{"id":1504,"date":"2012-02-18T22:26:40","date_gmt":"2012-02-19T04:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1504"},"modified":"2012-02-18T22:26:40","modified_gmt":"2012-02-19T04:26:40","slug":"the-b-side-of-tim-burton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1504","title":{"rendered":"The B-side of Tim Burton"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For those who read this site regularly, you know I love B movies. \u2028\u2028There\u2019s often times I feel like I\u2019m part of a very exclusive club that gets this stuff, after all, when Quentin Tarantino did Grindhouse, nobody even knew what a double bill was, the drive-ins are certainly long gone, and the films of people like Ed Wood stopped playing on late night TV a long time ago.<\/p>\n

The B-side of Tim BurtonSo I was thrilled when Tim Burton mentioned one of my all time favorite B movies, Frankenstein\u2019s Bloody Terror, during a recent interview with MTV.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s doubtful a lot of people today would know that reference in a million years, and funny enough, I actually wrote about it for TG because it was in 70mm and 3D. (Bloody Terror is a lot like today\u2019s 3D that takes you deeper in the movie instead of tons of “outies” flying in your face).<\/p>\n

This shouldn\u2019t have surprised me so much, because after all Tim Burton did make the movie Ed Wood, and a lot of his work has a schlocky side to it – in a good way of course. He also was very inspired by the British Hammer horror films, which were once considered trash by high English society and are now ranked as classics, same with the work of Mario Bava (Black Sunday, Kill Baby Kill), the Italian meistro of horror who was also a big influence on Martin Scorsese.<\/p>\n

Of course, probably more than anybody, Quentin Tarantino has shown how much low budget B movies have influenced modern cinema, as he\u2019s drawn heavily from them himself.<\/p>\n

A lot of people don\u2019t see the entertainment value in these films, but for the fans who do, we know what we love about them. They\u2019re usually wild, funny (intentionally and unintentionally), outrageous, very un-P.C. even by today\u2019s standards, shocking, balls out fun. There\u2019s also a lot of interesting things you\u2019ll discover in them if you watch carefully enough.<\/p>\n

Back in the day, studios would lecture filmmakers that a comedy had to be totally funny, and a serious moment or a downbeat ending would just confuse people, or lose the audience. Grindhouse movies didn\u2019t have to follow the rules, and they often had the most outrageous twists and turns you\u2019d never expect from mainstream films. \u2028\u2028<\/p>\n

As Tarantino recalled in the book What It Is, What It Was, “I think if you look at my work, it\u2019s not really taking that much from the mainstream cinema. What I\u2019ve taken from exploitation films in general is that anything can happen.” \u2028<\/p>\n

Back in the summer of 2007, Tarantino held a months long grindhouse film festival with prints all out of his personal collection. Among the classics shown were Slithis, The Female Bunch, The Blood Spattered Bride (the title of which became one of the chapter names in Kill Bill), White Line Fever, and many others.<\/p>\n

But when it\u2019s all said and done, you ultimately go to see these movies to have a great time, and more often than not, that\u2019s what they deliver. If you don\u2019t know how to have fun, a grindhouse show ain\u2019t for you. Go ahead, treat it with snobby condescension, treat it like it\u2019s beneath your film snob sensibilities. You have no idea what you\u2019re missing.<\/p>\n

by David Konow TG Daily