The calendar flips to 2026 and, of course, B-Movie Enema is there for you, my lovely Enemaniacs!

So… 2025, huh? That sure was a… year, wasn’t it? There was that one thing that happened. There was that other thing. You know the one. Yeah. That one. But there were, like, one or two good things that happened too, right? The Washington Commanders were only 33 points and one more win away from a sixth Super Bowl appearance in franchise history. That was exciting for exactly 20 minutes of that late afternoon. I got to interview Tjardus Greidanus, the director of the great 1990 thriller The Final Sacrifice. So, on balance, 2025 sucked, but a couple of fun things happened.

To kick 2026 off, I call upon an influence of B-Movie Enema… RedLetterMedia. This is also the first of two times I’ll call upon those fucking hacks from Milwaukee this year. In order to really honor them, I should start with their 2010 feature film, Feeding Frenzy, featuring the media group’s mascot, the psychotic elderly man, Mr. Harry S. Plinkett.

Feeding Frenzy just kind of snuck out there if you were largely a passive viewer of their content at the time. Before 2010, the channel was mostly known for the Plinkett Reviews of the films featuring the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was late in 2009, December 10, 2009, to be exact, that RedLetterMedia would go viral. And, to be fair, it was really co-founder Mike Stoklasa’s Mr. Plinkett that went viral with a 70-minute review of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace that more or less changed YouTube film commentary forever – for better or worse.

Stoklasa spent about a week and a half putting together the review that would be spread out across seven videos. Remember, YouTube used to have limits of ten minutes on the videos you could upload. Stoklasa performed the character as a very old, very unhealthy, very disturbed man who basically gave birth to a whole lot of garbage online 15 years later. But, in truth, this was also part of a long evolution of irreverent media consumption. Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Mad Movies made it okay to crack jokes while watching a movie. When online videos became a thing, James Rolfe’s Angry Video Game Nerd character allowed us to enjoy those wild early days of Nintendo when it was uncertain whether or not the game you thought looked cool would actually be good or not. Like him or not, Doug Walker’s Nostalgia Critic character reviewed a lot of, well, nostalgic movies, but Walker worked hard behind the scenes to legitimize the ability of content creators to use copyrighted material to provide commentary.

The point I want to make is that, largely, all of the above line of ancestry that led to the YouTube creators of the late 00s and 2010s were characters playing a role and heavily using irreverence to poke at their topic. Would James Rolfe get upset at a bad video game when he played it as a kid? Sure. Does Mike Stoklasa dislike the Star Wars Prequels? Oh, 100%. But they do this not for you to turn your real life ire toward the creators or actors involved in the movies or the programmers of those games. They did their videos because they like the baseline genre/medium/series they are lampooning. I could go on for hours about how, unlike the irreverent humor at play with those examples I pointed out above, the content creators under the banner of “the Fandom Menace” do not employ their negativity the same way.

But let’s pull this back around to RedLetterMedia and, more specifically, Feeding Frenzy. At the end of the day, Mike Stoklasa and Jay Bauman are filmmakers. Together with their handyman stagehand, Rich Evans, who is usually the on-screen personaification of Mr. Plinkett, Stoklasa and Bauman have basically run the gamut of filmmaking and analysis. Half in the Bag is a review show featuring Stoklasa and Bauman reveiwing contemporary movies. Best of the Worst is normally Stoklasa, Bauman, and Evans, together with a fourth or fifth person, looking at a number of bad movies and riffing on them during and after viewings. re:View is a show where any combination of those three might look at a good movie or a favorite director of theirs’ filmography. All of those shows could have the occasional filmmaking element that is a little more than the static shot of people talking about a movie.

Of their movies, probably Feeding Frenzy was the first that became known, especially with their fans, thanks to their online success and viral hit that was the Plinkett reviews. However, just a couple of years before that, the pair made a straight horror film called The Recovered. Bauman and Stoklasa will both be the first to admit that they don’t really find any of their movies to be that good, and maybe that’s partly due to their love of bad movies, but it’s also likely that they, as people who really do know a thing or two about filmmaking, recognize some of their limitations in the world of comsumer-grade videography equipment. That said, the pair decided to make Feeding Frenzy more of a comedy-horror film, a parody of the genre of horror as a whole. I think that, and a later movie of theirs I will be featuring later in the year, is the lane they can probably make the most headway in due to their understanding of film, genre, and writing.

