Back during Hollywood’s 1940s “Golden Age,” a B movie was the bottom half of a double feature, usually a Western. Multi-film bills phased out in the 1950s, but the term B movie stuck around, usually assigned to cheap genre movies before the age of the blockbuster arrived in the 1970s and turned B movie topics (alien invasions, disaster movies and the like) into big budget entertainment.
Bradenton’s South Florida Museum has an excellent assortment of B movies on tap all summer long as part of its Film Fridays series. The best part: all screenings take place in the Bishop Planetarium Theater — which Bay area residents know as either a place they went on a class trip or a place they tripped while skipping class and catching the Pink Floyd laser light show. Either way, it’s a cool room for watching some classic creature features.
Upcoming films in the series include the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (May 17), the Rick Moranis incarnation of Little Shop of Horrors (May 24), 1988’s remake of The Blob (May 31), the brainy Jodie Foster/Matthew McConaughey sci-fi flick Contact (June 7), director Neill Blomkamp’s killer aliens-in-Johannesburg feature District 9 (June 21), and the 2011 British import Attack the Block (June 28), which earned underground notices for its street-level take on the standard alien invasion yarn.
All Film Fridays screenings begin at 6 p.m. in the South Florida Museum’s Bishop Planetarium Theater, 201 10th Street W., Bradenton. $5 per person for general admission with discounted rates of $3 per person available for Museum Members. Sweaters or jackets are recommended as the theater may be cold. For additional information, call 941-746-4131 or visit southfloridamuseum.org.
This article appears in May 9-15, 2013.