Preamble:
As is depressingly usual, I had not planned on going to B-Fest this year. I’m an unbelievably poor person, and coming as it does right after Christmas, B-Fest represents a luxury I can’t afford. I was perfectly okay with this; ’twas my lot, and maybe I’d do as I did last year and take in a few of the Sundance-hangers-on on that weekend to gloss over any twinges I might feel.
And then the Angels of B-Fest entered. I’ll not reveal their secret identities, for the normal reason you don’t reveal such things: people expecting you to perform superheroic acts while you’re in civilian downtime mode. (Plus that whole thing about supervillains using your friends and loved ones as hostages and bargaining chips. Dammit, that’s what sidekicks are for!) Suffice it to say that these beatific souls stepped in and paid to drag my sorry carcass to B-Fest. (And let me remind them publicly here — that was a LOAN.)
I bought the ticket. I got a confirmation. I asked the boss for that day off. I got looks of blank incomprehension when I told them that I was going to Chicago for a 24-hour marathon of bad movies, but I got the day off.
I was going to B-Fest. I was finding my herd.
Prologue:
Friday morning, my alarm went off at 3:30am. I had planned to get to bed at a ridiculously early hour, but then it turned out that the only screening of 28 Days Later I could finagle was Thursday night, so I got to bed a little after 10pm — not nearly as late as is my wont, but certainly not ridiculously early, especially for a man who planned to spend close to 48 hours awake.
I dressed (showered the night before), kissed an unconscious spouse goodbye, and drove out with plenty of anxiety. This was my first time flying since the 9/11 security was put into place, and at that time of the groggy morning I was sure I would make some mistake or otherwise attract unwanted attention. Had I removed every potential weapon from my bag? Were they going to ask where I was going, and then disbelieve my answer? Should I pre-lube for the body cavity search?
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| Hey, look what I found in my Willy Wonka candy bar! |
Well, I managed to negotiate the self-service boarding pass doohickey without setting of klaxons, and even made it through security with only a modicum of fuss, even though I brainfarted and tried to walk through with my keys in my pocket (oh yeah — those). Then off for something masquerading as a danish for breakfast, and finally up onto a half-filled plane at 6am.
The plan was for me to meet up with Bernard, aka “The Warden” of prisonflicks.com, whose plane was supposed to get in from Washington DC about fifteen minutes before mine; we’d then proceed to the arrival pickup area, where Ken Begg would meet us. Ken, in addition to being the driving force behind jabootu.com, is also the unofficial patron saint of B-Fest, arranging for transportation and accomodation for many of the folks such as ourselves who live too far away to drive. Just managing the logistics of it would be a massive undertaking, but then he goes further and actually does most of the heavy lifting himself.
But I digress. I got off the plane, knowing the Warden’s face from a pic he had e-mailed me, and wearing my “Heed the Head” T-shirt for added visibility.
No Warden.
After standing a round a bit, I shrugged and headed down to the baggage claim area for a look around. Nothing there. Hmm. This is awkward. (Eventually, long after, we figured out what had happened. To tell the truth, I blame American Airlines. Normally, when you touch down after crossing time zones, they tell you what the local time is. They didn’t, so I ended up trying to reset my watch as I grabbed my carry-on and left the plane, and I accidentally set it an hour too far forward. Consequently, instead of realizing that my plane was notably early, I thought it had come in late. Add to that the fact that the Warden’s flight actually was a few minutes late, and his absence is explained. Damned airline.)
I had the Warden’s cell phone number, and Ken’s home number. Unfortunately, I have no cell phone myself, and didn’t have any change. And from where I was, the only place where someone could break a twenty for me was a floor up at a Starbucks kiosk… Except that the only person who could operate the cash register there was off at the john or something. Aargh. And right about then I realized that, being not much of a car guy, I hadn’t even inquired as to what Ken would be driving. Nice one, Shumate.
