Big budgets do not translate into good movies. To once more flog the dead but beautifully rendered body of the Navi, James Cameron’s Avatar is a perfect example of this. Without the budget, film makers are forced to be a bit more inventive with their craft, for good or ill, and the B-Movie is the result. These three films are aparently amongst the most popular B-Movies of all time. But in this instance does the B stand for ‘boredom’ or ‘better watch that again’?

Night of the Living Dead

This is the best zombie film made by George A. Romero. And he has made a lot of them over the years. It’s better than the sequel, Dawn of the Dead, in relation to which I hold the perhaps controversial belief that the 2004 Zach Snyder remake is superior. It’s better than Day of the Dead, although this is an excellent mid-80s outing for the series, and it’s better than Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead, which came in a spurt of creative and financial revival for Romero in the 2000s and mostly hit the mark, if the mark in question is mediocrity. Boom.

Night of the Living Dead is one of the only films that I own multiple times on DVD, for reasons that escape me. I got a terrible conversion of it for about a quid years ago, and I’ve picked it up again in various box sets almost without realising it. I think the best version I’ve seen came with the Trilogy of the Dead box set that landed a few years back, and this is a particularly good buy if you want extras and all that other good DVD stuff.

The film itself is from 1968 and is shot in black and white for budgetary reasons, but it is all the more effective for it, the lack of colour giving a certain arty hue to the whole thing and making the blood and gore more disturbing because your imagination has to get involved. There are exploitative moments, and the metaphorical lynching which occurs at the end is more poignant and effective than anything conjured up in the sequels. Even though Romero has said that the casting of a black actor in the lead role was not a conscious choice, he cannot have been unaware of the significance that race would play throughout the film. The socio-political context of its release, with the war in Vietnam generating violent images daily, is also reflected in the self-destructive nature of the plot.

Night of the Living Dead is, like the best B-Movies, filled with unsettling imagery, events and dialogue, and its age shows in places. However, it is clearly based on a timeless masterplot that still entices audiences today, because the disaster/zombie apocalypse film is ripe for repetition as well as parody.

Return of the Killer Tomatoes

This is a sequel to film I’ve not seen, but most people of my generation will be familiar with the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes cartoon that popped up in the early 90s. This parodic movie echoes Airplane, and it rips on perceived B-Movie tropes almost constantly. It features a fresh faced, mullet-sporting George Clooney in need of some dental work, long before he became the sophisticated serial woman appropriating A-lister that he is today.

At first Return of the Killer Tomatoes spits jokes like popcorn kernels, and some are worthy of comparison with the best work by the likes of Mel Brooks. But like Mr Brooks’ movies, the physical and verbal pratfalls are not strong enough to hold together a plot that is filled with characters in which the viewer cannot invest any emotion. From time to time this even feels a little too high budget to be a B-Movie. Which is disconcerting. On the plus side, some of the songs are brilliant, and as a curiosity of latter day B-Movie fodder it is definitely worth a look.

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark

Things keep getting weirder. This is a horror comedy that keeps sauce levels appropriately high with walking cleavage queen Elvira quitting her TV hosting job and ending up in a small town as the result of some will-related shenanigans.

The character of Elvira was originally generated in order to please B-Movie fans who would tune in for late night showings of classically terrible films, and this eventually translated into a cult following for Elvira herself, which spawned this movie. I get the feeling that you have to be a fan of Elvira to really appreciate this film, which is a shame. It attempts humour to varying degrees of success, and Cassandra Peterson, who plays the literal and metaphorical titular role, is clearly quite a funny lass. But the package doesn’t entirely work, and again it is slightly too polished to stand alongside true B-Movies.

The B-Movie DVD collection, which contains these three films and many more together for the first time, is arriving on May 17th. Other movies it features include The Stuff, Hell Comes To Frogtown, Crocodile, Creature and many more.