Review of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) by Paul F — 30 Jan 2005

I'm going to have to do this in chapters as RT only lets you have five ratings at a time.

Northwestern University's B-Fest has been going on for something like 46 million years. Each January, several hundred people take time out from the classy fare the Hollywood always brings us at the beginning of the year to celebrate the B-movie. They're only rarely good, but they're frequently entertaining, and watching them on the big screen in a crowded movie theater with people yelling things at the screen is the ideal method of viewing many of these things.

I've always had kind of mixed feelings about B-fest, in the same way that I'll sometimes have mixed feelings about "Mystery Science Theater 3000." Now, I love MST3K. But the truth is that I also love many of the films that they play, and not in a "they're so bad they're great" way. I genuinely think [i]Devil Doll [/i]is a creepy little flick, that [i]Danger: Diabolik[/i] is a great pop-art spy film and that [i]The Rebel Set[/i] is a fun exercise in juvenile delinquency. To watch most of the films on MST3K without robots making fun of them isn't a chore for me. It's a mission.

For as much as MST3K makes comments during the films, however, I've noticed that they rarely actually make that much fun of the film itself. They'll make references, crack jokes about certain lines and actors, but only when a film is especially bad do they attack the film or filmmakers as a whole, and these things usually deserve it. (Hello, [i]Monster a Go-Go[/i].).

The same can't be said for B-fest. A merely unenjoyable or vaguely competent film can really incur the wrath of the audience, and while MST3K has three hecklers, B-fest has hundreds, all of whom are perfectly willing to yell out any random insult that passes through theire heads. As a result, you'll often hear one barb coming from one direction, only to hear the same barb from another a few minutes later, as someone else in the room makes the same comic revelation. It's kind of a weird experience.

B-fest this year started with[i] Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers[/i], a decent little 50's sc-fi pic made good by the now-infamous Ray Harryhausen animated sequences of the title saucers flying into various national monuments. These bits still look great, and they almost compensate for the talkiness of much of the film. Still, the pacing is good (there's none of this "the monster doesn't show up until half-way through) and it got the crowd up the way a traditional B-movie should. The fact that I could barely hear a word of the dialogue (despite being in the front row) may have colored my reading of it, but I'd seen it before, so it didn't matter.

I was worried about [i]The Apple[/i]. Mostly because I had been the one who requested it several times in different handwriting last year, I was the one who introduced it to our gaming group that ended up sponsoring it, and I had even composed a bit for it, marking off the title number by handing out lyric sheets and standing on stage, dropping the lyrics on poster board to the floor a la Bob Dylan's "Subturranean Homesick Blues" video. If the film was a dull wash-out, my entire B-fest would have been spent brooding.

Fortunately, [i]The Apple[/i] was a major hit, with people proudly wearing their passed-out BIM marks and dancing in the aisles. I really shouldn't have worried--[i]The Apple[/i] is an unbelievable movie, high-spirited, deranged, and so filled with shiny colors and insane costumes that you can't turn away even on the small screen, much less a big one. If there's ever a movie that deserves the midnight cult treatment it's this, and I honestly don't think anyone anywhere had a better time watching this film than the crowd did.

After a short about the differences between masculine and feminine behavior (there are some!), we moved on to [i]The Swarm[/i], a great ridiculous distaster epic in which Michael Caine and Henry Fonda must fight off giant killer bees. Played straight and with great Stirling Silliphant dilalogue, the film is even sillier than if it had been played for comedy, and the cast--Katherine Ross! Richard Widmark! Richard Chamberlain! Olivia de Havilland! Fred MacMurry! Lee Grant! Patty Duke! Jose Ferrer! Slim Pickens! Cameron Mitchell!--really has to be seen to be believed. It may have helped the film upon original release if the General (Widmark) hadn't kept referring the the bees as "Africans" so as to lead to lines like "Soon all the Africans will be out of Houston!," but to uss, it just added to the fun.

Mike Jittlov's [i]The Wizard of Speed and Time[/i] is a great little movie about a small-time special effects man making the film he's always dreamed of, and one of B-fest 's annual traditions is the showing of Jittlov's short film of the same name, also featured in the feature. It's a great short, done almost entirely in stop-motion live action, and deserves a release to DVD. Hint, hint.

Not much to say about [i]Plan 9 From Outer Space[/i]. It's a fascinatingly poorly-made film, but after so many people have seen it and enjoyed it, can it really be called "bad?" Shown at midnight on the first night,[i] Plan 9[/i] is the last gasp of the opening energy of B-fest, with paper plates flying around the theater during the scenes of UFO's (actually, they're pie tins) and calls of "NOT BELA" during the scenes where Tom Mason stepped in to fill Lugosi's cowl. Lots of fun to watch at B-fest, and a decent enough ending for the many people who take off at 1:30, not willing to make it through the night after the doors lock. It's their loss.

Next, Fred Williamson! Charles Bronson! Mamie Van Doren! Hulk Hogan! Can you take it?