I drifted between the indoors and outdoors for about twenty minutes, coming in only when the Chicago cold threatened to gnaw off my ear. (The winter this year in Utah’s been freakishly warm, so the transition hit me harder than it normally would have.) Eventually, I saw someone who could have been Ken pull up and look around. I glanced in the car. By way of ID, he held up a banner emblazoned with the silhouette of Jabootu.
Yes. One down.
When the situation with the missing Warden was explained, we first made for a MacDonald’s to use their payphone. That call didn’t want to go through, especially because the phone wanted about five bucks in quarters to make a call to a cell phone in the DC area code, even though we knew that he was physically about half a mile away. Finally, we went to plan B: Back to Ken’s trailer to call.
Ken’s trailer. It’s a legendary location, an Avalon or El Dorado to B-movie aficionados. But I have seen it. I have seen the one DVD rack with several hundred DVD’s in alphabetical order (somehow, there’s something so… so… right about Citizen Kane sitting between C.H.U.D. and City of the Dead). Then a second rack with boxed sets. Then another rack with miscellaneous sets. Then boxes all the way down the hallway with VHS tapes. The kitchen was filled with more tapes, boxes of film magazines, and a variety of monster models in various stages of completion. On my way to the bathroom, I glimpsed more racks in both Ken’s bedroom and the guest room. And all of this was peppered with various kaiju figures, plush monsters, talking Daleks, etc. Suddenly, I understood John Denver’s line in “Rocky Mountain High” about coming home to a place he’d never been before.
We checked Ken’s machine (brand new — this was the first message it had ever gotten), and yup, the Warden was wondering where we were. Ken called him back, then wen’t back to O’Hare to retrieve him, leaving me to stare at the wealth of cinema around me and roughly calculate how many years I could spend reviewing just the movies right there. I was still staring and salivating when other bodies arrived: Jeff, Ken’s high school friend who returns for this just about every year, and Mark Hurst, otherwise known as the Enigmatic Apostic, casualty of Nukie (and a quintuple bypass). I’m happy to say that he’s finally burned that particular bridge; after two years of wrestling, his review of Nukie has been posted. Viva Apostic!
We started loading the snacks. Among the logistical wonders Ken accomplishes annually is the grocery shopping. This time, we had four coolers of soft drinks, plastic bins of salty snacks, a big bag of jerky, and the fabled Tower O’ Snacks. On top of that, he brings three camp chairs, mountains of pillows and blankets, and — new for this year — a camp cot. We filled the back of a rented SUV, plus Ken’s car. We were loaded for bear.
Ken made it back with the Warden, and apologies were exchanged all around. However, by now it was only just after noon, so no harm done; the Fest didn’t start until 6pm, and this window was specifically intended to catch just this kind of obligatory snafu. Then Ken left to pick up a later arrival, Jessica (aka “Juniper,” guest reviewer both at Jabootu and the Bad Movie Report), while the rest of us sat around his place and got into the proper frame of mind by listening to Spaced Out!, a compilation of the “best” tracks laid down by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. The mind boggles.
We then set out to meet Ken and Juniper at yet another legendary location: SuperDawg, home of the all-beef frank. It wsas a good feed, marked by Ken’s exclamation in mid-conversation that where on earth would you ever find another six individuals who could and would all debate the relative merits of Joe Estevez and Robert Z’Dar?
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Smells like geek spirit. |
And then, on to the Norris Building on the campus of Northwestern U (colder than a witch’s extremity), where people actually recognized me by my T-shirt. I have fans! And soon, we were joined by more of the people whom I consider close friends, though I had never met them face to face. There was the inestimable Dr. Freex, a cherubic figure with a sadistic streak a mile wide. There was Chris Holland, half of the Stomp Tokyo Conspiracy, who is just as polished verbally as he is on screen. We were soon joined by Chris Magyar and his girlfriend (whom I suspect he brought along just so she’d know how normal he is compared to all of his friends). And all over were other personalities whom I had had passing acquaintance with, mostly on Stomp Tokyo’s B-Movie Message Board: Hecubus and Marlowe and MegaLemur and 3BeerMan and TelstarMan (who mixes a B-Fest CD and hands it out free of charge each year) and the entire Brotherhood of Bad Movies. A little later in the evening I met Jason Hyde, long-time patron of my very own B-Movie Mailing List. It was like meeting a bunch of people who had previously been brains in jars, now granted their own corporeal form. (As the auditorium filled up two-hundred strong, Chris commented how gratifying it was that so many them were “our guys.” I was struck with an image of Freddy Krueger spreading his arms wide and growling contentedly, “You’re all my children now.”)
