Welcome back to B-Movie Enema’s summer-long exploration of camp movies (movies that actually take place at a camp, not campy horror movies), Camp Crappabuttawipe! Oof magoof, we are really in the dregs of this theme… More
Wet Hot American Summer (2001)
Hello and welcome back to Camp Crappabuttawipe at B-Movie Enema!
What do you get when you bring together a couple of stars from the 90s with some of the biggest and funniest people in comedy of the 21st century together in a single movie? Well, you get this week’s movie, Wet Hot American Summer! A couple of weeks ago, I talked about Ivan Reitman’s 1979 comedy that launched both his career as a director AND Bill Murray’s career as a leading man in comedies for decades to come, Meatballs. While I think it’s safe to say that Wet Hot American Summer and Meatballs are kind of in the same vein of a camp movie that focuses on the shenanigans the adult counselors get up to, Wet Hot is not as much of a straight comedy. No, this is meant to be more of a satire or parody of the archetypes of the adult counselors.
Wet Hot American Summer was directed and co-written by David Wain. Wain was influenced to make this movie based on his experiences as a kid going to Jewish camps. He specifically thought back to time spent at Ohio’s Camp Wise and Maine’s Camp Modin. Now, I’m glad I held off doing this movie until the middle of July (even though it would have been a much better choice for July 4th weekend with “American” in the title and all) because this movie does parody some movies we’re very familiar with and ones we’re especially recently familiar with. Yes, this is a bit of a homage to Sleepaway Camp, Little Darlings, and Meatballs.
See? Maybe I do know what the fuck I’m doing with scheduling movies at this site.
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Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989)
TEENAGE WASTELAND, oh, yeah… TEENAGE WASTELAND!
Oh, hi, Enemaniacs. You’ve caught me singing along to one of my favorite songs from The Who, “Baba O’Riley.” And that brings us to week #6 here at B-Movie Enema’s summer-long theme of Camp Crappa Buttawipe! This week, we bounce back into the Sleepaway Camp franchise with Sleepaway Camp III: Baba O’Riley… er… I mean Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland!
There’s not much more to say about the behind-the-scenes business that wasn’t covered last month when I talked about the first sequel. Both sequels were made back-to-back to save on overall production costs. The first of the two movies was the more expensive of the two, coming in at about a million and a half bucks. This movie used the rest of the $2 million that was granted to make the two movies. Both films were written by Fritz Gordon, and his appreciation for playing around with character names is still on display here. The last film used the first names of the Brat Pack and other young stars of the era. This film uses character names from sources like West Side Story, The Munsters, and The Brady Bunch.
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Meatballs (1979)
Welcome back to the start of month #2 here at Camp Crappabuttawipe at B-Movie Enema!
Alright, as we get into July, the months are getting hotter and, naturally, it’s time to really heat things up here at camp, Enemaniacs. Aside from another stop off in the Sleepaway Camp franchise, we’re really ratcheting up the comedy, sexual shenanigans, and horror this month. But we kick things off this July 4th weekend here in the States with… a Canadian comedy. My ability to read a calendar and select the most appropriate movie for that date/weekend knows no bounds.
Especially with what’s coming up in a couple of weeks…
Anyway, 1979’s Meatballs is a significant movie for multiple reasons. First, this is the movie that propelled Bill Murray from Saturday Night Live stardom to movie stardom. This was his first top-billing in a movie. Within a year from this release, he would leave SNL (though part of that is due to changes behind the scenes with Lorne Michaels and NBC), and begin to rattle off hit after hit with Caddyshack, Stripes, a role in Tootsie, and eventually leading to the big blockbuster Ghostbusters. This would also be the first collaboration that Murray would have with Harold Ramis. Ramis was largely known for being a comedy writer, and a very good one. Like Murray, he spent the late 70s on TV on SCTV with the likes of Eugene Levy, John Candy, and Rick Moranis. In 1978, Ramis co-wrote National Lampoon’s Animal House, which, itself, would go on to become a massive influence on comedies through the 80s. If you can think of a comedy from the 70s and 80s that remains funny decades later, it’s very likely it was written in some part by Ramis.
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Ernest Goes to Camp (1987)
We close out the first month of Camp Crappabuttawipe at B-Movie Enema with one that falls into the column of “just for me.”
Despite the overly clever name of this theme summer, not all the movies that are getting covered here are truly crappy or butt-wipe material. No, I think we’ve already seen a couple diamonds in the rough already this month. However, sprinkled in amongst the slate for our summer camp shenanigans are a couple of movies that mean quite a bit to me on a more personal level. 1987’s Ernest Goes to Camp most certainly falls into that, um… camp.
The character of Ernest P. Worrell, played by American actor Jim Varney, was one of those creations that we see crop up from time to time. These are the characters specifically created by an advertising agency (Ernest’s creators being Carden & Cherry from Nashville, Tennessee) that are so popular or catch enough attention beyond the character’s original intention to promote various local businesses, that he becomes a national figure, used to promote global brands, and then launch that into a further pop culture footprint to appear in his own movies and TV shows. Most recently, I think GEICO’s Caveman characters were the last to attempt this, but think if Lily from AT&T or Flo from Progressive Insurance suddenly got to star in their own movies. That’s what Ernest was in the 80s.
