2nd Rate Basterds?

“B movie” has been misappropriated as an insulting term. The truth is, there’s no such thing as B movies anymore. The B movie would be like the noir film, the western, the comedy, or the war movie they’d couple up with a musical or Gone with the Wind or something for a double feature. B directors have always been able to make more interesting films, because they’re not so much under the watchful eye of the studio. They had less money, but they had a lot of creative freedom, decades before the “auteur” movement of the seventies.
Of course, anyone says “B Movie” today, they’re really just being an asshole about the movie in question.