Wow. I’m eight thousand words into this thing, and I haven’t even gotten to the actual festival yet. Hanging out with Ken Begg has a definite effect on you.
So. Without further ado…
B-Fest
Territories are staked out and snacks are strategically deployed. The lights go down. B-Fest has begun, and what better way to do it than with…
Kingdom of the Spiders. That’s right, William Shatner in a cowboy hat! Spiders by the bucketload! It’s lucky that the dialogue was in no way important for following the plot, because I didn’t hear a lick of it; everyone was trying to establish their Fest Cred by riffing on every image on screen. Liz (hereafter to be know forever more as Liz of the Spiders) established the gag of taking any noun relating to the action on screen — “pickup,” “veterinarian,” “crude sexual proposition” — and appending “of the Spiders!” to it. Unfortunately, it was too simple a riff for the weakwilled to resist, and there were far to many “Generic Item of the Spiders!” spewed out over the next twenty-four hours. But that was very well mitigated when TelstarMan bellowed out the first four-star punchline of the evening, as the smalltown sheriff broke the news to a black sharecropper’s wife that her husband had been killed: “She’s a black widow!”
This movie was also notable for the skirt length, or lack thereof, on Shatner’s character’s prepubescent niece. And his probably-innocent propensity for pinching her bottom or lifting her up with his arm wrapped around her derriere didn’t help things. Just think — had the costume designer added only two inches to her dress, we might have been spared a hypersensitivity to all possible pedophilic gaglines for the rest of the Fest.
Cool as Ice. Vanilla Ice’s one and only foray into film during his six-month career positions him as an over-trendy echo of James Dean. Unfortunately, Ice’s only discernable character trait is that he’s an unrepentant jackass, rebelling simply for the sake of being cool; I think the screenwriters realized this, and desperately turn the love interest’s up-to-then solid boyfriend into an abusive controller in a frantic attempt to make Ice sympathetic in comparison. Oh, and there’s also a plot in there about love-interest’s dad (Michael Gross, looking like he swallowed one of the spiders from the last feature) on the run from mobsters. Moral of the story: Vapid suburban girls can’t resist a manly man who introduces himself by spooking her horse and almost killing her. And who wears technicolor parachute pants.
To tell the truth, I think Vanilla Ice missed a bet. His pop career was obviously a short-lived fad; he was a novelty act. But he did have a chiseled jaw, and demonstrated that he could at least remember his lines; with any sense, he would have gone the Marky-Mark route: readopted his birth name (okay, maybe “Robert Van Winkle” wasn’t really the best choice), let his zebra-stripe eyebrow grow out, and tried to make it as an actor. Oh well.
Flash Gordon. I’ve never had much of a fondness for this one — it seemed too intentionally campy, and the sexual innuendos seem overlaid on the pulpy plot with an extra dose of clumsiness — but after the last two, it seemed like a paragon of finesse. And with two hundred B-movie fans bellowing their devotion to Brian Blessed and singing “Aa-ahh!” any time someone said Flash’s name, it earned itself a place in the top half of the program.
Raffle break. Many sponsors had donated prizes, which were raffled off by ticket number. I got none of them. Sucks to be me. It was a good fifteen minute break, though, useful for stretching legs and making trips to the john. Only three movies in, and my throat was already getting hoarse. And I had just discovered that those fleeting whiffs of something I was occasionally catching were actually me. The A&O Club (they’re the people that actually put this thing on) had to give a reminder that, though the normal restrictions on food and drink are obviously waived during our tenure, we were not permitted to have food delivered to the auditorium. (Which prompted the wonderful reply, “What about DiGiorno?”)
