While filming a zombie movie in an abandoned factory deep in the mountains, the film crew accidentally woke up the real zombies...
This is [The camera does not stop! ] A clichéd beginning that makes people roll their eyes, but its subsequent unfolding is completely astonishingly deviated from people's expectations.
More than 5 months ago, when [the camera does not stop! ] When it was first shown in a few art theaters in Japan, it's hard to imagine how popular it is today .
At a cost of 3 million yen (about 180,000 RMB) , there was no star, and there was almost no announcement in the early stage. After the release, the word of mouth quickly fermented. It exceeded one million viewers in a few months, and captured over 3 billion yen (about 100,000 yen). 183.9 million yuan) at the high box office .
Not only if you are a zombie movie, horror movie lover, you can't miss it; but if you love movies and comedy, you must not miss it.
Because, this is a love letter to movie lovers -
The rough, weird, and confusing aspects of the first 37 minutes of the zombie short film are all unraveled in the second half of the film.
It's no wonder that some people say that the look and feel of this film is probably a continuous screening of [The Room] and [The Disaster Artist], and that's right.
When you feel that the road ahead is long and it is difficult to persevere in your dreams, reading such a love letter with laughter and tears written for filmmakers, you will feel that no one is easy, especially those B-level film directors with limited budgets and poor time .
B-movie, B-movie, is not a film classification in the usual sense, but a low-budget film divided from production input.
In the 1930s, sound films began to appear, and the transition from silent films to sound films expanded the audience and allowed more people to enter the theater;
Coupled with the economic depression at that time, Americans in the Great Depression, no matter what content you put in the movie theater, as long as people can temporarily forget the reality of hardship, they will be happy to spend a few cents in the relief fund. of.
Therefore, people often use the "Golden Age" to describe the American film industry in the 1930s.
As early as the second half of the 20th century, MGM, Paramount, Warner, Fox and other major studios had formed a relatively clear industrial structure map, and high-investment A-level films could also make good profits for them.
For example, Warner's sound film [Jazz Singer] recouped more than $3.5 million at the box office for them at a cost of 400,000.
© [Jazz Singer] Stills
But, on the other hand, with high investment and increased employees comes high investment risk.
Those who were born in the early nickel coin theaters naturally understand how to save money and make the best use of things——
In the gap between the long production cycle of shooting A-level films, make full use of personnel and equipment, and take some low-cost small films along the way.
In this way, the B-level film was born.
At that time, the theaters followed the model of the early opera house. Several different works were staged one after another, and cartoon short films, scenery short films, etc. were shown first, and it was almost the feature film.
And B-level films are often shown after the end of the feature film, tens of minutes but not more than an hour.
© Like [Sade's Friends] in 1938 only 55 minutes
Compared with the high-cost and well-made feature films with big stars and big directors, the B-grade films that come with them don't care about the subject matter and texture at all.
There are no stars, moving actors, few scenes, cheap sets and special effects, mediocre plots, and even frequent coherence errors, low-level fun, etc., which have become the label of B-grade films.
To say, [The camera does not stop! ] The first 37 minutes of the zombie short film can be called a B-level film .
The term B-movie also seems to have become a negative word that implies low quality and cliché.
After the 1960s in the United States, although the "two-film system" of bundled release has long been cancelled, the emergence of drive-in theaters and midnight theaters has begun to make B-level films more prosperous.
© Drive-in theaters in the '60s propelled the B-movie
Often combined with exploitative themes such as violence, horror, gore and eroticism, it appealed to a young audience that had grown up at the time.
At that time, there was even the concept of Z-rated films that were cheaper than B- rated films , and they were often unceremoniously called "Trash Films" .
The script is worse, the editing and lighting are worse, the actors are worse, often Z-rated films made on the fringes of the film industry or even outside, along with B-rated films, although fringe, they also become part of the film itself.
Although it is despised by the vast majority of audiences, it also has its own small group of loyal fans in each era.
In Daihachi Yoshida's [I heard that Kirishima is going to retire] , there is an ordinary boy Maeda who is crazy and obsessed with taking zombie movies with a camera in his hand.
After watching Shinya Tsukamoto's violent [Iron Man], he and a classmate he met excitedly chatted about his precious B-grade movies, but the other party shook his head repeatedly to show that he didn't know each other, and then quickly walked away.
©B-grade film [Iron Man] appeared directly in [I heard that Kirishima is going to retire]
This kind of sad loneliness and loneliness probably really represents the feelings of many diehard fans of B-grade films, and it may also be the voice of those failed directors who were not understood all their lives and were born with ridicule.
For example, Ed Wood.
Ed Wood wrote at least 47 scripts, directed 18 film and television works, and supervised 12 films in his lifetime, but no one knew him before his death.
After his death, he was named the "worst director of all time" by later film critics , and his [Outer Space Program 9] was also named "the worst movie of all time" .
That's what piqued interest in the B-movie director who had never made a good film.
© [Ed Wood] stills performed by Depp
Tim Burton made a biopic for him [Ed Wood] , and before the end of the film, Ed Wood, who had suffered countless heartbreaks and frustrations, received applause from people.
