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favorite B-movies
Aurjay:
thing about Donnie Darko is it cost 4.5 million to make and grossed 4.1 million. I dont consider that to be low-budget. Also it had an all-star cast. I would think of it as more an indie film than a B-movie. One major thing i still think of in B-movies is the acting. The acting has to be either bad or amateurish. Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch are both cult films that were made with extremely low budgets but the acting wasn't bad in either so i consider them to be indie/cult films.
page break for great B-movies
scarred:
Budget to low-budget is relative to the movie (a $20 million action movie would be low budget), but 4 million is pretty low-budget even for a character drama like Darko.
Scandanavian War Machine:
what about El Mariachi? That shit was filmed for like $400 with one camera and no second takes.
And it became a multi-million dollar franchise.
scarred:
they call those "micro-budget"
a pack of wolves:
--- Quote from: Aurjay on 24 Feb 2010, 16:03 ---One major thing i still think of in B-movies is the acting. The acting has to be either bad or amateurish. Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch are both cult films that were made with extremely low budgets but the acting wasn't bad in either so i consider them to be indie/cult films.
--- End quote ---
I've got to disagree with you there. B-movies usually do have bad or amateurish acting but I think that's a side effect of the way they're produced rather than a criteria. For me, b-movie status is all about intent. It should be aiming for a particular genre audience and not be designed to break out of the genre ghetto. So you're right about Donnie Darko, big names and not being a straight genre film mean it's out of the running even if it had cost 50p. It also should be produced for money rather than any kind of artistic statement. Films like The Blair Witch Project have aspirations beyond sitting on the DVD shelves between the other horror films, but a film like Ice Spiders is not going to be winning any awards and it knows it. It's supposed to shift a few units and make a few quid by hitting genre fans' buttons, and that's proper b-movie behaviour.
El Mariachi is a tougher call than Donnie Darko, since it is a straight-up action film. I don't think it's concerned with sticking to genre stereotypes enough to be a b-movie though, it's not an easy enough sell if you see what I mean.
Suburbia's an interesting one since that brings us into the weird world of the exploitation film. That means I can throw in this masterpiece in the 'women in prison' genre:
Well acted and well shot, but still a total exploitation piece for all of its flair (and all the better for it).
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