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“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!“ |
The Wizard of Speed and Time The traditional audience-participation short, with dozens of audience members lying on the stage of the auditorium, drumming their feet in time with the human stop-motion wizard racing around Hollywood. And then, as tradition dictates, it was played backwards and upside-down as they rewound the reel.
Plan 9 From Outer Space. I know a lot of the old guard are tired to death of this one, but for a newbie like me, seeing B-Fest’s traditional midnight movie was a complete blast, and made the entire trip worthwhile. You’d think that ol’ Ed Wood had made it specifically as an interactive experience; I don’t know how I’ll ever watch it again without the wellknown lines rolling from the tongue — “Your stupid minds, see? Stupid! Stupid!” — the deafening shouts of “Day!” “Night!” “Bela!” “Not Bela!” “Wicker!” “Rattan!” “Tor!” “Ladder!”, and the hundreds of paper plates filling the air every time one of the (snort) flying saucers wandered onto the screen. This was the only one for which I cam prepared with quips — “Preemptive strike!” and “No blood for sunlight!” — but neither turned into a self-replicating meme.
By 2am, though I was really starting to feel the weight of the hours on me, and it was with a rare sadism that Ken watched the expression on my face when he said, “Hey, Nathan! We’re already one-third done!”
The Happy Hooker. The story of Dutch immigrant Lynn Redgrave, who quickly went from being a too-hastily-married bride to one of the top madames in Manhattan. Really quickly. Really, really quickly thanks to the fact that at least one full reel, and possibly two, had severe problems and didn’t get shown. From what I could see, the entirety of the plot was contained in those two missing reels. It was also a surprisingly non-sexy movie, given the subject matter and the R-rating; in fact, it was so underwhelming that Liz of the Spiders finally got on stage with a sign that read, “We demand breasts!” I think that part about the hooker being happy must have been in the missing reels, too. Unless it was a title meant ironically. But irony is largely wasted on an audience after 2am.
Flesh Gordon. As you can tell by the racier subject matter, it’s assumed that the movies shown in the wee small hours have an audience comprised entirely of consenting adults. I had not seen Flesh Gordon before (and worse, I HAD seen the sequel), but it was a nifty sense of deja vu from the earlier feature. Unfortunately — and I don’t know if this is something I really want getting around, but here goes — I was utterly bored by the sex, to the point that I decided this would make a good stopping place for a half-hour nap. Fast-forward to the next one.
A Language of My Own. A black-and-white Betty Boop short with absolutely no reason to exist. First she sings her song in English, then hops on a plane and flies across to Japan, where she sings her song again for an appreciative audience, then changes into a kimono and sings again in Japanese. (No, I couldn’t really follow along, for some very good reasons: 1) It’s more than ten years since I lived in Japan, 2) Japanese sung by a non-Japanese bears very little resemblance to the actual spoken language, 3) it’s four in the freaking morning! I could barely understand English by this point!)
Warlords of Atlantis. I tell you, there’s nobody like Doug McClure for a pseudo-Burroughs-esque lost civilization yarn. We start out well, with undersea dinosaurs and giant octopuses. But once our intrepid explorers get into the undersea Atlantean kingdom, the social commentary comes rolling out in huge waves (so to speak). When I realized that I had no hope of following the extraterrestrial racial superiority philosophy that the pixie-wigged Atlanteans were laying on the stalward McClure, I suspected that it was time for another half-hour repose. Next!
Dementia-13. I took some time for a leisurely bathroom break just when this movie was starting, and as a consequence I never did figure out what the hell was going on. There was something about a girl who was drowned mysteriously years ago at this Irish estate, and now everyone’s back and no one knows who did it, and there’s a gold-digging American blonde girl poking where she shouldn’t be until people start getting mysteriously axe-murdered. Since I hadn’t a hope in Hades of catching up to the plot, especially with my cortex running on half-power, I just watched William Campbell, the Squire of Gothos himself, as a semi-tortured audience who was the best suspect for axe-murderership except for everyone else.
