All a "B-movie" is, or was, is a film that played on the bottom part of a double bill; back in the days where you got a pile of projected material when you went out to the movies. You got a newsreel, cartoons, a chapter of a 'serial', a B movie, and an A-picture.
Many films called B-movies are in fact, not... and never were. However, we now associate certain tropes and ropes with the kind. (B-movies were shot on low budgets, and often by using the sets left over from their A cousins.)
After all, Jaws (1975) would have been a B-movie at one time. (As New York Times film critic Vincent Canby said, "What is Jaws but a big-budget Roger Corman film?" Technically speaking, Corman's movies were not B as he made them specifically as 'drive-in' fare; eventually these movies would be made knowing they would be bundled into a double bill.) The joke is that yesterday's B-movies are now the A-movies. And somewhere down the line, the spirit and fun has been all but wrung out.
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