Editor’s note: It’s been a while since I’ve featured other writer’s here but I’m warming up to the idea of it again. I got some pretty good feedback on my vampire article for Geek Force Five and at a recent meeting of the minds for bloggers and whatnot, a rebuttal in favor of werewolves was proposed by GF5 contributor Shawn Lampron. These are his ideas.
I became obsessed with the idea of hirsute monsters around the age of ten or so. I was fascinated as my usually tame local cable channels started to show me glimpses of werewolf movies made in the wake of An American Werewolf in London’s success. With ready access to a local video store, I made my mother plunk down numerous rental charges over the course of a summer as I devoured cheap VHS copies of howling werewolves bounding through the woods, endlessly hunted by those annoying “regular” humans.
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The Guest Starring series has been off to a slow start. I’ve approached a dozen people about submitting a quick 800 word essay on their opinion of the perfect b-movie and those people who didn’t ignore my proposals explained that they were too busy to chime in. So to those of you who were too busy, I want to confront you with this. Andrew W.K. is a successful musician, producer, public speaker and performance artist. He is easily the hardest man working in rock music today. He’ll do four speaking engagements in four states in two days and then shoot over to Tokyo for live performances only to come back to the States and produce an avant-garde album.
He had time to contribute. What’s your excuse? I am beyond excited to bring you, Andrew WK’s Perfect B-Movie.
The Perfect B-Movie
By Andrew WK
I was invited to write a column about B-movies, and what I consider an ideal example of a B-movie (thank you Cinema Suicide!), . I want to start by saying that in no way am I an authority on cinema, nor am I a particularly avid movie-watcher. However, I love movies as much as anyone, and I figured I could write something worthwhile. Then I realized I wasn’t sure what a “B-movie” was. I’d heard the term many times before, and some of my friends collected what they called “B-movies”, but I wasn’t certain what they were talking about. Is it a genre? A classification? An aesthetic? My first thought was that a B-movie is how people rate a slightly less than perfect film – like, “A-movies”, “B-movies”, “C-movies”, all the way down to “F-movies”. But I realized I haven’t heard people refer to F-movies, or even A-movies for that matter. Then I thought maybe B-movies refer to a film’s obscurity, but when I did some research, quite a few B-movies were actually famous and successful motion pictures. Further research told me that B-movies were sort of like “B-sides” in recorded music – a perfectly good and valid piece of artistic work, but maybe without the production, the purpose, or the presentation of an A-movie (or an A-side)
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Hey, folks. A while back it struck me that maybe I wasn’t doing quite enough with this blog as I could have. For nearly a year, I posted news and reviews on my own and over the last couple of months we’ve added some new blood to the shark tank in the form of some new writers but if there’s one thing I really wanted to do, it’s get some opinion up in here. So in an effort to add a little variety and hopefully spur some discussions in the comments and forums, I have asked a few people to put together their thoughts on a topic that we can all relate to. I asked them to write up an opinion piece about what they consider to be the perfect b-movie. Mind you, not necessarily their favorite, but a movie that they feel really embodies and defines the term. The first person to answer the call is Remo D., genre fan, writer, reviewer and host of California’s ‘Manor of Mayhem’ cable TV creature-feature. So without further adieu, Remo D.’s thoughts on the ultimate b-movie.
MY PERFECT “B” MOVIE
by Remo D.
Of the thousands of bizarre and outlandish films I’ve taken in over my lifetime, could I even try to define the perfect “B” movie? Absolutely not–but I’ve got MY personal favorite lined up and ready to go! It’s a “B” movie in the purest sense of the term–it was created by a major studio as a second feature to give support to one of their major productions, but it ended up with a life of its own, providing plenty of unexpected entertainment and individual value.
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