards and upside down. We all run in place again, except this time everything is upside down and backwards. Needless to say, this was one of the high points of the evening.

Midnight - The B-Fest schedule changes every year, but the Ed Wood Classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space always plays at midnight. I can’t really tell you the plot of this movie, but from what I can tell it’s all about yelling and throwing paper plates. There’s a sexy vampiress that you have to yell “SLUT” every time you see. There’s Bald stocky Zombie and when you see him you yell “TORE” or “THOR” or something like that. Bela Lugosi is in a few scenes, but he died before the movie was finished. Obviously you have to Yell “BELA” when he appears and “NOT BELA” when his body double stands in. Also the Movie is set mostly at night, but for some reason many of the night shots were done during the day, so it’s important to yell “DAY” and “NIGHT” as well.

Now if that’s not complicated enough after 3 or 4 stick rum and coke’s it’s vital to throw as many paper plates as you can all over the place when Flying Saucers appear on the screen. From what I can remember, there were a lot of Flying Saucers in this Movie. If that’s not fun enough, you should be writing clever things on these paper plates. I didn’t bring any plates of my own, but after one or two UFO appearances, they covered the aisles and I just ran around grabbing them like everyone else. During lulls in the action I’d read through a stack of plates, writing on any plates without messages, then fling all those messages over the audience as soon as another UFO came on the screen.

This is why I have no idea what Plan 9 from Outer Space is about, but as you’d assume this is basically the climax of the festival. The funny thing to realize here is that after that wild and crazy 80 minutes is over, you’ve only watched about 7 hours of Movies and there are 17 more to come.

If, at this point, you’re completely sure you need to be at this event next year, I challenge you to read on and still show up:

1:30am Saturday - Perfect scheduling for a Blaxsploitation film. At this point I was literally becoming sloppy drunk. I spilled on myself, kicked over our bag of Doritos, and fell asleep, but not before going out to the restroom and finding all these b-festers with no proper sleeping equipment sprawled all over the student center:

3 or 4 am Saturday - Some how I woke up as the movie Street Trash was starting. Make no mistake, this is a very BAD movie, but the melting bums, rape scenes, and amazingly bad acting kept me awake through the entire film. I’m fairly certain I’d sort of sobered up and didn’t drink at all after this point in the festival.

around 6 am Saturday - I somehow managed to sleep slumped over in a movie theater chair during The Hypnotic Eye, but I heard it was worth seeing.

about 8 am Saturday - At this point I really had no reference for what time it might be, but everyone else seemed to be waking up, so I found myself watching Krull. I’d never seen this before, but it was in a sort of NeverEnding Story / Star Wars genre so it seemed promising. After watching it, in it’s entirety, I can now tell you that I hated this Movie. It may have been because there was a constant Hummmmmmmm that drowned out the dialog on every reel of this 2 hour film. Or maybe because the reels were played out of order on accident and no one really noticed. Or maybe it was because I’d been in that theater for 14 hours, eaten only a leftover half of a chipotle, Doritos and liqourice, gotten minimal amounts of really bad sleep, and been a little hungover. Even without those things, this is an awful movie. I was entertained by the fact that a young Liam Neeson is in it, but when his character died with at least a half hour left to play, I started yelling “END” at almost any point where the movie switched scenes. It was basically pure cinematic torture. The exact opposite of the bliss I felt during Plan 9.

11 am Saturday - We broke for around an hour for Lunch. I needed to get something with some nutritional value in my body ASAP and was unwilling to wait in any long lines to have something prepared for me. I found a bottle of orange juice and a pre-package french bread with tomato, mozzarella and basil sandwich. It did the trick.

Noon Saturday - I got my second wind when they made a great adjustment to the schedule, moving the Chuck Norris Classic Invasion U.S.A. up ahead of Teenage Dolls. I had hoped to see this movie, but feared I wouldn’t see the end because my Flight home was leaving at 5:30. This is a great movie with too much yelling, several great opportunities for the guy with a slide whistle to do his thing and the other guy with the tire to roll it across the stage. The guy with the fake corpse also got a workout during this one. See this movie, it’s a good one.

2 pm Saturday - I decide I need use what’s left of my Chuck Norris Strength second wind and start my 2 hour journey to Midway Airport. Admittedly it was a fairly nice January day in chicago, so the half mile walk to the L stop wasn’t to bad. The ride it’s self was another real low point in the weekend. I was really really tired and drifting off, but fear of missing my stop kept me mostly awake. Also, I started to get real hungry, but it wasn’t the normal hungry feeling. When you deprive yourself of enough sleep hunger feels more like you want to throw up and I contemplating trying to throw up in a trash can while I switched trains, but didn’t. My psychological state at this point was probably approaching insanity, but some how I made all teh trains and got to the airport with plenty of extra time. The Wreck from Potbelly’s sandwich works is one of my favorite sandwiches of all time, and it tasted so great that day.

5 pm Saturday - I boarded the plane after most people had got on and as I approached my window seat I really hoped there wouldn’t be any little kids sitting near by. When I got to my row, two kids, probably both around 10 were sitting in the two other seats. I said “Hey Guys, I’ve got that one.” in as friendly a tone as I could muster. They slid out, I got seated and their mom got in the seat right next to me… I don’t blame her…