Tag Archives: B Movie

by | January 21, 2014 · 9:44 pm

MarsCon: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

There are few things more fun than spending a weekend at a local geek event.  That is just what Therefore I Geek did this past weekend at MarsCon in Williamsburg, VA.  Here is the good, the bad, and the ugly about this convention:

The Good

There was a lot of good at MarsCon. Being a local event makes it much more manageable and relaxed than other, larger events such as NYCC.

One of the first things we did was check out the gaming area and pretty quickly got pulled into a game called Quickfire.  Quickfire is a universal tabletop miniature game, meaning that it doesn’t matter what miniature game pieces the players use. The simple rules can get a game going for any number of players in no time. As players go through the game, there are progressively more difficult environmental challenges that appear. There are two major drawback to the game:  the need for a GM-esqe person and the high risk of the game dissolving into complete chaos. These issues were only minor, though, and the overall game play was enjoyable.

This was an epic game table, the kind I'd only dreamed of.

This was an epic game table, the kind I’ve only dreamed of.

MarsCon also had several good panels, which in my experience is a rarity at local conventions.  On Sunday morning I attended a panel on editors and their changing role at someone’s (*cough*Tracy*cough*) urging and it was a fantastic panel. Of the four panelists, two were editors, one was a writer, and one did both.  Will McIntosh, Carrie Ryan, Edmund Schubert and Laura Haywood-Cory, along with a moderator Michael Pederson, who also happened to be an editor, were intimately familiar with the subject they were discussing and it showed.   This is the kind of panel I want to attend all the time. It was engaging, informative and stacked with experts.

Sunday afternoon I went to “Cult Film: The Atomic 50’s: When Supernatural Horror Went Scientific”, a panel on the scientific turn that B movies took in the 1950’s, which was also amazing. There was so much useful information in this panel. While I am uncertain about the presenter’s credentials, he was incredibly knowledgeable and was so passionate that it was easy to get caught up in his excitement. This was also one of the few panels in which the audience participation was value added. Many of them had seen the movies in question and were able to jump in when the presenter forgot a character or actor, but then quieted down when he started speaking again.

[Tracy:  While I sent Andrew off to learn about how much respect and reverence he should have for his editor, I went to a panel called “Beyond the Strong Female Protagonist:  Writing Women who are more than ‘Kickass.”  I really enjoy this type of discussion anyway, so I was excited to get into it.  The panelists were all writers and were led by Jim Hines, author of the Magic Ex Libris series.  I enjoyed the conversation and appreciated that the panelists kept order in the room—even shutting down a particularly opinionated fan who attempted to hijack the panel several times.]

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(from left) Meriah Crawford, Jim Hines, Alethea Kontis, L. Jagi Lamplighter, and John C. Wright

Of course any event with Mikey Mason is always a blast. Mikey gave us a nice mix of his better known material, plus a couple of songs from his most recent album. If his Facebook page is to be believed, and I think it is, then he wrote a whole new album while he was at MarsCon!

Mikey Mason

Mikey Mason

Aside from his duties as entertainer, Mikey was both the best auctioneer and gave the best “Vanna White” impression while working the charity auction for the Heritage Humane Society of Williamsburg.  In the end they managed to break last year’s total on just two items. I wish you all could have seen the look on the face of the liason to the  Humane Society. He kept getting more and more excited as the auction bids grew.  By the end, he looked absolutely stunned. (T:  Can confirm.  It was adorable!)

The Bad

No convention is perfect and MarsCon was no exception.  Mikey’s concert had an hour of scheduled setup time but it was still forty-five minutes late starting due to “technical difficulties”. We can all understand some minor glitches—lord knows I’ve seen them at NYCC—but a delay of this length due to problems with fundamental things like lighting and sound is not acceptable. I was surprised to see a venue as experienced as this one having issues like this, especially with an artist like Mikey who has a very simple, straightforward setup.  Speaking from experience, the rig should have been set up before hand and then just moved into place.

Also, I’ve never been particularly thrilled with events held in hotels. Typically they don’t have large rooms that can serve as a proper exhibit halls. Dealer rooms have to be squeezed into small rooms and tend to spill out into the hallways which leads to traffic flow problems. While that wasn’t an overwhelming issue in the Fort Magruder Hotel & Conference Center, another hundred or so additional people in attendance might have made it much more of a problem. The positive side of the hotel is that it had proper spaces for panels, which other conventions (such as the VA Comicon) do not have.

