B movie? It's an A+!
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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B Movie Bonanza
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A place for lovers of B movies to come together and talk about them.
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AAA all-time fave, hopefully appeals to folks here who'll join in the watch party tomorrow
Lloyd Kaufman has entered the chat
One of my all time favourite movies. Was this really a B Movie? It feels like it had a big production value.
No, not a B movie but I thought there might be fans here who'd like to join in.
The watch party is over now, but we all had a great time watching it.
Oh yeah of course, I would have loved to have been there too! Next time 🤞 just in case it wasn't clear; I wasn't criticising you by questioning if it was a B Movie or not - I was just genuinely surprised to see it listed because it looks so high-budget!
Glad you all had fun 🥳
No worries!
BTW there will be a next time, as an August 'season' of BTiLC & other Kurt Russell movies are an annual event. (Tomorrow on #SundayFunnies will show Used Cars and for #MondayActionMovie it will be Escape From New York see https://piefed.social/post/1154200 for more info
To be a stickler, BTILC is maybe considered culturally a B-movie today that the term has lost its meaning, but the budget and marketing was a typical A-lister back in the day. It was the headliner in theatres worldwide. I remember it showing in the main salon in cinema multiplexes here in Sweden. That simply didn't happen with American B-movies at the time unless it was something truly spectacular.
Yep. The A/B/C/Z refers to the budget of the production. A B-movie had lower budget and lower priority from the studio. They were fillers or jokers or opportunities for up and coming directors and actors and crew to prove themselves for future A-budget productions.
Added footnote.
Double features were a big deal back in the day. Many theaters only ran double bills, and the studios would re-release particular double bills ["Bonnie and Clyde" and "Bullit" ran together]
The B movie was the second movie, like the B side of a 45 rpm record was the less popular song.
Lower budget, actors who weren't as famous, those made a movie a B.
Someone in the watch party said their local cinema in 1986 showed BTiLC and Highlander (also from 20th Century Fox) in a double bill all summer, didn't say which came second.
Things were a lot different before video tape changed the game. There was a theater in Atlanta that ran Gone With The Wind for decades. Another big difference is that there used to be many, many more theaters with one owner. There were all sorts of deals being made between the distributors, the studios, and the theater owners.
You leave Jack Burton alone!
If for nothing else this movie is awesome because it spawned Mortal Kombat.
O. M. G. How did I never make that connection before?!?
It's true all the O.G. MK characters are there if you look for them.
Is Cage supposed to be Burton? 🤔
John Carpenter is not a B-lister.
I have been playing Ghosts of Tsushima lately, particularly doing the Legends Mode story to unlock a mask and I keep wondering if the narrator of Legends Mode is the same dude that played Egg in this movie. He kinda sounds like him, and the way these stories are presented is literally just a dude telling an exagerrated and embellished story, which hella reminds me of Egg 🤣
I keep expecting to hear "suddenly, Lo Pan appeared before Jack... er, I mean The Ghosts..."
Ghosts of Tsushima is from 2020, but Victor Wong (Egg Shen in BTiLC) died in 2001. But who knows with AI?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Wong_(actor,_born_1927)
I just watched this with the boyfriend who had mever seen it and I laughed so hard at the stupid questions Jack was asking at the end of the movie.