Whether munching nuts in the cavernous gloom of shabby movie palaces or slumped half senseless before the television at dead of 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 retained images and shadowy 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, wooden acting 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 of the serial Zombies of the Stratosphere, one might be excused for dismissing B movies as ludicrously bad, or worse still, ludicrously bad and boring with it. Yet more than a few, like The Incredible Shrinking Man, were, against all odds, good - some even winning major awards.
In this book Robin Cross, himself afflicted by a voracious appetite for movies good and bad, offers a studious yet affectionate look at 40 years of low-budget productions. Among them we may find both the expected: a lot of amiable rubbish; and the unexpected: the films that conquered budgetary adversity and the stars who shone.