The Ugly

I’ve mentioned that the panels I went to on Sunday were amazing.  Saturday panels were, unfortunately, the complete opposite.  In a panel about the “Dark Side of Disney,” panelists started off by asking the audience what the panel was about. It was immediately obvious that the panelists were almost completely unprepared for the topic about which they were supposed to be speaking. One panelist had no specific knowledge on the topic outside of a couple of Google searches and a discussion with her friends.   She spent most of her time trying to convince the audience and other panelists that there was a prevalence of mental illnesses in Disney films. I’d love to know what made her think that a Google search provided adequate expertise to diagnose and discuss mental illness.  At one point another panelist actually cut her off because she obviously didn’t understand what she was talking about.  Needless to say, we bailed out of this particular panel pretty quickly

In a later panel on cosplay, the panelists were significantly better informed, the least experienced having done it for seventeen years, but they were unable to keep the panel on track. I have no problem with audience interaction during a panel.  Especially at an event as small as this it’s a great chance to have a more intimate experience with the panelists.  Having said that, the panelists are the experts.  Attendees want to hear what they have to say, not opinions from the other audience members. This panel would have benefited greatly from a strong moderator with firm control of the room. A good moderator should ask some basic questions, get the panelists discussing the topic and then towards the end take some questions from the audience.

In the end we had a great weekend and I’ve got some great ideas for new content, so keep your eyes open for it. MarsCon will definitely be making an appearance on my 2015 calendar.

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by | September 3, 2013 · 5:03 pm

Review: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!

Sometimes B movies try to take themselves way too seriously. Directors think that the movie is the big break they’re looking for and instead of having fun with it, they end up looking silly. What makes Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! so fantastic is that it is self aware and often exploits its own grade. Just one look at the opening credits reveals this. In between actual opening credit shots are furniture ads and a “space available” sign. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is a great example of what the B movie genre can really be. There is no exploitation, no sex, and no excessive violence, just an amusing story full of quirky humor and the generally bizarre.

While much of the movie is nonsense, the plot sticks around for at least forty minutes (far longer than I remember it doing), and maintains some plot threads even after the rest has degraded. The movie follows two separate stories, that of White House Press Secretary Jim Richardson as well as Federal Intelligence Agency agent Mason Dixon and his covert team. Like any good Press Secretary, Richardson’s job is to try and spin the tomato attacks in such as way as to save face for the President. Mason’s job is to investigate the source of the tomato attacks and try to stop them if possible. While hot on the trail, all of Mason Dixon’s team is killed except Lt. Wilbur Finletter, a saber wielding man in a jumpsuit and a deployed parachute (yes, he wears the parachute for the entire movie). In the end, it turns out that Jim Richardson is the mastermind behind the diabolical tomato plot and that he is essentially a “tomato whisperer.”  He hopes that when he stops the attack the surviving people will make him their leader. Richardson meets a disagreeable demise at the business end of the overeager Lt. Finletter’s saber. Naturally this unpleasantness happens just as Richardson was about to tell his secret for controlling the tomatoes.  Eventually the tomatoes are stopped by Mason Dixon’s quick thinking, and the aid of an awful pop song called “Puberty Love”. It had been many years since I’d seen the movie and my memory didn’t serve justice to this bizarre and twisted plot.

Press Secretary Jim Richardson’s journey is one of the more bizarre, yet amusing portions of this movie. His quest begins with a conversation with the President (who is endlessly signing his name on pieces of paper with different pens). Richardson then travels to San Francisco, which is dubbed New York, to recruit the help of a Madison Avenue ad executive.  The exec bursts into a musical number halfway through their interview. The ad campaign they come up with is so ridiculous that it would be unbelievable, except that I’ve seen some really bad commercials in my time.

The best part of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is all the little details. Scrolling ads appear on the screen from time to time.  Near the end, the ad type is interrupted by a caps locked plea for help as the typist is apparently eaten by a tomato.  I had to rewind the movie to watch the actual scene, since I was paying attention to the ad the first time.

At one point in the movie there is a Congressional Committee meeting in which all of the congressmen are named after former US presidents such as Polk and Fillmore.  For screen writing this terrible (and it really is) the puns and innuendos are amazingly clever. My absolutely favorite scene involves a briefing in a room that is far too small for the number of people who are in it. People are forced to crawl over each other and the table in order to get to their seats or to get up in front of the group to speak. There is also a Japanese scientist who is dubbed very badly, very intentionally.

Aside from the main plot, there are some other great moments throughout the movie. There is a very convincing helicopter crash in the opening scenes of the movie that I love (Turns out it was actually a real crash, so that explains why it’s so convincing.). The oversized tomatoes actually look pretty good. They are smooth and shiny just like real tomatoes, just much larger. Also, I love the little grumbling sounds that the tomatoes make as they go on their killing spree.  

A surprisingly realistic tomato… except for its size, of course.

Of course Mason Dixon has his obligatory love interest, in the form of reporter Lois Fairchild. Lois’ contributions to the movie are limited, though she does have a couple of amusing moments. In her introductory scene, she says hello to a passerby named Clark with a red cape sticking out from under his coat; and later the movie wraps with a warped version of a stereotypical love scene.

