I usually don’t put much stock in dreams, but since I really needed to stretch my legs, I headed outside, and to my relief, the car was still there. Returning to the Norris Center, I'm happy to find out the bakery was now open. We got in line, and lo and behold, the good Dr. Freex was in line right in front of us. Freex got the last donut [Curses!] so I settled on a couple of pieces of pumpkin bread and a cartoon of milk. We found a table and talked about the riots during Message from Space and Merkin. (Is that Sonny Chiba? No. Is that Sonny Chiba? No...) This conversation led to the careers of Sonny Chiba, Vic Morrow, Cheri Cafaro, then veered into the Hastings College advantage, the one-way streets of New Orleans, and ended on the bars to avoid on Bourbon Street.

After finishing breakfast, I made my way back into the theater and scouted out the rest of the gang. When Chris Magyar asked how many beer cans I’d give Merkin, I told him it was an 18th Amendment hands down. We talked for a while until the lights dimmed, then, after returning to my seat, steeled myself for B-Fest's back stretch. According to the program, the next feature was to be a midget short -- and that got the crowd very excited. It was called Movie Maniacs, and it featured a drunken and surly midget dressed up like Charlie Chaplin running amok, who eventually pisses off the wrong people and has to make a run for it. The running looked vaguely familiar, and just as I realized that it reminded me of The Wizard of Speed and Time, a lone audience member stormed the stage and started kicking the floor.

Despite the audience’s pleas, the short was not repeated backwards.

After being expelled from a formal dance troupe that was crimping their style, two break dancers, Shabado Quinonas and Bugaloo Shrimp, team up with Lucinda Dickey and Christopher Macdonald and try to win a spot in some big dance revue. Against all odds, our little troupe preservers and lands the coveted last spot by dazzling a panel of judges and gradually win them over, eliminating their arch enemies of the formal dance troupe in the process.

Fifteen films into a bad movie marathon and the team of Golan-n-Globus finally shows up. A typical tale of spoiled upscale kids versus poor downtrodden kids, whose lives have been honed by the mean streets of the city. But here, instead of knifes and chains, the class war is fought with the power of dance. Dance. Dance! DANCE! And yeah, the guy singing the theme from Flashdance at the top of his lungs in the back of the theater? That was me.

Okay, so, we have a riot during the whole can of awesome that is Message from Space, but the audience goes nuts and cheers for a break dancing movie?!?

I tell you, there ain't no justice in this world. Anyways. I wonder if the cafeteria is open yet?

I belong to a select group of people who comprise the Battlefield Earth Club. To talk about Battlefield Earth Club can get you into trouble. What little I can tell you is the video was given to me, with instructions to watch it, and then pass it on to someone else. I did as I was told, and last I heard that single copy had exchanged hands at least a dozen times and was now somewhere in Wyoming. In other words: Seen it, and don’t want to see it again. Never liked John Travolta. Never will. 

On the way to the cafeteria, I silently curse Quentin Tarintino’s name for giving John his career back. What was he thinking? I don’t know ... Travolta always had that kinda face that screams "Punch me!" Buying a couple of cheeseburgers, fries and a big soda, I find a table with a nice scenic view of Lake Michigan. At this point, I’m still not sure where Paul is and I hope he’s okay. And factoring in all the circumstances, those were the best dang cheeseburgers I ever ate.

Satiated, I found one of the computer stations situated outside the theater empty and checked my e-mail and dropped by the B-Message Board and logged in on the Live from B-Fest thread, and then made it back inside the theater just in time to see Big John blow some cows apart. *sigh* With that, I settle back in my seat, patiently marking time until this ... thing ends.

His intentions for stopping world hunger might have been noble, but Professor Deemer’s experiments in rapid, radiation-induced growth still goes horribly wrong. And I’m still puzzled as to why he tried the growth serum on a tarantula; though I guess there would be eight drumsticks to fight over at the dinner table, right? Regardless, through a disastrous chain of events, the spider escapes and starts picking the countryside clean.

I tell ya: Nothing can restore your faith in humanity by having a classic come along to wipe away the memories of the previous film -- no matter how beat up the print is. I did get a little depressed because no one will join me when I yell out "Nes -TOR!" (-- with the emphasis on the second syllable), whenever Nestor Paiva’s dopey sheriff appeared. (Ah, well. I tried.) As I said, the print was in pretty bad shape and the film ground to a halt a couple a times for repairs. During one extended lapse, an eerily beautiful rendition of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" began to pick up steam from the audience. It was off key, in a minor chord, but sounded great. To appease the masses while the film was taped back together, they ran The Wizard of Speed and Time both ways again, much to everyone’s delight as the Hottentots stormed the stage and stomped away.

The repairs completed, the film wheezed back to life, and despite several key scenes that vanished completely, Clint Eastwood still napalms the eight-legged nightmare into a big fiery mess.

Christopher Lee draws the short stick again and goes under wraps as Kharis, while Peter Cushing got to play the good guy, who desecrate the tomb of Princess Ananka and accidentally awaken her guardian -- you guessed it, Kharis. The scene then switches to England, where a high priest of Ananka sics Kharis on those who raided her tomb. And as he buzzsaws through most of them, when it turns out that Cushing’s wife is the spitting image of Ananka, Kharis kidnaps her and tromps off into the bog, where the high priest is killed, the girl is saved, and our poor, lovelorn mummy sinks into the muck until the sequel.

