Whether munching nuts in the cavernous gloom of shabby movie theaters or slumped half-senseless before the television in the middle of the night, most of us have seen more B movies than we care to admit or are able to remember. Yet somewhere, lurking in the recesses of our brains, lies a heap of shadowy images and faces from these misspent hours.
The very expression "B movies" conjures up visions of creaking sets left over from half-forgotten epics, plots left hanging in mid-air as money and time ran out, aging stars stumbling through terrible indignities, acting wooden enough to rival the Petrified Forest in animation, and enough stock footage to circle the equator. After seeing Zsa Zsa Gabor ruling over a planet of low-rent broads in Queen of Outer Space, the antics of Nyah the Martian in the truly awful Devil Girl from Mars, a puffy-faced Erroll Flynn sleepwalking through Istanbul, or an episode from Zombies of the Stratosphere, one might be excused if he dismissed all B movies as ludicrously bad, or worse still, ludicrously bad and boring to boot. Yet more than a few, like The Incredible Shrinking Man, were good, despite the odds — and some even went on to win major awards.
In THE BIG BOOK OF B MOVIES, Robin Cross, himself afflicted by a voracious appetite for movies good and bad, offers an affectionate and comprehensive look at forty years of low-budget productions. Among them we may find both the expected — a lot of unwittingly comic disasters — and the unexpected — the films that conquered budgetary adversity and the stars who shone.