B-movie festival invades Sammy Davis Jr. Plaza

Kirk Baird

Tuesday, May 21, 2002 | 8:29 a.m.

A film's sly denouncement of McCarthyism through human replicas.

A movie's examination of the nuclear-arms fear gripping the United States, as seen through the eyes of an alien sent to Earth on a peace mission.

A flick about a giant Venusian creature that terrorizes Rome.

If any or all of these plots sound appealing, then the third annual B-movie festival may be for you.

Beginning this week with the 1956 classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," the city of Las Vegas' "Attack of the B-Movies" festival runs each Wednesday night through June 5.

The other films to be shown are 1957's "20 Million Miles to Earth" on May 29, and 1951's landmark sci-fi "The Day the Earth Stood Still, which concludes the festival.

Although the B-movie label has some negative connotations, Colleen Duffy, acting cultural specialist for the city of Las Vegas' Department of Leisure Services, which helps bring cultural events to the city, said these films remain timeless.

"They're more classic sci-fi than B-movies, per se. But, the availability of some of the real classic B movies -- with the awful groaner special effects -- they're just hard to get now," she said.

At last year's festival, for example, Duffy said she wanted a theme of "When Plants Attack," featuring films about giant flesh-eating greenery. Two of the movies on her list were the original 1960 "Shop of Horrors," by legendary B-movie director Roger Corman, and the 1963 classic "Day of the Triffids."

The problem: The city uses a 16-mm projector during the festival. And when Duffy called film distribution companies specializing in older films, she learned the only 16-mm print available of either film was the 1986 "Little Shop of Horrors" musical remake.

"I ended up with a hodgepodge" of sci-fi flicks, she said. "(But) each year they get harder to find."

When Duffy began booking films for this year's festival, she found her luck had not changed much.

"It first started out that I wanted to (feature a series of films about) people who had been exposed to atomic energy or radiation," she said. "I went for 'Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman' and 'The Amazing Colossal Man,' but we couldn't get copies of some of those films. So we decided to go with an 'Invasion From Outer-Space' theme.

"The theme has always been under the B-movie umbrella, and usually a sci-fi or monster movie."

With "B-Movies" she got both.

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is both a sci-fi allegory and an old-fashioned horror film, long before horror meant buckets of blood and gore.

The film's story has proven interesting enough to latter-day filmmakers, that it has been remade twice: in 1978 with Donald Sutherland featuring the same title, and in 1994 as "Body Snatchers."

"Earth Stood Still" was one of the first "thinking-man's" science-fiction films, where the alien was not the monster, but the humans and their warlike nature.

The film features the famous line, "Klaatu barada nikto!" the only alien dialogue spoken in the movie. The dialogue has since turned up in other films, including "Return of the Jedi" and "Army of Darkness."

"20 Million Miles to Earth" follows the familiar plot of the giant space creature coming to Earth and wreaking havoc, before baffled military commanders and scientists in lab coats team up to stop the beast.

The movie's high point may be the creature's duel to the death with an elephant, courtesy of stop-motion animation pioneer Ray Harryhausen.

Despite the age of these films, Duffy said the B-movie festival always draws a fanatical crowd, including families.

"It's definitely a select group (the festival) brings out, but it's definitely a cross-section of people," she said. "You get everything, from the senior community to families and younger, Generation-X kids.

"Even though they're scary, they're not so gory that you cannot take a kid to come and see the films with you. And there's the lure of the old black-and-white films and to see the bad special effects. There's an innocence about them."