B-Movie Madness

What if I told you that you could have a movie or book that features atomic locusts, a mallet-toting killer, a butcher that carves up more than just cows and chickens, and a Mr. Freeze clone?  Thanks to Alan Spencer, this is all possible, thanks to his most recent novel B-Movie Reels.

The basic plot is that recent film school graduate Andy Ryerson moves into his uncle's house in Anderson Mills, KS.  His task while there is to watch a stack of B-movies given to him by his professor and make commentary on each one.  Two problems: the house has had a "storied" history, and when the original film projector breaks, Andy comes across another film projector in the house.  Not long after he starts watching the movies on the antiquated projector, the characters in the movie begin coming to life and the townsfolk of Anderson Mills begin to be killed off by the various creatures and characters from the movies.

In getting to the Andy Ryerson character and the house he would inhabit, the novel offers a little back story on the house and its previous inhabitant, James Ryerson, who happened to be Andy's uncle.  Here, while the novel offers a good story behind James and how the house affected him, it doesn't quite go into the inhabitant before that and why the house became the way it did until about halfway into the story.  All that said, the real stars of the novel are the various creatures that emerge from the movies Andy is watching, and as is the case later in the novel, not watching, as the creatures (zombies from a movie Andy was watching) eventually take control of the projector.  Many of the townsfolk are merely fodder, as they're there to be killed off, but the ones that do play a role in the story either have some kind of connection to the Ryersons or are used by the spirit of James to guide Ned Ryerson, James' brother, to the house in order to destroy the projector and the house itself.  The premise of B-movies coming to life is ridiculous, but it provides plenty of scares and fun at the same time, and that is where B-Movie Reels succeeds greatly.  Alan Spencer seems to have found a comfort zone with ridiculous premises (see Zombies and Power Tools for another example), and though the main characters (not from the movies) outside of Andy Ryerson are secondary in the story, they do propel the story enough to make it a worthwhile read all the way around.