Once the plot devolves, the movie becomes a little difficult to follow. May of the scenes seem to have little relation to the ones that came before and even less to the ones that come after. The movie eventually breaks down into a random group of weirdos stomping on tomatoes in the parking lot of San Diego Stadium.

This is not an uncommon problem for B movies. They often start with a great premise and are able to maintain in for forty five minutes or so, but they then need to fill another 30-45 minutes with scenes that often feel made up on the spot and are not at all in line with the rest of the movie. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! ranks as one of my top favorite B movies of all times. Not only was it a good movie, but it has spawned several sequels, including one with a very young George Clooney (a review for another day), and a 90’s cartoon series. A definite watch for any fan of B movies. 4 Death Stars.

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by | July 16, 2013 · 12:18 pm

Review: The Toxic Avenger

toxie one sheet

Of all the companies that make B list movies, none have quite the following that Troma has. Their name has become synonymous with campy, hypersexual, and blatantly graphic (though unrealistically) violent films. While they are also known for such “classics” as Nuke ‘Em High and Sgt. Kabukiman, NYPD, the ultimate Troma film has to be The Toxic Avenger.

What makes The Toxie Avenger so great is that it came out in the 80’s, at a time when the genre of B movies had declined to an all-time low. By the end of the 70’s many of the higher end B movies were being made into A movies with bigger budgets and more well-known casts. What was left was dredged up from the bottom of the post-censorship rules barrel. These films were increasingly cheap, violent, and just plain bad. The Toxic Avenger came out right in the middle of this decline, as the epitome of what the genre could be, part bad comedy and part low budget horror film.

Melvin

A weakling, weighing 98 lbs…

The plot of the movie begins with Mervin, the mop boy at the Tromaville Health Club, enduring considerable amounts of torment from a homicidal twenty-something with ‘Roid Rage named Bozo.  He is tossed out a window where he lands in vats of toxic waste and is transformed into the horrifically mutated Toxic Avenger (lovingly referred to by fans as “Toxie”).

After his terrifying transformation, Toxie begins to hunt down all of the town’s evildoers, which obviously includes his former tormentor, who has taken to running down children in the street in his free time.  As Toxie works his way through the series of evil people he wants to take out, he finds rather creative ways to kill off the dredges of society.  Three thugs involved in a robbery meet particularly disturbing ends involving a milkshake mixer, a deep fryer, and a pizza oven respectively.  Of course, since every movie has to have a romantic side, Toxie has a love interest who is blind (something like Alicia Masters in Fantastic Four.).

This had to hurt, just a little.

This had to hurt, just a little.

For a low budget film, this is pretty fabulous. It has all the things I want to see in a B movie from that time period. Despite their best efforts, the acting is terrible. In the fast food restaurant robbery scene, one robber tries so hard to look intense and intimidating that his body tenses and his eyes bulge almost out of his head. I was concerned he was going to have an aneurism! The primary antagonist, Bozo, suffers from what one can only assume are steroid induced mood swings that left me both stunned and laughing. I wish real steroid users were this amusing. Even Toxie is not immune to the bad acting plague going on in this movie. Melvin is barely able to open his eyes or deliver lines and after his transformation, Toxie’s voice is dubbed in so poorly that even fans of the terrible voice dubbing in Godzilla films would be appalled.

Complementing the terrible acting are the less than impressive sets. The love shack in which Toxie and his love interest set up looks like something made by kindergarteners with paper mache. Other sets look like someone dumped an office trash can in front of the wall of a sound stage in an attempt to depict a garbage strewn alley that falls more than a little short. Most trash filled alleys I’ve seen (and having lived in New York for several years, I’ve seen my fair share), are far from white drywall with crumpled paper and food wrappers lightly strewn about.

The fight scenes are a particular source of entertainment. Filled with terrible martial arts and quick cuts, in a vain attempt to portray action, these scenes had me almost in tears from laughter. Any time a gun goes off, blood squibs are used in a liberal fashion and to very little effect.

Eventually Toxie’s actions earn him the ire of the corrupt, local officials who want to see him taken down. The movie ends, as many movies of this genre do, with a big scene in which the army is called up and a mass of men in uniform with surplus equipment show up on scene.  By the end, Toxie resorts to using his hands to pull unidentifiable organs out of the town’s rather bloated mayor.

This goes bad, quickly.

This goes bad, quickly.

Toxie has over the top violence, a German scientist with an atrocious accent, one of the worst sex scenes I’ve ever witnessed(Watchmen is still worse), and a car chase with the crappiest cars they could find, all things adding to The Toxic Avenger’s imperfect perfection. The one thing I was truly impressed with was the amount of army surplus equipment they managed to scrape together. While some of the shots may have involved the same trucks driving past the camera more than once, there were also an old tank, several jeeps and trucks, and a whole mess of machine guns. For a movie of this caliber, it is quite a spread. I can’t think of a better choice for my introduction to Troma’s B movie library.

3/5 Death Stars

3 Death Stars

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