I think somewhere in here was an encore presentation of The Wizard of Speed and Time. Or it might have been earlier. Hell, I don’t know; it’s not like I was taking notes, and it wasn’t on the schedule. They just had to take up time lost during The Happy Hooker so that the breakfast break wouldn’t come too early. They also played the Betty Boop short backwards and upside-down; it was less annoying that way, actually.
No Holds Barred. I never thought I’d express such appreciation for a Hulk Hogan vehicle, but the giddy loud energy of it was just what I needed at the moment that I was seriously doubting my sanity for showing up in the first place. Hogan is naturally a wrestler, but he’s a GOOD one, see — his word is his bond, he gives to charities, he wears pink underoos — being courted by an aggressive rival TV exec who literally won’t take no for an answer. What really makes this one sing is Tiny Lister as the eviller-than-Satan wrestler Zeus. Lister’s a credible actor, as demonstrated elsewhere on his resume, but here he plays a barely animate side of beef (EE-vil beef) who has about three lines of intelligible dialogue; the rest was simply bellows. RAAAHR!! So, Zeus, where are you from? RAAAAHR! What do you think your chances are in the wrestling competition? RAAAAHR! What’s your favorite color? RAAAHR! Shouting along with him was both therapeutic and invigorating, and led to one of the best riffs to last through the rest of the Fest: “But what would Zeus say?”
Breakfast Break. It was about 8:30am, and we were still a bit ahead of schedule, but there was a coffee shop open downstairs, so we adjourned. I finally met Shawn J., who ostensibly writes the Friday Night Society site here at Cold Fusion. I could only stop a moment to razz him for that, because I was on a quest to find a men’s room that still had paper towels so that I could clumsily mop out my armpits and feet before putting on a fresh shirt and socks. Clean laundry — better than a meal, any day.
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The Warden and me. (There’s nothing wrong with my camera; after 24 hours of movies, you just look fuzzy.) |
Mac and Me. It’s probably just as well that I didn’t try to down a real meal, because this one just might have brought it back up again. A ham-handed ripoff of E.T. that just reeks. Most astonishing of all was the blatancy of the product placement — barely a shot went by without a Coke can, a Skittles bag, a Sears sign, or a McDonald’s product visible in the frame. By the time the birthday partygoers in the McDonald’s (complete with Ronald himself) turned into a perfectly choreographed ’80s dance exhibition, I was convinced I was actually watching some subversive Dadaist statement in film. There was one redeeming virtue to this showing: The hero kid was paraplegic, so at crucial junctures of the story, Hecubus, a longtime B-Movie Message Board contributor who is also paraplegic, launched himself across the stage. Woo-hoo!
The Last Dragon. Oh, did I say something about ’80s dancing? Mac and Me was just the warm-up act. This one takes the cake, bizarrely blending bubblegum ’80s pop (certainly you remember DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night” from the soundtrack) with a blaxsploitation-tinged kung fu plotline and plenty of fortune-cookie wisdom (literally). The fighting’s fun to watch, and I’ve still got enough brain cells left over from the ’80s that I can remember when those clothes honestly were cool. And no matter what the fashions, Vanity was a fox.
It Came From Beneath the Sea. Yes, Ray Harryhausen is a god. But even that couldn’t save this one. Thrill to sweaty submarine-bound men staring at little readouts and twisting little dials! Be captivated by the least passionate love triangle in Western history! Oh, and there’s a also a giant octopus, but hey — let’s get back to military men staring impassively at readouts and microscope slides! That’ where the REAL excitement is, right? Despite the fact that I was well into my second wind, this one nearly laid me out again.
