The voice is excruciating. It's the aural equivalent of a must-see car wreck. This flat, warbling coloratura, mangling "Girl from Ipanema" and "Downtown," can only be the inimitable Mrs. Miller, a Southern California housewife who made a career out of innocently butchering standards in the 1960s. For Světozor's first festival dedicated to B movies, Mrs. Miller made for the perfect soundtrack during the intermissions. Like the films she served as segue for, she was simultaneously embarrassing and compelling.

The Czechs, trapped behind the Iron Curtain, were unable to experience the wretched premieres of The Killer Bees, Food of the Gods, Sssssssssss or Flesh Gordon, and so there's much catching up to do, which they are only too keen to attempt. This was made apparent to me on my first arrival in Prague a week after the Velvet Revolution. A Czech, with whom I shared a train compartment, asked me why I was reading Karel Čapek when there were so many better things to read. He himself was sweatily thumbing through a dog-eared copy of Arthur Hailey's Airport.

The film festival at Karlový Vary might have finally initiated a proper study of B-movies last year with its "Midnight" slot. Not to be outdone, Světozor inaugurated its first "B-Kultury" festival last Saturday night — an event that Světozor spokesman Jiří Sebesta says the theater plans to continue, as well it should.

With the wealth of bad B-movies (not to mention the As) that crowd the vaults, this first festival got it mostly right. The lack of Ed Wood, John Waters or any blaxploitation films on the roster will surely be corrected next time, but the inclusion of schlockmeister Lloyd Kaufman and perv-genius Russ Meyer was inspired. Dario Argento's Suspiria, a genuinely frightening film, was the perfect example of a B-movie as great film. The other Italian offering, however, Luigi Zampa's Tigers in Lipstick, was "B" as in "banal."

Světozor became a large house party, with a young, hip crowd, and with bands playing in the downstairs hall that artist Jan Gemrot decorated with a night gallery of creature feature portraiture. The whole experience felt fairly collegiate.

First up was Kaufman's The Toxic Avenger, the film that spawned both the series and Kaufman's Troma empire. Strictly an amateurville auteur, Kaufman delights in an almost criminal preference for the fifth-rate. It's mostly tongue-in-cheek/check-is-in-the-mail filmmaking at its exuberant worst.

There isn't much to say for Zampa's effort from 1979, which plays like overheated out-takes from Love American Style. The excellent Monica Vitti was sorely wasted in this dog's tea of a film, though you get a chance to see her and a young Roberto Begnini quarrel, which is the highlight.

As for Meyer's Ultra-Vixens, what can one say? The "King Leer" of soft-core porn was a master director. I would defy anyone to find many American films from 1979 as brilliantly shot and edited as Ultra-Vixens. And yet one must deal with Meyer's pathological breast fetish, which becomes exhausting, as bouncing 46H-cups are surely a minority interest.

The cleverest aspect of the evening was having each film introduced with a video of Czech film personalities (Anna Geislerová, Jiří Pavlovský, Roman Holý, et al.) making arguments for the films, though the words špatný (bad) and strašný (awful) were frequently included amongst the praise.

It has to be admitted that a full evening of bad films can become wearing. One can easily begin to believe that there really is less to life than meets the eye. There is a savagery to the tasteless and trivial, that, when it becomes a steady diet, erodes culture, something the Czechs know firsthand after being forced to live with Nazi and Communist kitsch.