Monday, October 11, 2004

How to make a B-movie?

Being one who watched countless B-movies since young, my feeling for B-movies has changed more than once. From being excited and interested when I was between 10-16, to being jaded when I was between 17-24, to being amused by it right now. B-movies have a tendency to become formulaic, so it doesn't matter whether the movie was made with $1,000 or $1,000,000. They've become so predictable that I can roughly type out a "primer" where you can just plug any B-movie in and it'll all fit just fine. This list is by no means exhaustive, and will be updated once I think of something new.

1) The cop is always late.
You hear me right. The police always show up AFTER our hero has fought till near-death and made a miraculous come back to clean up the mess.

2) If the hero has a team, there'll be at least 1 female and/or 1 Black. America being America, it would want its audience to believe that sexism and racism don't exist in films. But hey, we're talking B-movies here, so who are we trying to kid? This leads to the following points:

3) The Black dude will die/be wounded/be rescued by the hero like a helpless puppy. Reference: Deep Blue Sea, Predator, Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, Terminator 2. Let's face it. If the Black dude is not the hero, there's no point letting him become anyone heroic, hence this point.

4) If the Black dude is the hero, then everyone from the other races MUST die. Reference: Blade, Predator 2, AVP, Spawn. Whenever the Black dude gets his just screen time, the director overdoes things and let everyone else who're not Black die.

5) The hero gets to bed the only female in his team with a lame joke. Reference: ALL James Bond movies.
Bond: (insert lame joke here)
Girl: Haha. You're lame and funny. Let's have sex now.

6) All action movies MUST have an action sequence within the first 15 mins of the movie. Before Speed, all action movies took at least 30 mins for anything remotely exciting to happen, such as The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake etc. After Speed, every action movie tries to up the ante by bringing forward the action earlier. Even the latest Exorcist tried this trick just for the sake of it.

7) Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Chuck Norris, Dolph Lundgren, Hulk Hogan. Any movies starring these stars are sure B-grade disasters. The new celebrity added to this list is, unfortunately, Jacky Chan.

8) Shameless hint of a sequel. The villain lays eggs! The villain has a twin! The villain's belongings are shining! The villain is the hero's father/son/sibling! Whatever it is, the villain always come back, in one form or another.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

haha, that's a good one.