eight plus word titles like:
Geek Syndicate
“[Revenge/Invasion/Attack] of the [ Monster / Creature / Alien] from the [Black / Lost…] [World / Jungle / Planet]”. You get the general idea! To maximise any costs associated with sets, make-up, equipment rental and so on, early B-Movies were often part of a series in which the same star(s) repeatedly played the same character(s) in endless sequels. Think the multitude of Dracula, Wolfman and Frankenstein films starring Messrs Chaney Jnr, Lugosi and Karloff. So, the term “B-Movie” became synonymous with low budgets and inferior quality of acting, scripts, special effects and sets. Then the nineteen-fifties came and with it – television! Television was a heart-stopping jolt to the B-Movie makers and it all but killed off the “two-feature” night-out at the cinema, which later ended completely in the nineteen-seventies. Later, the nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, along with the Sexual Revolution, LSD and race riots came B-Movies of almost soft-porn eroticism, “blaxploitaton” films, Asian martial arts movies, the Hammer horror films and so on. Every genre was turning out B-Movies but having to try harder, as costs were steadily increasing and cinema audiences were drifting away to their love affair with television. That said it, even then it was easy to pick out the little gems of innovation, such as Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
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As we moved from the late seventies into the nineteeneighties, however, two big factors breathed new life into the B-Movie. Firstly, the commercial success of original films like Jaws, Star Wars and Dressed to Kill spawned a plethora of copy-cats films. Later, the advent of the VHS cassette player gave the studios a new channel to reach the masses. This spawned the entrance of the “video nasty” which singlehandedly delivered the type of government-funded marketing-hype that B-Movies couldn’t hope to achieve in a month of Sundays. A film being banned by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) was the best promotion you could get and guaranteed plenty of sales of brown-paper bag “under the counter” sales transactions. Amongst this mass of trash offerings, there were still plenty of diamonds to be found. Diamonds like Piranha, Battle Beyond the Stars, and John Carpenter’s Halloween. All through the eighties and into the nineties, B studios churned out shelf-load upon shelf-load of schlock horror films, whether they were set in a sorority house, on a campsite, or on an alien planet. In the mid-nineties, recession hit again and so too did a decline in the appeal of the traditional video B-Movie. Maybe the viewers were getting tired of the same staple diet of knives, blood and guts or perhaps it was that we were suddenly being treated to seminal B-movies that had bigger budgets, bigger stories and rising stars, but which still remained independent of the big studios.
Films like Total Recall and Dick Tracy evolved the meaning of the term “B-Movie”. All this tied in nicely with the arrival of multiplex cinemas, whose owners wanted ten screens with films that filled every seat, for a quality cinema experience. In the past few years, we have seen a return to form of the B-Movie. This is typified by the many remakes of B-Movie classics, and their multiple sequels, such as The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha, as well as their clones. Such films are typified by the Wrong Turn series, or Eli Roth’s Hostel movies. That’s not to say that there isn’t any high profile trash in there too: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, or The Thing prequel as well as pretty much anything you see after midnight on the SyFy channel. It is the multiple channels on cable and satellite that have found a home for the likes of Ogre or the MegaShark vs … movies. The past few years have turned out some original lower budget genre classics like Shaun of the Dead, The Descent and the Ginger Snaps movies. This resurgence has not just taken root in the horror genre. Science Fiction too, has produced the likes of the very brilliant District 9, The Mist, Moon and apocalyptic tales such as 28 Days Later, and Doomsday. Unfortunately, we’ve also had to stomach the onslaught of I Am Number 4, UltraViolet, The Spirit and anything that Shyamalan has made since Unbreakable. Arguably, the twenty-first century revolution within B-