FILMS - Are B-Movies Back In Vogue?
Ah, B-Movies, B-movies, bmovies… where to start!? The thing about B-movies is that there are so many different types to classify and when you think about it, you can give the “B-Movie” label to so many films as long as you are prepared give it the right frame of reference. This frame of reference extends beyond the amount that it cost to make the movie. For example: 1. The film with the big budget that still looked cheap, was badly acted and had a poor script: e.g. The Black Hole, Saturn 3 2. The film that had literally no budget, but was so original that it still made good: e.g. Death Race 2000, Donnie Darko 3. The film that was an unashamedly a rip-off of another property and was made on the cheap, but you loved it anyway e.g. Battle Beyond the Stars, Beastmaster In order to approach this article, I thought I’d be clever and succinctly define the term “B-Movie”. No such luck, I’m afraid: “a B-Movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film” said one trite definition. That definition may have been accurate several decades ago. B-movies started life as films intended for distribution as the less-marketed, “back-end
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sonable salary demands to pander to, and no expectations from share-holders or stake-holders for productplacement or fast-food tieins in order to guarantee that all-important “returnon-investment”. Investor money in the arts is arguably easier to be had these days and by the same token, the cost of equipment, CGI and travel to international locations have all reduced. In addition. There is now a large pool of available “wannabe” actors & actresses prepared to be exploited for fame. Quite simply, the term is now used to loosely describe many midto-high budget, mainstream movies with lowest-commondenominator content, usually drawn from the traditionally associated genres: sci-fi, horror, martial arts, crime etc. Always on the look-out for that elusive sleeper hit, the distribution companies, now with Blu-Ray, low cost DVD and of course the internet, are all much more likely to take a ‘punt’ on giving a B-Movie higher profile media exposure. Either way, most B-Movies have represented a particular genre of their time. Born as the cheaply produced black andwhite Westerns, churned out in their droves after the Depression & during the second World War to give the masses a well needed distraction and relief, they morphed into the low-budget science-fiction and horror films that became more popular in the late nineteen-fourties. These were typically garnered with incredible
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of the horse” half of a double feature. Think in terms of the “B-side” of a music single, if you will. In the same way that sometimes, a musical B-side wasn’t just a cheap, secondrate jingle thrown on the underbelly of a hit single, but was actually a damn good, finely crafted song, a B-movie could occasionally come up trumps in a market-place filled with star-studded, high-budget, Computer Generated Imagery (CGI)-driven noise-fests. Contrast The Blair Witch Project, with say, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Both films were released in 1999, the latter cost $115 million and took in over $500 million. The former cost a mere $60,000, and famously took $250 million! Lest we all forget, B-Movies have been the place where many a rising star was discovered, usually exploited and where many fading stars still go in their twilight to end their careers. Today, the term “B-Movie” has evolved in its meaning, in much the same way that the whole film industry has become more complex & multifaceted. These days, the term has almost contradictory definitions: 1. A movie that has “minimal artistic creativity” (you know the type!), 2. An original, off-beat, thought-provoking film, usually unshackled from the trappings of a big studio. The film will therefore have no creative constraints or oversight, no big-name stars with unrea-