Links to Like-Minded Websites
The B-Masters Cabal
And You Call Yourself a Scientist!-- I'm a man who loves a unique perspective, and you can't get much more unique in this business than a site that features reviews (mostly of old science fiction movies) written by a real-life, honest-to-Baal mad scientist. Liz is also a fantastic writer, and brings more sheer insight to the table than any other critic specializing in the World o' B that I know of-- with the possible exception of this next guy...
Braineater-- You want to read a review of the original Gamera that includes transcriptions of its incidental music and a sidebar explaining how giant Japanese monsters get named? Then Will Laughlin is your man. Anybody who'll devote as much mental effort to a Larry Buchanan movie as went into his review of Zontar, the Thing From Venus has my undying respect and admiration. You can even use Braineater to gauge the extent of your own B-movie corruption-- if you understand why the Giallo Generator is funny, you're already a hopeless case. He's also one of the few folks I know of who shares some of my sick fascination with Jesus Franco, but that's another matter altogether. (I think they might make pills for that now...)
Teleport City and Mezzanote-- After more stem-to-stern revamps than I can count (now including a rebranding so complete that they felt compelled to reopen the site under a new name!), Teleport City has expanded far beyond its roots as a couple of punk kids' movie review site. Nowadays, it's pretty much one nudie pictorial away from being an early-60's gentleman's magazine in blog form. They still cover movies, though, with all the ascerbic wit and most of the counterculture attitude you remember from the old days.
The Unknown Movies Page-- The premise here is a simple one: The Unknown Movies Page dedicates itself exclusively to reviewing films no one has ever heard of. And as a quick tour through the reviews there will show you, there's usually a very good reason for the movies' obscurity.
Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension-- The movie review site that put the "exhaust" in "exhaustive." If you're looking for reviews that dissect their subjects down to the level of every freakin' change of camera angle, then Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension is the place for you. Be sure to pack a lunch...
badmovies.org-- The writing may be a little on the lightweight side, but Andrew Borntreiger more than makes up for it in presentation. Screen shots, film clips, snippets of choice dialogue, and a format that is nothing short of inspired. You've got to wonder how an active US Marine finds the time to run a site this ambitious.
Retired B-Masters Sites
The Bad Movie Report-- Dr. Freex is at least half of the reason you're reading this stuff at all if we haven't met face-to-face. His combination of extremely well-written reviews and relatively simple web design first gave me the idea that I, too, could build a website, and that if I did, there might be at least a few people out there who would read it. Not only that, his B-movie credentials exceed those of virtually anyone else reviewing celluloid schlock on the web, for he once made a cheap-ass horror flick. Better still, there's a wing of his site dedicated to telling the whole sordid story!
Stomp Tokyo-- Once the Viacom of internet B-movie criticism, these guys reigned over a veritable media empire. Fortunately, they still keep the lights on a most of it, hosting numerous subsidiary sites, maintaining the B-Movie Message Board, and of course making sure the main site remains accessible, even if it hasn't been updated in years. Entertaining reviews in a very wide range of genres. (Pro-tip: Stomp Tokyo was in the midst of a massive site reorganization when its operators decided they'd had enough, and many of its reviews were never converted to the new format. Those unconverted reviews were also never added to the revised main index, but they can be accessed here, via the original index page. Bear in mind that reviews which postdated the changeover were never added to that page, so you really do need to check both indexes to find all of Stomp Tokyo's content.)
Opposable Thumb Films-- One of the Stomp Tokyo sub-sites that ascended to B-Master status in its own right. These were the guys who used to rate movies according to the amount of David Hasselhoff that would need to be added in order to make them tolerable.
B-Notes-- This was one of Jabootu's sub-sites, and a founding member of the Cabal. Dense and exhaustive recaps in the manner of the parent site, but with a more structured format.
Gangrene Widescreen-- Truly a site that didn't last long enough. Instead of writing movie reviews, Grady the Undead Film Critic produced short videos combining film clips, original animation, and occasionally even musical numbers. That approach to online film criticism has gained ground in recent years, but Grady was an early adopter.
Cold Fusion Video and Oh, the Humanity!-- Sadly, I can no longer link you to either of these B-Masters founder sites. Cold Fusion was lost to the ages when the servers hosting it and who knows how many other sites shat the bed and destroyed their own backups in the process. Oh, the Humanity!, in contrast, died peacefully in its sleep when the people who used to run it decided they had better things to do with their money than to keep up domain registry and hosting on a site they hadn't updated in years.
Other Noteworthy Sites
The Bad Cinema Diary-- Completely rebuilt and redesigned, with a new address and a new, Wordpress-based format. With its multitude of consise, single-paragraph reviews, Bad Cinema Diary is like an online version of those brick-shaped paperback video guides that everybody used to have at least one of back in VHS days (except that because it's a Wordpress site now, nothing's in any order beyond that in which it was originally posted, and there's no frigging index). Understandably but annoyingly, the literally thousands of reviews puplished over the years by the original Bad Cinema Diary have not been ported over, but you can still download them in e-book form from the current site if you really want them.
Cape Jeer-- Anybody whom I've frustrated with my refusal to cover superhero movies should check this place out. The only thing stopping Cape Jeer from being all superheroes all the time is its occasional foray into comic book cinema outside the tights-and-fights ghetto.
Checkpoint Telstar-- This site took about 35 seconds to outgrow its original premise of using B-movies as a window into Cold War culture, but it does still pursue that core mission from time to time. That unusual nominal focus can lead Checkpoint Telstar into territory far removed from the familiar sci-fi/horror/action complex covered by the typical B-movie site.
Cinemasochist Apocalypse-- The title pretty much speaks for itself, doesn't it? A Midwestern headbanger's guide to extreme cult cinema.
Hysteria Lives!-- This site gives me serious slasher envy. Admittedly, the exclusive focus on loonies with knives makes it hard to read more than a few reviews at a time, but no other site that I know of deals with the subject of slasher movies in anything like this level of detail. There's a pretty good section covering the "Video Nasties" panic, too.
The Terrible Claw Reviews-- Exactly what you would expect from a guy who names his website after his favorite species of dinosaur. (Mine too, for whatever that's worth.) Not every review is of a giant monster film, but that's unmistakably where the proprietor's heart is.
3-B Theater and Micro-Brewed Reviews-- That's "3-B" as in "three beers." As in proprietor Chad Plambeck's favorite strategy for fighting his way to the end of flicks like Deadly Weapons and They Saved Hitler's Brain. Novices, meanwhile, will probably want at least a case.
The Tomb of Anubis-- Back from the dead for the who-knows-how-manieth time, this incarnation of the Tomb has thus far specialized in direct-to-video swill like Evil Bong and 1313: Bigfoot Island. The writing is as confrontational as the movies are cheap and shitty, so those who like their film criticism polite and temperate are well advised to go elsewhere.
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