Kurt Russell names the single greatest B-movie ever made: “That was cool”
As cinema’s reigning king of the cult classic, Kurt Russell knows a thing or two about what it takes to make a B-movie that stands the test of time, but he’s not arrogant or egomaniacal enough to call one of his own the greatest-ever example.
He could if he wanted to, though, since there’s no shortage of viewers out there who’d happily list John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, The Thing, or Big Trouble in Little China as being bastions of B-tier excellence, all of which coincidentally starred the actor in the lead role.
That said, the definition of a B-movie has continually evolved. They originated as the lesser half of a double feature, but these days, it’s more open to interpretation. If a major studio releases a low-to-mid-budget picture that’s obviously a genre film, then it’s technically a B-movie, at least by modern standards.
Some of Russell’s most popular onscreen ventures fall firmly into that category, too, whether it’s the gruesome Bone Tomahawk, the superhero comedy Sky High, the high-speed thriller Breakdown, or the cult favourite sci-fi horror, Event Horizon. On the other hand, his pick for cinema’s all-time greatest B-movie single-handedly changed the face of the industry forever.
“I mean, Jaws is a monster of the deep movie,” he accurately explained. “But they had some money, and a really good story, and it’s a really good script, some really good lines, really good people, and he could really do a first-rate version of it. That was cool.” Steven Spielberg’s aquatic nail-biter might have ushered in the blockbuster era, but it was a B-tier production.
A young and still relatively inexperienced director helming a creature feature that was supposed to cost $4 million before ballooning to over twice as much is almost the definition of a B-movie, apart from the obvious fact that it seized the zeitgeist to such an extent that it became the highest-grossing release in cinema history. That, and it’s a masterpiece.
“They realised that if they put a really good director on this project, and, of course, it came from that very famous book at the time, but that book could’ve been done in such a cheap, B-fashion, with no money, couldn’t been a movie for $2 million, and a cardboard fin,” Russell elaborated.
Not that Jaws was too far off, with Spielberg being forced to constantly improvise due to a faulty mechanical shark, while Jaws’ infamous jump scare, which remains one of the best ever committed to celluloid, was shot in a swimming pool when he realised that the scene needed a little more oomph.
It’s not even remotely sacrilegious to call it a B-movie when that’s pretty much exactly what it is, and neither is Russell wide of the mark in suggesting that the picture that scared an entire generation out of the water has rarely, if ever, been bettered.