What is Communism? A few of the more politically sensitive members of the audience chose to go get some coffee during this traditional short, and I can see why. It’s anti-Communist propaganda of the worst sort, dedicated to impressing upon us in ten short minutes that Communism is a lying, dirty, shrewd, Godless, murderous, and determined international criminal conspiracy. (Kudos to whoever had the desk bell and dinged it once for each point on the list.) Naturally, it doesn’t bother to mention that “shrewd” and “determined” are hardly negatives, nor does it acknowledge that our own government has been guilty of at least a couple of the other signposts of Communist evil. Being propaganda, it’s not interested in explaining so much as demonizing, so the viewer is given no inkling as to what Communism actually IS as a political philosophy, except for the fact that it’s EE-vil. Unfortunately, modern students react really poorly to propaganda, at least such a blatant variety, and ended up ridiculing it almost too much; fortunately, most had the good graces to hush up when panoramic shots of the victims of Communism were shown — by which I mean physical piles of dead bodies. We ended on a comfortably jingoistic note, waving little flags and only semi-ironically chanting, “USA! USA!” (We had been breaking forth in that chant any time we saw an American flag anyway, so it fell trippingly from the tongue.)
Supergirl. Superman 4 may have been based around a numbly simplistic understanding of the politics of peace, but it still wasn’t as out-and-out dumb as this one. Helen Slater is a Kryptonian who has to retrieve the Omegahedron, the city-powering paperweight that her irresponsible uncle (Peter O’Toole!) lost. So she comes to earth, where her cousin Kal-El already lives, creates herself a Super-style suit out of.. um… something, and then adopts a secret identity for absolutely no reason. (The mission’s simple girl: grab the doohickey and leave. No need to set up shop for the long haul.) But the power source has fallen into the hands of a wanna-be occultist (Faye Dunaway!) who improbably discovers that the Omegahedron can power magical mischief. So what would you do if your sorcerous powers were suddenly ramped up? Why, try to seduce the groundsman, of course! The script shows every sign of having been written by a committee. Of chimps.
Godzilla 1985. How better to end things than with the Big G? Eschewing the kiddie-flick silliness of the previous coupla decades, Godzilla comes back again as an honest-to-goodness monster. Still a pretty funny one, but not intentionally. Meanwhile, in American-shot segments, Raymond Burr stands around and pontificates, looking for all the world like he’d been bulking up to take on the Green One himself (probably aided by the copious amound of Dr Pepper that apparently runs the U.S. military). Godzilla moves slowly, the plot movies slowly, the Japanese Prime Minister does his darndest not to move any facial muscles, and some fool forgot to include the classic Godzilla theme music in the score. What would Zeus say?
Wow, where did twenty-four hours go? It only took half an hour to clean up the auditorium, and then… it was done.
But for some of us, there was still more to come.
Epilogue
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Dr. Freex and me. (“I get to be Dynagirl this time!”) |
The Warden had a friend in town, so he bid us farewell. The rest of the Jabootu crew loaded up the vehicles and meandered cross-city to the condo of Paul, Lord of Jabootu and his wife Holly; he’s the guy that does all of the webstuff on Jabootu.com while Ken’s writing the War and Peace-length reviews. It was a tired but spirited gathering, spiced up with Chicago-style pizza (hey, did you know they put the cheese under the sauce? Weird!) and various beverages. I knew that my voice was hashed, but it wasn’t until trying to carry on multiple conversations in an enclosed space that I realized how loud the last few movies had been. My hearing was practically gone in the higher registers; I had to concentrate to hear male conversants, and with the wimmen I just had to try to lipread.
Conversation was good and nerdy (when it finally got to the point of discussing specific artists working for Marvel in the ’70s and ’80s, Chris threw up his hands and declared, “You’re all a bunch of geeks!”), there are few things more fascinating than the conversations of intelligent people when they’re falling-down tired. And Dr. Freex demonstrated that sadistic streak by pulling out his DVD of The Wonderful Land of Oz and playing choice segments for us. Thanks, Freeman.