Okay, yeah, Hammer Films revived the classic monsters in the late 1950's and got the bosoms busting and the blood flowing in brightly red colors, but, I don’t know, to me, some of them can be pretty darn dull and too gothic for there own good. And The Mummy is the biggest culprit. Any film with a flashback within a flashback is in deep trouble in my book. And I’m still laughing at that big honking elephant gun that the spindly Cushing was hauling around. That thing was lifting him! And it also should have knocked him right on his English-keester every time he fired it.

At some point during the movie, Freex and Chris joined me in the back row, and encouraged me to move down closer to "the man-animals" (a/k/a the B-Fest Regulars) and live among them and learn their language to get the full experience of B-Fest. But I respectfully declined. It’s not that I didn’t want too, but, at some point, I think it was half way through The Lonely Lady, I decided to stay in back and absorb B-Fest from the widest angle possible. I guess you could call it the Dr. Jane Goodall method as opposed to the Steve Irwin approach. And believe me, brothers and sisters, I had the best seat in the house. I saw everything. I had the seats memorized of all the laser pointers, flashlights, and the "GYMKATA!" guy. In fact, I encourage everyone to try B-Fest from the back row at least once. It’ll give you a whole new perspective.

Trust me.

And from that vantage point, I watched as the emcee made his last appearance and gave kudos to everyone who made B-Fest possible, and then asked everyone to clean up after themselves after the last show concluded. And, hey, Paul’s back. Just in time for...

When the Japanese find an ancient UFO buried deep in the ocean, they accidentally activate it. Meanwhile, as Godzilla rampages along the coast, I find it funny that they don’t even bother to evacuate when he attacks as the military doesn't give a hoot about civilian casualties anymore. After a rousing battle between the Big G and said military, the UFO shows up, and after a quick DNA check on the fire-breathing monster, blasts him back into the ocean. The UFO then settles on a building and hacks into the world’s computers and starts gathering data on Godzilla. Meantime, a scientist, his cute kid and a feisty reporter figure out that the aliens have come to Earth to colonize and will adapt to the most dominate species, which is obviously Godzilla.

Godzilla, a little pissed about the whole being blasting thing, resurfaces and stomps into the city. Obviously, he’s here to kick a little alien ass and chew bubble gum. And he’s all out of bubble gum. Heck, he doesn’t even like bubble gum. Answering the challenge, the UFO poops out an alien that quickly transforms into a bizarre combination of Godzilla and Gamera. As they fight, the monsters manage to take out half the city before Godzilla manages to destroy the UFO and then turns his attention on the alien. The alien in turn tries to eat him, but quickly finds out that Godzilla is bad for the digestion and is flash-fried from the inside out.

And yes, there is a little Godzilla inside each and every one of us. And don’t you forget it!

When I saw Godzilla 2000 in the theaters a while ago, it was the first Kaiju movie I’d seen in a theater since Godzilla on Monster Island waaaay back in the '70s. Godzilla movies are meant for crowds. Especially crowds who are big fans of rubber-suited induced carnage and mayhem, and it was a ton of fun cheering him on with the others. It was perfect, and ended on a very high note.

And with that, as the end credits rolled, B-Fest 2002 officially came to an end.

As the lights came up, I took a couple of seconds to soak up the carnage left over from the last day and half. Wracked with pangs of regret, I came to terms with the fact that one of the most gloriously insane 24-hour periods of my life had come to pass. I wanted it to keep going but, no dice; it was over. I am happy to report that almost everybody pitched in to help clean up the auditorium. Paul and I both had to be back to work Sunday afternoon, which meant the sooner we got out the better. And after we cleaned our row and gathered up our stuff, I wandered down and said goodbye to everyone -- and if I missed you again, sorry.

As Paul and I made our way to the car -- that was thankfully still there, thinking things over, I concluded that the only thing needed changing would be to have gotten there sooner, allowing us to fraternize with the B-Movie Brethren more before hand. Getting there early would also allow a better choice of seating. Beyond that, no real regrets -- except the whole "no food in the auditorium" fiasco. But that's nothing that can't be fixed for next year.

That’s right. I’m hooked.

Now, if it wasn't very clear to you before: Paul and I just drove 700 miles, watched 24 hours of gonzoidal cinema, and were now going to drive 700 miles back home. That's about 1400 miles and 48 hours of Seemed like a good idea at the time but, in the end, What the hell were we thinking?

I’m happy to report that the Chicago Freeway gods took pity on us and spat us out with no bad incidents. And though I complained about a sore butt when the film fest ended, in truth, it was my knees that were really killing me. I did my best to stretch out in the back of the car, and managed to stay awake until we got out of Chicago to help navigate; but once we we’re in the clear I dozed off. Actually, I fell asleep while handing Paul, who had managed to catch some sleep during the festival, money for the tollbooth.

We made it back into Omaha about 2:30 in the morning. From there, I could have pressed on to Grand Island and home, but chose instead to borrow a bed again. And as I fell onto that bed, the next thing I knew it was almost 1:30 the next afternoon. Having put all my stuff in my car the night before, all I had to do was jump in the Barneymobile and book, but not before a quick stop at Krypton Comics, where I bought a copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special and several back issues of The Hulk. And then it was back on the road where home, my own bed, and a nice long shower was waiting.

First off, big thanks to Paul for driving us all the way to Chicago, putting up with my constant shouts of "We're gonna to die!" and my other panic attacks when I thought we missed a turn off. Thanks buddy. Second: a big thanks to A&O Films for sponsoring B-Fest and putting up with the abuse heaped upon them during Merkin. And last, but not least (-- and one more time), thanks to the whole Stomp Tokyo and the BMMB gang for being so friendly and putting the new nervous guy completely at ease. 

See you all next year at B-Fest 2003.