Is B-Movie a terminology more relative to the movies of the fifties and sixties and the decades that went before rather than today’s current cinema audience?
A time when cinemas presented two movies at most showings, a main feature and a low budget secondary film, affectionately referred to as the B-Movie.
But as with most things in life the B-Movie hasn’t gone away, there are still millions of fans for the often Black & White, poorly acted, dangerously staged special effects and sometimes erratically edited, classic movies from this area.
Frequently the birth place of great producers, directors and actors once they had learned their craft on the secondary rung of the celluloid ladder.
Television in the fifties extended the life of these budget restrained master pieces and in the late seventies video brought Stars from the past to an ever increasing and growing younger audience.
Now with self produced and distributed DVDs and websites such as You-Tube, a digital age has extended the life of the low budget beginners opportunities to produce their own B-Movies.
Movies of the 22nd century, without them realising they are participating in a long established part of the film industry.
The B-Movie lives on in every town, back street gathering and college in virtually every country on the globe.
A student of film today with the tools of this technological age has available a real opportunity to produce B-Movies of quality for less than the budgets used in some of the classics, forty or fifty years ago.
To many of us B-Movies are fun, memories and a place of escapism but for those who want to be part of the film industry they are an education, an enlightenment on how to achieve the impossible on limited funds and an inspiration to filmmakers of the future.
It is all in the eye of the beholder.