Then those staying at Ken’s place (largely the Stomp Tokyo contingent) left for the night — and somehow, the rest of us (Mark Hurst, Jessica, Liz of the Spiders, Jeff, and I) stayed at Paul’s place. But not to sleep; no, it’s far too early for that! Instead, we threw in the MST3K tape of the Mexican Santa Claus movie. Jessica had apparently hit her third wind; while I was concentrating hard on keeping both eyes open at the same time, she was riffing to put the ‘bots to shame, despite never having seen the episode before.
But at last, everyone was convinced that 2am was fully late enough to stay up. Paul and Holly retired to their bedroom, Jessica and Liz took the spare room, and we three manly men flung ourselves across various pieces of furniture or carpet in the living room. Mark warned us — “I snore,” he said — but the full truth of the statement hit me about ten seconds after Mark got positioned in the recliner: Mark SNORED. I mean, he snored so loud, at first I thought he was kidding. No one can snore that loud for real, right? Wrong. All night long, he proved me wrong. (Don’t worry, Mark; Paul fell asleep in that same chair Sunday afternoon and proved that it was the chair, not the sleeper, at fault.)
So it’s no wonder that when 7am rolled around, I had a headache that stayed with me most of the day. No matter; the wonderful company more than made up for it. (And the shower. Even though I had done some lowest-common-denominator grooming, my skins was as greasy as Hulk Hogan’s baby-oiled thews.) Sunday morning was especially edifying; Mark, Jeff, and Paul are all sincere thinkers, and Paul is a recently reconverted Christian, so conversations on my faith and theirs, general ethics, etc., were fascinating (especially since we managed to neatly avoid any of the current hot-button political topics). The girls didn’t manage to drag themselves out of bed, even when we all left for a late breakfast around 11am. Ha! You pay for that late-nite energy later, sisters!
After a breakfast of the full posse (minus Ken, who was running the girls to their travel destinations), we all went back to Paul’s, and I crashed for an hour or two, raising my head only long enough to wish Freeman and Chris a farewell. Then at five, I was whisked off to O’Hare by the remaining complement (Paul, Holly, Mark, and Ken) and wished well on my way back to normalcy. Passed through security no problems (hey, now I’m a seasoned traveller!), and finally puttered back to my own house about 10:30pm. The adventure was over.
Summation:
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Chris Holland, looking just like you’d expect a separated Siamese twin to look. (Photo courtesy Paul LoJ; expression courtesy B-Fest.) |
I owe my enjoyment of B-Fest almost entirely to Ken Begg, truly a prince among men. Those who have met or seen Ken know that he’s a large man; what many probably don’t realize is that 98% of that is pure heart. (I don’t feel bad cramming his brain into the remaining 2%, as I’m sure that he’s actually got an array of isolinear chips in his head that gives him cognitive abilities beyond those of mortal men.) I still haven’t figured out how he gets along without any other internal organs, but I’m more than willing to label that mystery as yet another Thing Mankind Was Not Meant To Know.
Which is not to denigrate or diss any of the others I met (whether I knew them before or not). As Ken told me on our way from the airport, we surprisingly have no asses among us. It’s even more surprising when you consider that our commonality is a fondness for aiming sarcastic ridicule at bad movies. What an incredibly delightful throng to call friends.
Some Notable Totables:
- temperature in Chicago when I left Salt Lake: 4°
- temperature in Salt Lake when I left Chicago: 51°
- Sue Grafton novels read while sitting in airports and on planes: 1
- number of times I used the word “actually” in this diary: 9 — apparently I need to diversify my vocabulary
- regrets: 1
- I deeply regret that Andrew Borntreger of badmovies.org wasn’t able to attend. Up until this point, he was the only other B-movie webmaster with whom I’d had personal contact, talking on the phone on a number of occasions. He had both military and personal commitments overlapping (he’s a career Marine in a time of heightened responsibility, and his wife is very pregnant and probaby likes having him around as much as possible). Evenb though I’ve never been in the same room with him, I could feel his absence, and hope that circumstances at home and abroad will be such that he can enlighten and enliven us next year. (Next year? You bet your bippy. Save my seat.)
Nathan Shumate
1/29/03
