8 B-Movies You Can Watch on YouTube That Are Awesomely Good

By KARL R. De MESA

I love popcorn entertainment.

Give me your crab giants, sharknados, sharktopi, shambling infected, cannibal holocausts, zombie hordes, lizard kings from space, Nazis on the moon, genetically engineered weapons, and any manner mutant monsters roaming the hills and you’ve got me.

There’s a certain joy in knowing exactly what you’re getting and it doesn’t get more direct than something titled Sharktopus vs Whalewolf. Despite my love for creature features, the B-movie aesthetic can be applied to almost any theme and the territory of this subject is vast indeed.

While the sci-fi and creature feature angles can be milked to high heavens, it can be fused to grand guignol, cabaret, martial arts, action, vampires, haunted houses, serial killers, werewolf, crime, living landscapes, fantasy, calamity, and religious (yep). Leave your neurons at the door.

Having said all that, here are just some absolutely free movies of the B variety that are head and shoulders above the usual fodder, whether they’re tongue-in-cheek, self-aware, or simply determined in their storytelling bubble to run down the narrative they’re all enjoyably cool.

So sit back and enjoy the excellent catastrophe. Thank God for YouTube.

FOG ISLAND

As DIY as they come with nary an original sound design or concept that doesn’t pay homage to genre conventions. So here we have a serial killer wielding some kind of reverse machete (a bill hook, am told) terrorizing the staff of a local radio station for the weirdest reason. It’s like The Mist on zero budget and without any of the tentacled monsters.

GANGSTERS, GUNS AND ZOMBIES

The plan was simple: case the bank, drive the robbery getaway van, deliver everyone to the safe house and get paid. But the rising of the dead may get in the way of that perfect heist. So, let’s not debate the merits of crime plus the walking dead, just start watching this awesome fusion of noir and nastiness.

DAY of RESSURECTION

Based on a novel written by Sakyo Komatsu that was made into a 1980 film, this is the American remake of that same story. “At this point we are capable of not only reducing each other to rubble but of reducing the rubble to rubble!” the scientist tells the general just before a deadly virus is unleashed and, predictably, cleanses most of the world’s population. The survivors flock to Antarctica, where they find that the virus is dormant in sub-zero temperatures, which means that what’s on that polar station is the last hope to rebuild humanity.

ATTACK OF THE MONSTERS (Gamera vs Guiron)

Good ole mutated, gigantic lizards (mostly because the original Godzilla isn’t online) duking it out with aplomb in space. Classic kaiju celluloid from Japan with all the trimmings. These five sin-off movies were supposed to be mocking counterparts to the US TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. This one is luckily dubbed in English.