THERE ARE NO “B” FILMS ANYMORE. Interview with JOSH HADLEY

 According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, B movie is „a movie that costs little money to make and that is usually not considered to be very good”. How would you define „B movie”? Is it a… type of movies? A genre? 

I find the term B movie to be misapplied (ironically by people that never lived in an era where real B movies existed). A B movie would be when a double bill had an A movie and a B movie, traditionally this was when a studio would put a real effort into the A movie and then throw together some cheap crap as an extra your way to entice you into giving up the ticket money; two movies for the price of one.

This is no longer the case, outside of rare exceptions such as Grindhouse they don’t do double features anymore and hence there is no B movie. The term as it is misapplied today is meant to signify lower qualify product when in fact all it exposes is the ignorance of those who don’t really understand the term nor ever did. Roger Corman gets angry when he is called “King Of The B’s” as his film was always the A picture on a double bill and he is still called this today with no regard for the proper use of the term.

I think what people mean when they use the term B movie is a lower budget (quality) film that is not good enough to go toe to toe with mainstream fare and they use a cheap shortcut term out of cultural laziness. I hear people call Asylum films B movies all the time… oh really? What double bill did that play on and what was the A feature then? I just can’t stand shortcuts pushing ignorance.

A genre is (literally) “a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.” In reality it is another term for category or classification. Now, sometimes this can get sticky such as what is the film Alien? Is it a Science Fiction film or a Horror film? It’s both so does that make a new genre? Sci-fi / Horror? And is that wholly different than Sci-fi and Horror as separate genres? Today the term genre has come to mean a far to broad spectrum ranging from anythin “geek” related to anything outside the narrowest definition of mainstream. That in itself has changed though, today the mainstream is what the outside was 10 years ago, so the term genre must also be redefined.

What drives you, and other fans, towards what people call B-movies?

That much is obvious; they are more entertaining than the cookie cutter claptrap of the studio system.

The low budget film scene relying on the Three B’s as Joe Bob Briggs put it; Blood, Breasts and Beasts, will always have an appeal that the mainstream will never appreciate. It has been proven time and again that you can make a film that is ABOUT something and has some meaning while still adhering to the Three B’s formula and that is why we flock to these films, they have a duality to them, you are watching a film about a monster on the loose killing teens with an allegory for AIDS playing out under the surface or how media consumption dilutes the emotional reactions to violence and injustice acting as a chaser to the viseral material at the forefront.

When a film attempts that type of allegory without the Three B’s formula it (typically) tends to get lost in pretension or obviousness. The studio system thinks it’s audience is made up of morons (and to a degree they are correct, otherwise explain to me how Transformers was a hit) and they dumb down the pictures to enforce this.

What many people fail to see in their lemming like adherence big dumb movies is that they are being insulted right to their face and they not only don’t get that but they are happy that they are being noticed at all. That is a sickening but very real place that studio films have found themselves, engaged in an active war with their own audience. When you are making a film “by committee” as the studio system does then you have to make the film more mainstream and can take fewer chances with it hence the banality I mentioned before. When you are making a film for a specific audience you can essentially narrowcast and with that you can cloak a message far easier into the fabric of what is, on the surface, simply an exploitation film.

Besides, where else would you see the batshit insanity that low budget films give us other than from low budget films? The studios would never allow something like the 1989 Dr. Caligari or even John Dies At The End to come out through them and when a film with the tendencies that set it apart from it’s competitors does come out from a major studio it is an oddity and rarely strikes a cord with the mainstream audience. Videodrome is an example of this, this was a film financed by the Canadian government and simply released by Universal which bombed with the mainstream audience and found new life with the oddballs that ‘got’ what it was trying to say. Videodrome is a prime example of a film with a powerful message that is disguised as a gore film.

Would you agree that B-movies (yes, I know…) got cynical lately? I mean, in the 70s, 80s and even through the most of the 90s those movies were sincere – their directors really tried. Nowadays Asylum and SyFy are in the spotlight and they make crap on purpose, and people watch it ironically, and that’s just… fake and insulting.

Lets be fair, there have always been insincere con artists that made a film simply to cash in on a trend, hell Roger Corman made a career out of it, but yes, it seems somehow more… crass how they do it today. Shark movies are hot, lets make a shark movie. Giant Robots are in at the moment, lets make one of those… screw not having the money to do it right, DO IT ANYWAY. That is not new but I do agree that the intention has changed quite dramatically.

In the past when a smaller movie failed at being something of quality it was rarely due to apathy and most often due to the constraints of outside forces (usually, but there were indeed cases of the “fuck it, no one will notice” attitude as well). When you make a “bad” movie intentionally it CAN work as in the case of Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes or Ted Newsom’s The Naked Monster but those were satires on “bad” movies so they was still done with the wit and intention of being a good “bad” movie… the crap churned out by the Asylum is nothing more than product and as a line worker do you care about the product you are making? No, you don’t and neither do they.

At least though with The Asylum they have a point they won’t dip below, you then have people like David DeCoteau who simply make product for the sake of making product. David DeCoteau has no limit that he will not dip below… In focus? No? Fuck it, I am not retaking that. Why get a boom mic when the shotgun mic on my $600 Wal-Mart camera gets the point across just fine. So you can see the PA’s hand at the edge of frame, I don’t have time to look at shots before editing, I have 4 movies to make this week. Looping? What is looping, lets just record the voice over from the speaker on my cell phone, it still works.

When you as a filmmaker don’t care, then how can the audience care and if the audience does not care then what does that say about film in general? If you are making nothing more than product, then how can you expect that product to be treated as anything greater? David DeCoteau gets offended when people say he does not care any longer and yet when you watch his movies it becomes crystal clear that he gave up some time ago. That is the major shift that happened in film, this attitude of laziness, as much as streaming and the internet have opened up film to a new audience the shift has also had the effect (intentional or not) of deflating the “value” of a film.

The Internet deflated the value of movies…?

When you had to search out a film, when you had to wait a year for it to appear on any channel, when you did not have access to tens of thousands of films at a button press the experience of watching the film meant more. Today, films are just time killers, something to have on in the background as you play a game or to fall asleep to. The majority of the modern audience does not have an appreciation of film the way previous generations did.

In the VHS era it was a big deal to be able to watch a film at your convenience and even then there was a limited amount to choose from, places such as Netflix having such massive libraries of movies in an instant removes much of the allure from the films themselves and greatly harms the ability of a filmmaker to make money from their creation as well. In the drive-in days a filmmaker could make a feature, “bicycle” it around and make 10 times the budget before finally selling the movie off to cable. In the VHS era it was even better as you had this new market that was hungry for product and smaller movies could make a profit on TV and video sales alone. This is no longer the case in the streaming era.

In the 90’s you could sell your movie (regardless of budget) to HBO for a good 20 grand… with Netflix they will give you 2-3 grand for a film and why has this price dropped so harshly? Because they have so many other people that are competing for that same slot that drives the price down and with an audience that gets off on a film the worse it is this also gives a great incentive for a laissez-faire attitude towards the final product. The audience has embraced this kind of movie making known as “So Bad It’s Good” which I will never endorse. This new audience loves movies that are inept and tepid simply because they are such and that brings the level of film making down even lower as a whole.

The Asylum seem to think of themselves as the new Cannon and yet they miss the mark by such a margin that I am not sure if it is delusion or simple grand denial that allows for their continued success. Making crap intentionally is not the same thing as making art and it turning out to be crap.