We’re going to dive in here shortly, buuuuut… I gotta make two more points. Last August, I went to Fan Expo Chicago in Rosemont, Illinois. For many reasons, this is kind of a happy place for me, but this past trip had something more to appreciate about it. One of the guests in Artist Alley was comic artist Freddie Williams II. Williams has often collaborated with RLM in videos (some of my favorite stuff featured Williams). I took my copy of Feeding Frenzy to have him sign it because he drew the poster and DVD cover art for it. Because I either had something RLM related or mentioned RLM, I got a free print from him for Horse Ninja, which was a gag involving him and Rich Evans creating a new comic book character. He shared some really funny insider information about the guys there that was a lot of fun, and he’s a genuinely great dude. If you see him at a con, stop by and chat with him. I’m not sure if this always the case, but he was there with his wife and they were just great to talk to.

And, lastly, the only piece of info on the Trivia page at IMDb for Feeding Frenzy stated that the original plan and idea for the movie was centered around a 45-minute, gratuitous, erotic shower scene. I am both horrified and captivated by the thought that it might have been a Rich Evans shower scene. Dammit… I’d better get on with the review, or I’m going to be waaaaaay too consumed with that thought.

I like that, no matter how consumed with the idea of a 45-minute Rich Evans shower scene I might be, I can’t even get past the DVD menu to know that freak Jay Bauman is involved with all his depraved lustings.

The movie opens on the mean streets of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We follow a call girl, played by Tina Krause, who starred in their previous film, The Recovered. She arrives at a motel only to find Mr. Harry S. Plinkett. Seeing that Plinkett is in a wheelchair, the call girl says that she has to charge more for cripples. Say what you will about Mr. Plinkett, he at least understands the extra labor involved in dealing with disabled clients, so he agrees. In fact, he will double her fee if she gives him a preview before buying.

She agrees, and Plinkett’s shadow seems to like what she has to show him.

Also, Tina Crouse is a serious pro to give Rich Evans a striptease. That’s especially after she gets to her bra and panties, and he holds his cane up to tell her to show him how she “sucks” it. Also also… Rich Evans is saying very aggressively horny things that I don’t think I ever want to hear him say. You know what? I’m kind of on Stoklasa’s side right now when he consistently gives Rich shit in videos.

Anyway, thankfully, she does not need to endure this long as Mr. Plinkett pulls a trigger, which releases a blade from the end of his cane through the back of her head. Bravo, Tina Krause, for having to deal with that dialogue coming out of Rich Evans’ mouth… And… Well… Also, taking a blade in your mouth, and through the back of your head, like a real champ.

As the credits play, Mr. Plinkett drags the dead call girl back to his hardware store. What becomes of her? Well, we will have to wait and see as we pick back up the following day. We meet Jesse Camp, an employee of Mr. Plinkett’s hardware store, which is just a True Value with its sign cleverly hidden.

Jesse is kind of Mr. Plinkett’s whipping boy. He gets belittled for arriving late to work. When Jesse asks why he’s the only one Plinkett ever picks on for coming into work late, Plinkett says the others get their work done. However, today, Plinkett has a special job for Jesse – CLEAN UP ON AISLE FIVE.

Just in case Jesse asks too many questions, Plinkett tells him that he’s had another accident with five gallons of industrial tomato paste and the table saw. He gives Jesse a biohazard kit because that tomato paste very likely has AIDS in it. So how does Mr. Plinkett get away with all these accidents with AIDS-infested vats of tomato paste and belittling his employees? Well, he does so by way of holding deep dark secrets over the heads of his employees. If they leave to find new employment, he will tell the world that secret. Oh, and also Milwaukeeans are probably kind of dumb?

Eh, anyway, here’s Mike Stoklasa as Carl explaining how he got on Plinkett’s good side.

Jesse’s day brightens up when the lovely Christine Preston comes into the store. Jesse gets all flustered and stumbles over his words whenever she’s around. Jesse and Christine went to high school together, but she kind of forgot that he was there. Worse, she has a studly, jock, Chad-of-a-boyfriend named Kyle. He seems like the perfect guy. Also, she swoons around him right in Jesse’s face.

Jesse comes home where his slacker roommate, Martin, asks if Jesse knew that Christine Preston is now dating the really nice and dreamy Kyle Johnson. Martin says that, once, Kyle gave his mom’s car a jumpstart when she needed help. He also reiterates that Kyle isn’t just handsome, but he’s a star football player and in law school. Besides, Martin reminds Jesse that there’s no way he could ever steal Christine away from Kyle because Jesse is a “borderline retarded person.” Martin then drives the point home a little more by asking Jesse if he ever, once, in the 20 years of knowing Christine, ever asked her out… ever. Or, for that matter, if he ever told her how he felt about her. Martin’s pretty sure Jesse’s missed the boat on Christine.