But this is obviously fictitious.
He made his first movie [Sudden Men and Women], which was an opportunity he won after a long time of obscurity in Hollywood——
3 days to write the script, 10 days to shoot, and a budget of around $30,000.
When it came to [Outer Space Program 9], he was even more exaggerated, and it took only 5 days to complete the shooting.
Of course, no one cared about it at the time, and later it became notorious, due to the "shoddy" feeling brought by these films at low cost and in a short period of time.
In [Outer Space Program 9] , he used shiny washed dishes as flying saucers and cardboard as tomb chambers.
©[Outer Space Program 9] UFOs can see lines
Look closely and you can see the long lines hanging from the flying saucers as they fly by, and the actors occasionally bump or even knock over the rough sets made of cardboard.
For the same scene, he shot it once during the day and again at night, and the same material appeared many times before and after the movie.
Not to mention the embarrassing acting skills of the amateur actors, who said their lines as if they were constantly looking at the prompt card, and the dialogue was boring and awkward.
When showing the war, he directly moved out the previous documentary scenes, which made [Outer Space Program 9] an undisputed "magical work".
And in the biopic [Ed Wood], there is also a tragic scene when he filmed [The Atomic Man's Monster Marriage] .
©The octopus monster in [The Atomic Man's Monster Marry]
The props of the large octopus monster, the protagonist of his movie, were stolen by the entire staff from other studios in the middle of the night. As a result, they stole it too quickly and forgot to take the octopus monster's engine.
There is no sound, 25 scenes are filmed in one night, almost only one hour of sleep at night and then get up to shoot, and the actors have to soak themselves in water and pretend to be attacked by octopus monsters.
After these hardships, the premiere of the movie was greeted by the audience throwing eggs at the actor and director, and even nearly smashed Ed Wood's car out of anger.
Compared to the distressed Ed Wood, it seems that even [the camera does not stop! ], everything the crew paid to shoot the zombie short film is nothing.
After all, the experience of being thrown with rotten eggs by his audience is not something that every director of a B-grade film can have.
Ed Wood is just one of them, one of the countless people in history who have worked hard to move forward with the dream of "Don't Stop the Camera!"
The New York Times once said:
Isn't [Jaws] a high-budget Roger Corman movie?
Roger Corman , another king of B-grade films, has directed more than 50 B-grade films in his life. He once filmed [Blood in a River] in 5 days, and also filmed it with the horror efficiency of two days and one night. Over the B-class classic [horror shop] .
©[Horror Shop] Poster
He even has a well-known quote:
There is only one way to make a movie: to shoot fast.
In order to save money and time, he often asks photographers to chase fire trucks, ambulances, and even shoot anything that is happening in life.
Because, he would put the material directly into the film; for this reason, he even went to the fire scene and shot the fire scene regardless of the danger.
Rest assured, after such a big scene is shot, his lower part and lower part may use the same material repeatedly, and it will never be wasted.
[Manos: The Hand of Destiny] , another god-level lousy film that is famous in the history of the film, has been in the worst top 10 list all the year round, but the director Arold Warren is a fertilizer businessman with a movie dream.
© [Manos: Hand of Fate] poster
Including [Room] and [Flock of Birds: Shock and Horror] , which have turned into epic masterpieces since the new century , directors Tommy Weisu and James Nguyen are also exceptionally "serious and sincere" "filmmakers".
In James Franco's biography of Tommy Wiseau in [The Disaster Artist], you can see how serious and sincere he is to make a masterpiece.
But it was also so hard to shoot this "bad movie citizen Kane" [room], where everything is wrong and everything is wrong.
James Nguyen, a Vietnamese Hitchcock fan, is even more interesting. He used all the $10,000 he had saved since going to work to shoot [The Birds: Shock and Horror] , and spent 4 years polishing it carefully.
©Special effects in [Flock of Birds: Shock and Horror]
When I ran out of money for the post-production, I found a special effects artist who had just graduated to do it. The special effects of this film were actually just copying and pasting the birds.
So, don't look down on bad movies, they really have dignity!
Like [The camera doesn't stop! ] At the end, the rocker camera was broken, and everyone on the crew had to shoot the scene they wanted even if they stacked Arhat.
It’s okay to be rough, and it’s okay to be bad, but the camera that shoots the film can’t stop!
References:
[1] "カメラをstop めるな!" Supervised by Ueda Shinichiro, the original goal of mobilizing 5,000 people, Movies.com
[2] Roger Corman, Wikipedia
[3] B-movie, Wikipedia
【4】Birdemic: Shock and Terror, Trivia, IMDB
[5] History of B-grade films, Movie Recommendation Network, 2016.4.6
【6】Funniest B Movies of All Time, Paul DeMerritt, CheatSheet, 2017.1.28
[7] He is the worst director ever! But he doesn't think so, Li Xiaomo, Public Account Adventure Movie, 2016.6.4
【8】Ed Wood: Tim Burton's Beautiful Ode to a Fascinating Filmmaker, From One Outsider to Another, CINEPHL
Author / Curly Hair
The article was first published on the WeChat public account "Bao Ci Er"
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