Instead of attending B-Fest for the past few years, I've been just throwing together a bunch of B-Fest-like films and viewing them on a Saturday afternoon, somewhere around B-Fest time. This year I did my faux B-Fest yesterday (January 30), and here were the titles that I watched.
- Dangerous Men (2005) is the latest Alamo Drafthouse insanity to be re-released to an appreciative public. Starts off as a revenge pic about a woman getting back at the killers of her fiancee, and ends with the hunt for a ridiculous-looking drug dealer going by the name "Black Pepper".
- Rock Rock Rock (1956) is your typical Alan Freed cavalcade of stars, but also features Tuesday Weld as a high schooler who tries to raise enough money for a prom dress, but instead gets a rather complex lesson in economics.
- Sugar Hill (1974) is a blaxploitation flick with a lot of voodoo and the mother from "The Jeffersons".
- The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965) features those two items, in various combinations.
- Skatetown USA (1979) is Patrick Swayze's first film, and is about the rough-and-tumble world of roller skating gangs.
- Pulgasari (1985) is North Korea's own Godzilla movie, but features way too much melodrama and obvious Communist allegory to be fun.
In addition I included a couple of short subjects, a feature which the real B-Fest has dropped the past few years: "Soapy the Germ Fighter", about a talking bar of soap who urges a kid named Billy Martin (not THAT Billy Martin) to clean up regularly; "The Self Image Film (If Mirrors Could Speak)", a disturbing short about kids who wear clown makeup and don't realize that they are made up; and "The Devil's Toy", a Canadian Film Board short about the skateboard and how it's terrorizing Canada in 1969.
Most of these films can be found online in various locations, particularly archive.org and Dangerous Minds; I recommend them all!