Meanwhile, Christine meets her friend Jen at a bar. Jen’s in some dire straits. She has been kicked out of her house. She had to work on the streets. Just as Jen begins to tell Christine that she was raped by someone and she needs money for an abortion, Jesse comes in with his big shot at a surprise confession about his feelings for Christine.

This… goes over like a lead balloon. While the song is awesome, and performed by RLM regular Jack Packard, and talks about their love being in love and how his love is so hot for her, the whole thing turns out to be a disaster for Jesse. Christine tells Jesse that she knows he has a crush on her, but he couldn’t have picked a worse time than right then, when her friend was relaying a harrowing tale about being raped, to make an ass of himself. He definitely has no chance with her now or ever again.

So Jesse struck out. At work, Carl, discovers Jesse is reading a book about how to trick attractive women into dating him. Even Carl knows that Jesse doesn’t have a shot at Christine Preston. Carl tells Jesse that Plinkett wants the lovesick fool so he can get the security tape from Monday night. Jesse asks why he would want that, but Plinkett, once again, holds Jesse’s deep, dark secret over him to force him to get that damn tape. When Jesse brings it back, Plinkett breaks the tape with his hands.

This gets Jesse curious about what might be on that tape and why it was so important to destroy it. He and Martin discuss this while doing the most Milwaukee thing ever – drinking beers at Lake Michigan. The mystery deepens when Jesse is looking through the Lost and Found for a customer. In the box, he finds Jen’s purse. Jesse tracks down Christine, who tells Jesse that she’s been trying to find Christine ever since she ran out of the bar when Jesse interrupted their conversation with his love confession.

Jesse, Christine, and Kyle discuss Jesse’s theory that Plinkett had something to do with Jen’s disappearance. Christine, at first, doesn’t buy what Jesse’s selling. However, Kyle says that it’s entirely plausible that Plinkett is up to no good. He says that his parents told him about when Plinkett first moved to the town in the 80s. There seemed to be newspaper reports about this guy, and that he might have had something to do with the death of his wife. Jesse tells the couple that he knows of a room in Plinkett’s hardware store that he always keeps locked. He hears things moving around in there. Christine decides that they need to go there at night when Plinkett is gone, and the store is closed.

That night, they sneak into the store’s basement and snoop about. They approach the mysterious door that Plinkett keeps locked at all times. There’s a padlock on it, so, after Jesse’s feeble attempt to knock the door down by throwing his shoulder into it, Kyle breaks the door down with a sledgehammer. Inside, they find a crate, a recliner, an old black and white TV, and some bloodied boxes and rags.

They also find a letter from a meat company telling Mr. Plinkett that they can no longer send him unprocessed beef and pork. The letter came just one month ago. Christine hears some monster noises in the crate and looks in it, hoping to find Jen, but can’t really see without opening the crate. Just as Kyle is about to open the nailed-shut crate, Mr. Plinkett arrives with a gun.

Waitaminute…

This secret room is in the basement of a hardware store. At the end of a narrow, makeshift corridor. Mr. Plinkett is wheelchair bound. He, to our knowledge, has no real ability to walk, let alone take the stairs anywhere.

Eh, fuck it. Checks out to me.

Anyway, Plinkett allows for Kyle to open the crate and see what’s inside. The little monster guys who made the monster voices pull Kyle in and begin eating his face. Mr. Plinkett, a pretty shitty shot with his little gun, fails miserably to shoot and kill Jesse and Christine. So, he begins throwing bones at Jesse while Christine tries to help Kyle.

Eventually, Kyle succumbs to his many little monster guy bites, and Mr. Plinkett knocks Jesse down by hitting him square in the head with a skull. This allows Plinkett to escape. The little creatures that ate the hookers and Kyle are now free and chase after Jesse and Christine.

I love Plinkett’s little monsters. They are a little bit like Critters. They definitely have some of the Killer Tomatoes DNA. They 100% look like de-scrotumed testicles. They’re all teeth and ravenous hunger. They don’t even have eyes. They’re great!

While Jesse takes Christine back to his place and tells their story to Martin, the monsters are rampaging across town. Carl arrives out of the blue to collect the tea kettle Jesse borrowed the week before. You know, because it’s Tea Kettle Night at the VFW. You can’t have Tea Kettle Night at the VFW without a tea kettle! Anyway, he explains that a regular customer at the hardware store died tonight. It looked like coyotes got to him, and his guts were all over the place.

Also, Pillow Fight Intermission.

