From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
The Envelope Please
Best Picture: "Hoboken Lou"?
If Ron Bonk were a betting man, he'd pick "Prison-A-Go-Go" as the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture of 2003. " 'Hoboken Lou' is a good movie, too," he adds.
Sound unfamiliar? Don't worry; they're not the nominees for the Academy Awards, scheduled for Sunday at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles. They're up for the annual B-Movie Awards, which will be handed out over the Internet on Monday. Other nominees for Best Picture include "Demon Hunters: Dead Camper Lake," "Head Hunter" and "The Passage."
Mr. Bonk, 34, is the founder and president of Sub Rosa Studios (www.b-movie.com) in Syracuse, N.Y., one of the leading B-movie filmmakers and distributors in the country. In addition to the awards, he also oversees the B-Movie Hall of Fame, which last year honored Golden Globe-winning actress Karen Black for such cult-classic films as "Auntie Lee's Meat Pies" and "I Woke Up Early the Day I Died," country-and-Western stars Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, as well as the films "Billy Jack" and "The Turkish Star Wars," among others.
Sub Rosa, started in 1992, focuses on films made for considerably less than the estimated $270 million it cost to make the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Films made on VHS tape can cost as little as $100, but a more typical budget is somewhere under $50,000, said Mr. Bonk. "Hey . . . Stop Stabbing Me!," which came out last fall and was a B-movie hit, was made for just a few thousand dollars. Budgets for higher-end B-movies made on film can go as high as $1 million.
The nearly 2,000 titles for sale on Sub Rosa's Web site lean heavily toward horror. Among the all-time bestsellers are "Last House on Hell Street," "Flesh Freaks" and "Insaniac." Other titles include soft-core porn, like "Vampire Blues" and "Hellcats in High Heels."
Like many startup businesses, Sub Rosa began as a hobby. Mr. Bonk was in the antiques business and made a video, "What a Deal." That only whetted his appetite for filmmaking. In 1993, he made "City of the Vampires," a gory, low-grade film that he admits "was horrible." Undaunted, he began looking for a distributor, but found that most were either unscrupulous or going out of business. That's when he got the idea to make Sub Rosa a distributor for his work and other B-movie filmmakers.
Word spread slowly, but with the growing popularity of the Internet he built up a decent library. His first big hit was 1996's "Vicious Suite," which sold over 3,000 copies. "That's pretty good for a VHS movie," Mr. Bonk said.
There were the usual hiccups that come with any new business. "I was learning how to do world-wide distribution in Syracuse, N.Y., not Hollywood," Mr. Bonk noted. And he was late to market with "Strawberry Estates," a film he shot in 1997. It's a mockumentary about an expedition into the Smith Garrett Building in Eaton, N.Y. Three days into it the explorers disappeared. The video is all that supposedly remains from an independent videographer who chronicled the trip.
Sound familiar? Although "Strawberry Estates" was shot for less than $1,000 a year before "The Blair Witch Project" came out, Mr. Bonk didn't get it out in time. To avoid being labeled a copycat, he reshot some scenes in 1999 and released it on VHS in 2000 and DVD in January.
The switch to DVD further addled the entire B-movie industry. The new medium increased production costs and it was hard to find reliable partners to transfer B-movies to the new format. Two years ago, Sub Rosa was barely surviving on VHS sales over the Internet. "We had to move into DVD or the company was going to die," Mr. Bonk said.
B-movies face the added hurdle that their low volume requires them to be priced at $15 or $20, compared with first-run Hollywood films that can cost half that after they hit video stores. But B-movies have their following and Mr. Bonk and Sub Rosa have survived. In fact, the business is thriving.
"Our movies don't have some of the big-star names, big-studio finish and glitz," Mr. Bonk admits. "Some of our movies are shot on camcorders. The lack of big production value hurts. But a lot of these mainstream slasher movies are on par with what we're doing."
Indeed, I watched "Short Cut Road," a Sub Rosa title about a group of friends who are brutally murdered on a back road in Upstate New York. While the acting wasn't Oscar-worthy and the production quality wouldn't pass muster at Merchant Ivory, it wasn't any worse that what you see on the USA Network at 2 a.m.
Despite that, Mr. Bonk and company still don't get much respect from mainstream Hollywood. The ultimate dis came at the turn of the century, when the American Film Institute released its "100 Years . . . 100 Movies" list. B-movies that have become cult classics, like "Night of the Living Dead" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," weren't even mentioned.
"We were completely insulted," said Mr. Bonk.
But the B-movie producers may get their red-carpet revenge. Last year, Sub Rosa formed a consortium made up of about a dozen B-movie filmmakers and studios in an effort to get their titles placed in more mainstream venues like Tower Records, Borders and Musicland. And Mr. Bonk is buoyed by the fact that Best Buy plans to create a new cult-movie section. "We've had some interest but haven't been able to close the deal yet," Mr. Bonk admits.
With titles like "Prison-A-Go-Go," how can the public resist?