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Little Darlings (1980)
Welcome back for another entry in this year’s Camp Crappabuttawipe at B-Movie Enema.
You know, summer camp isn’t just running for your life from a crazed killer. Nah, it’s also a place where coming-of-age comedy-dramas can be told too. That’s kind of what we have here with 1980’s Little Darlings. This movie comes to us from first-time director Ronald F. Maxwell. He was only 30 years old when this film went into production. However, he had already been a professional working in television since the mid 70s. Maxwell followed this up with another film starring one of the stars of this movie, The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (along with Dennis Quaid and Mark Hamill in between Star Wars sequels). Later in his career, Maxwell shifted to Civil War epics, the largely appreciated Gettysburg in 1993 and the largely despised Gods and Generals in 2003.
As for our leading ladies in this movie, the other one who would work with Maxwell follow-up is Kristy McNichol. McNichol was already a veteran of television shows from her teenage years. She was a regular nominee for Emmys in the late 70s for the drama series Family. Later in her career, she would appear in 100 episodes of the comedy Empty Nest. With Little Darlings, McNichol would follow that up with the aforementioned The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia along with a Golden Globe-nominated performance in Neil Simon’s Only When I Laugh. Unfortunately, her appearance in the 1982 comedy The Pirate Movie (a movie absolutely slaughtered by critics upon release) probably harmed her ability to keep up the momentum her earlier film appearances granted her.
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Marshmallow (2025)
Welcome back to week #2 (heh) here at B-Movie Enema’s Camp Crappabuttawipe!
This week, we’re looking at something a little bit different… A horror movie taking place at a camp that is not just new, but more than just a generic slasher film. We’re reviewing 2025’s Marshmallow from director Daniel DelPergatorio and writer Andy Greskoviak.
I think we need to focus right there on that director’s name. Daniel DelPergatorio is a hell of a name for a horror director. That name sounds like he’s Danel of the Purgatory. And… well, what do you know? That’s actually how his name translates from Spanish. That’s fuckin’ rad. What’s also pretty fuckin’ rad is that I already know his work. He served as co-director for the 2009 animated short Tales of the Black Freighter that was released alongside Zak Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen. The Black Freighter story was interwoven into Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen story, but, for very obvious logistical reasons, would not be able to be added to the live-action film’s flow. Still, that’s pretty awesome that DelPergatorio worked on that as his directorial debut.
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Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988)
The summer is upon us, campers, and to celebrate, B-Movie Enema is spending the next three weeks camping in the great outdoors.
While movies set at summer camps are largely a horror thing, there are comedies, dramas, and kids’ flicks we can pull from over the next 13 weeks. Some are pretty crappy. Some are pretty funny. One is just for me. It’s gonna be a good time. So, with that, I want to welcome all my Enemaniacs to what I’m calling:
Here at Camp Crappabuttawipe, we aren’t on stolen land. No, we paid for it, and it was surprisingly expensive too. But we’ve got lots of activities for the Enemaniac looking to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday, modern life. We’ve got slasher killers, crazy hulking killers, and… um… legends of crazy slasher killers. But wait! There’s more! We’ll have raft races against other cabins. We’ll probably play a little grab ass here and there. We’ll even try to reconnect with our actress mother, who was known as a scream queen in her career before her tragic death. It’s gonna be fun!
And it all starts with the long-awaited return of a horror franchise to B-Movie Enema – Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers.
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Caligula (1979/2024)
B-Movie Enema has existed from the morning of the world, and it shall exist until the last star falls from the night. Although I have taken the form of the Enema Man, I am all men as I am no man and therefore, I am a God… of buttholes.
Ah yes… This was bound to happen, wasn’t it? There are infamous movies, and there is 1979’s Caligula. Known as the gigantic budget sex film produced by Bob Guccione and Penthouse Films International. Guccione was the founder of Penthouse Magazine. Penthouse, as per my reckoning, as a guy who once had a subscription to both that and Playboy in my younger years, was known for two things. The first was the Penthouse Forum, in which people supposedly wrote letters that sounded a little more like erotic fiction than anything else. The second was the fact that the women in the magazine, at least when I had the subscription, tended to be more of the adult actress type of models, and therefore, unlike Playboy, which specialized in girls-next-door types, the Penthouse Pets tended to be a little raunchier in their pictorials. Playboy was more artful. Penthouse was more sexual. Hustler was dirty.
But what people don’t really know is that Penthouse was involved in funding for films for a long time. They chipped in funding for studio pictures like Chinatown and The Day of the Locust. Guccione never produced his own film. So he decided he wanted to not just produce a movie of his own, but make a grand spectacle about a time in which spectacle was sexy as fuck. So he said that Caligula would be the guy he’d make his movie about. He started working with an Italian producer, Franco Rossellini, whose uncle, Roberto, was one of the most prominent Italian filmmakers. He then eventually hired author Gore Vidal as his screenwriter.
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