So we have some callbacks here after this wonderful fan service pillow fight scene. Remember, I said that originally this movie was to feature like a 45-minute shower scene? Well, we get the exploitation sequence in that pillow fight, which, itself, is two minutes long. So, yeah, we get three very attractive young women doing what I’ve been told ALL my life women do when they shack up as roomies together. They get in their underwear and have pillow fights. Brilliant! That’s what we love to see! Anyway, that goes from there to what I highlighted from the DVD menu with the woman’s feet and the chunks of person falling to the floor in front of it. The movie cuts that into various other things, like shots of the actress, Katey Senebouttarath, clawing at the various things on the kitchen counter, quick inserts of the monsters, etc. The DVD menu basically uses the B-roll of the one angle from the floor as parts of her clump down around her feet.

Whether it’s the panty-clad girls engaging in a pillow fight, sometimes in slow motion, or the shot of the girl’s feet for all you foot fetish freaks out there, this whole sequence, which is much shorter than the original proposed 45-minute shower scene, still probably does something for someone. You freaks.

It also nicely fits the exploitation and indie monster movie thing, right? I’m going to put aside what I do have to say about the style of this movie in relation to RLM’s sensibilities as a media creation company for the moment. For now, I will say I’ve seen a lot of the types of movies they watch. It’s fairly in line with what the average guy making a movie on a shoestring budget would do. I’ve seen these movies for this blog, and I’ve seen them in a conference room during HorrorHound Weekend’s film festival. It’s almost always played as a wink to the more 80s style of including sex as a pretty large side dish to the murder and gore of the slasher genre, but in almost every one of these types of movies, you have the director out there finding girls who are willing to dress/look sexy and do sexy things – at various levels of dress and undress.

I’ve seen movies at the aforementioned HorrorHound film festivals that just stop dead in their tracks to have a lesbian sex scene in the middle of the woods while there is very clearly a killer or monster nearby. However, it’s like the monster/slasher killer is like us, the audience, because he stops to watch it too before then doing whatever he was going to do to these poor girls. There’s a difference here, though. While most of those film festival indie directors are either 1) trying to make an impression on viewers by having that one scene that has the hot girl in the cast down to her bra and panties, 2) trying to pad out the movie to a longer feature length, or 3) trying to convince people that they can talk to a woman and ask her to take her clothes off for their movies, Feeding Frenzy is making this part of the joke of the whole parody of monster movies. It’s like Bauman and Stoklasa are parodying both the movies of the 80s with the Critters-esque monsters and the indie movies of the late 2000s and 2010s by having the fan service stuff too. I’ll have more to say about this later, but it’s pretty great.

Back at Jesse’s, while still trying to figure out if they should talk to the police about what Mr. Plinkett has in the basement of the hardware store, Carl reveals that he’s known about the monsters all along. However, he only knows about how Plinkett feeds them pig and cow parts. He never said anything to Jesse because it never came up. Oh, and also Carl just didn’t care.

After Christine gets the news about the death of Megan, the girl who needed caulk and died after her rigorous pillow fight, Carl and Jesse figure out that the monsters are attacking people who were in the hardware store that day. They start figuring out who had been in the store recently so they can track them down. They even enlist Martin to help triangulate the efforts through the computer. Seems like a good plan, yes? Well, they started too late to save a few people that the monsters got to first.

After Carl and Jesse manage to catch three of the critters, Carl ponders if they are going after the people who were in the hardware store, what’s to stop them from coming after them? A couple of the creatures go after Christine, but she manages to stash them in her glove box. Christine wants to go to the police now, but they are intercepted by Mr. Plinkett and his only son who didn’t manage to successfully kill himself when they all attempted suicide together. Turns out this one, Larry, only shot himself in the face and got brain damage for his troubles.

Plinkett explains that he worked for the government in the 70s. He’d get dead soldiers from the Vietnam War, and he’d reanimate them to go back onto the battlefield. They would die again, only to get reanimated once again. The more he reanimated them, the dumber they got, but this worked for war purposes.

Before the police arrive on the scene, Plinkett and Larry abduct Carl, Jesse, and Christine. They are taken to Plinkett’s lab. Turns out that Carl wasn’t all that important, so he was let go, where he goes clubbing with some floozies. Plinkett explains that he needs Christine’s girl parts and Jesse’s blood. Jesse’s deep, dark secret he’s been keeping is that Jesse produces a pheromone that basically makes it impossible to attract a woman for sex. That pheromone is actually quite useful to restore necrotic tissue. This is all in service to his grand masterplan… The resurrection of his dead wife, Beatrice!

Apparently, Beatrice doesn’t have the same feelings for Mr. Plinkett that he does for her because she instantly escapes and rips his head off. Larry scares off his monster mother and apologizes for involving them in family matters like this. Before finishing the job and killing himself properly, he frees Jesse and Christine so they can chase after the monster Beatrice.

