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

What, when and why has changed in smaller, independent movies since the glorious days of Scanner Cop, Halloween 3, Lifeforce and such? Why don’t we get the same great vibe from them as we did back then?

Part of the reason things have changed is addressed above, the market has changed as has the consumer and that has changed the very way these movies are produced. I may be a true cinema snob but I think that video looks like shit, and things shot on video look like shit, be it analog video or digital video, it looks like ass. Now, the news can have that look, it is meant to but for a fictional piece of cinema we are conditioned to see film with the grain involved and at the framerate we are used too, video is meant to portray “real life” (hence the news aspect) and when I see video I can’t, no matter how hard I try, see a movie, but a cheap attempt at pseudo-movies. You can’t even call something shot on video a film as it does not contain the very core of the term… FILM.

In the 70’s and 80’s the small films were still shot on FILM and that made them look as they should and as video started to encroach these movies still strove for that look with a process called “Film Look” which adds grain to video and slows down the frame rate to simulate the look of film. These days “Film Look” is rarely used on video productions as they just don’t care, the mindless will ingest it all the same. There is a lack of quality control on the one end and a lack of customer desire for that quality on the other. Each side feeds the other in an orgy of avarice and pathetic dissonance.

(That said, the caliber of movies moves with the times as does the formats, remember that of the 3 films you mentioned the latter two were both MAJOR theatrical releases both of which failed miserably at the box office making them not B-movies really.)

People both inside and outside of the industry itself seem to treat film as nothing more than a way to pass the time lest the “So bad it’s good” bullshit philosophy would not exist; how can you reward a film for not doing it’s job properly? If a film is bad, than it is bad and it should be treated as such, and to that I am referring to movies that are not made to evoke this “So bad it’s good” style, I mean films that were meant to be “good” films and failed miserably.

In all honesty there is also too much of the intentional “bad” films and by that I am speaking of a film that goes in trying to be “serious” knowing full well that the audience WANTS the FX to look awful, WANTS the acting to be stiff and lifeless and WANTS the dialog to be written by 8th grade dropouts and most of all WANTS the film to be as cliche as possible, as if that somehow elevates the film to a level it could not achieve had it been played straight.

Have mainstream movies also changed? And if so, is it a change for the better or worse?

Cannon had a business model of essentially “B Movies On A Budgets”, and part of the reason that didn’t work in the long run was two-fold… one that Cannon was really trying to buy credibility which never works and two that while they were more open about it but that has been the long running flow of mainstream Hollywood, even if they won’t admit it. Look at movies such as Star Wars or Jaws, those are exploitation movies through and through, just with large budgets, those are the KIND of films that would have been drive-in fodder a couple of years prior. So when Cannon tried this on a somewhat larger scale it was seen as new due to the blinders that both the studios and the mainstream audiences placed on themselves, neither party noticed what was always in front of them.

Universal does not see Jaws as an exploitation film, yet it is in every way. FOX does not see Alien as a haunted house movie that perhaps Corman would have put out, but it is, sure the production values are higher and there was more mainstream appeal but the studios have always looked to the underground of film as a place to kickstart them (the studios). In the 1980’s Paramount was outright ashamed that the Friday The 13^th movies were consistently their largest earners at a time when Paramount was desperate to get a “prestige picture” out, which failed time and again to find their audience. They were perfectly happy to take the influx of funds from slashers but they just didn’t want to have to admit they did it, like paying a hooker for a blowjob, you want to cum but you don’t want anyone to know how it happened.

Exploitation films have long been the dirty little secret of the mainstream film world, those things they all rely on to shore up the studio all the while being let in the backdoor service entrance so no one respectable sees. That is changing to a degree. Look at the box office hits for the least 4 or 5 years and you will see that nearly all of them are what in the previous generation would have been either DTV (Direct To Video) or straight out exploitation films. Comic movies, Scifi movies, Horror movies… these are the films that have become complete mainstream where in the 90’s they would have been cast offs or relegated to the status of kids films.

Mainstream, while folding in exploitation more openly, still requires that the audience be treated like idiots though and so it is a give and take when it comes to the mainstream. There is also this strange occurrence that happens when the mainstream attempts to absorb the underground that makes the underground seem “cool” which makes both sides look bad. For instance, most of Tarantino’s fans only find out about many of the films he references due to him having done so, they go and check out Sonny Chiba movies and the like but is it not a tad insulting that if these same people had just stumbled onto The Street Fighter on late night TV they would have laughed at it, but because Tarantino likes it that somehow makes it cool?

That is how the mainstream waters down the underground, by attempting to integrate the two it only dilutes both. Mainstream film is meant for mainstream audiences and they are uncomfortable with anything new the same as underground film (my term but not a blanket term) does not fare well when being drug into the light where all of it’s imperfections can be exposed.