After being freed, Christine goes hard at Jesse, not in a good way. She blames him for everything that’s happened with all the death and what have you. It only gets worse when she rejects him in the worst possible way when he tries to earnestly reveal his feelings for her. But then Beatrice arrives and wrestles the shotgun away from Jesse. When Beatrice attacks Christine, she asks for Jesse’s help, but, after being rejected by her, he just goes home.

There, he has a heart-to-heart talk with a masturbating Martin. This gets Jesse to reconsider saving Christine, and he returns to kill Beatrice by exploding her head with Martin’s defibrillator (that was a whole thing with Martin constantly having heart attacks). Won over by Jesse returning to save her, she decides that maybe it’s cool to go ahead and have sex with Jesse, and it’s… a happy… ending…?

Alright, so is Feeding Frenzy from the guys at RedLetterMedia a good movie? No, but it’s supposed to be a bad movie. Earlier, I mentioned all the movies between the late 00s and into the 2010s that were made that often featured cheap, but practical, effects and girls willing to do some sort of level of undress. Feeding Frenzy is right in that same vein. But here’s the difference… This is so 100% RedLetterMedia that it’s something different, and much more intelligent (if Mike Stoklasa ever read this article, this exact sentence would probably make him do that “pfbbbt” thing).

I really mean that, though. Feeding Frenzy has all of the exact same ingredients as all those other ultra-low-budget movies I’ve seen floating around Tubi and various other small genre film festivals. You have the self-aware element to throw in a little comedy and not come off as pretentious or full of itself. There’s a kooky side character (Martin OR Carl fit this) with very specific quirks. There’s a plot that seems bigger than the movie can really handle (Mr. Plinkett being a mad scientist with a lab and everything). There’s a hapless loser lead who just really likes a girl. The girl is someone who is almost a male fantasy come to life by admitting to making out with a girl and seemingly really fucking cool to hang out with as if she’s another male character… but with boobs and a prettier smile. You get what I’m getting at.

This movie has every single one of those elements that all the other movies have, but uses those elements so much better and with a much higher degree of skill and intelligence than the rest.

The key ingredient, the “secret sauce” if you will, is Mike Stoklasa. While he shares story credit with Jay Bauman (whom he also co-directed the movie with) and Rich Evans, Stoklasa wrote the script. And it is obvious. Look, if you’ve consumed the thousands of hours of content RLM puts on YouTube like I have, you can really get the joke without really needing an exact 1:1 reference for the gag. Time and time again, Stoklasa has envisioned something that would make him laugh in a movie that takes itself seriously. He’s done this on both Half in the Bag and Best of the Worst. After a while, you understand what he finds funny and what he’s pulling from when he cracks wise on the channel. There is a not insignificant amount of Zaat in this movie’s plot. Early on in Half in the Bag’s run, Jay and Mike talked at length about their love for that movie.

While I find this movie to be actually quite funny and uses its limited budget to its so-bad-it’s-good advantage, the one question I ask myself is whether or not someone who hasn’t consumed the many, many, many hours of RLM content would also find this movie as funny as I do. That might be the flaw of Feeding Frenzy. It most definitely is the flaw of their more famous movie that I will cover in the future. There is no possible way this movie would be enjoyed by someone who outright dislikes the crew at RLM, but if you are someone on the outside and not sure who they are, and you stumbled upon this movie… I think you could like a lot of it, but the real treasure of the gags and the deeper level of possible appreciation you could have for the movie would likely be lost to a normie.

I had a blast with Feeding Frenzy. I watched the movie a while back when I first got the DVD (definitely somewhere around 2014 or 2015, maybe). I thought it was fine then. Some funny stuff, but it didn’t stick with me. I actually hadn’t thought too much about it, and probably used to hold the opinion that I didn’t think it was a very good effort from RLM compared to their other stuff. I definitely thought about it when I got the cover signed by Freddie Williams II. When I saw he was going to be at Fan Expo Chicago last year, and knowing he did the cover for this DVD, I added the movie to the calendar because I knew, later, I had other plans that still involved RedLetterMedia. So, I started to get excited to revisit this movie. Turns out that excitement paid off well. I really enjoyed watching this the second time.

But alas… It’s time to look to next week. It’s high time I covered something new from the indie movie power couple Brian Williams and Ellie Church. I backed their last movie, and I’ve been dying to watch it. So join me next time as I look at what will be the new champion of “most recent movie to ever be featured on B-Movie Enema” when I review 2025’s Gush.

Until then, a little parting gift from Jay Bauman…