Rowsdower coming to Blu Ray? Very possible with help from the fans!
Author: Geoff Arbuckle
I write and talk about movies. Find me over at Film Seizure where I talk about nostalgic movies on a weekly podcast as well as have a weekly show about monster movies. I also write about B-Movies at my site B-Movie Enema!
Soultaker (1990)
This review of B-Movie Enema will claim your very soul!
This week and next, I’m going to review a couple of movies tied to writer, director, producer, and actress Vivian Schilling. I don’t expect too many people to immediately see that name and think, “Oh, yes… Vivian Schilling. I am intimately aware of her work.” Generally speaking, she has not really worked in film for nearly 15 years. However, she has a few movies in her filmography that are definitely worthy of coverage. This week’s is likely her best-known film. That’s because the fine folks on the Satellite of Love lampooned this movie on the final season of the original run of Mystery Science Theater 3000. That’s right, it’s 1990’s Soultaker starring Schilling, Joe Estevez, and Robert Z’Dar.
As for Vivian Shilling, the co-writer and star of this film, she was born in 1968 in Wichita, Kansas. She went to study acting in New York City at the famed Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. In 1986, at the age of 18, Schilling appeared in The Adventures of Taura: Prison Ship Star Slammer. Not only is that a title that just rolls off the tongue, it’s a movie that I could see myself reviewing on this very site, but it also appeared on one of this year’s episodes of Best of the Worst from RedLetterMedia. Her first taste of actual scripting and leading a film is going to be the focus of next week’s review. It would really be Soultaker that would likely be her most famous movie.
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Eight Days a Week (1997)
Welcome back to B-Movie Enema!
We’ve got something of a returning character in this week’s movie. Writer/director Michael Davis originally got started as a storyboard artist. Between 1989 and 1992, he actually had a few interesting credits on his resume. In 1989, he did the storyboards for the Kevin S. Tenney film The Cellar. The very next year, he stepped up in terms of quality films with 1990’s Tremors. The very next year, 1991, he did the storyboards for a highly anticipated sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. In 1993, he wrote the first of three Prehysteria! movies released through Full Moon Features under their Moonbeam Entertainment imprint for children and family films. Then, in 1994, he wrote one of the main stars of 2016’s Alyssa Milano Month, Double Dragon.
But this week, we look at Davis’s sophomore outing as a director, Eight Days a Week.
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Bride of the Monster (1955)
It only took 510 B-Movie Enema reviews to finally arrive at the King of the B-Movie Films, Edward D. Wood, Jr.
This week, we’re going to review 1955’s Bride of the Monster. Before we do that… The story of Ed Wood is kind of interesting. For the most part, we know the major story beats of his life. Wood wanted to make movies. He made bad movies. He struck up a friendship with down-and-out Bela Lugosi and gave him work for the last few years of the Hungarian’s life. He liked to wear women’s clothing.
It’s a little more than that, honestly. Wood really WAS heavily into the performing arts and pulp fiction. Lugosi was an early idol of his. The story you heard in Tim Burton’s wonderful 1994 film, Ed Wood, about how the filmmaker was dressed as a girl by his mother when he was a child, was true. She did want a daughter, and for several years, little Eddie was her sole child, so she would dress him up in girls’ clothing as something of a coping mechanism. According to his second wife, Kathy O’Hara, that was the origin point for his continued crossdressing for the rest of his life and his particular affinity to feel angora against his skin.
Wood served in the United States Marine Corps from 1942 to 1946, where he faced considerable combat against the Japanese. He had his teeth knocked out by a Japanese soldier, and he’d pop his false teeth out for a big toothless grin to make Kathy laugh. A story told in the 1994 Burton film by Johnny Depp’s Wood about how he was terrified of being wounded and then discovered he was wearing women’s underwear by the field doctors was true. It sounds like something for a joke, but it was true. You gotta love it.
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INTERVIEW: Tjardus Greidanus and Rob Skeet of THE FINAL SACRIFICE Talk Their New BTS Kickstarter Campaign
The Final Sacrifice is one of the all-time great Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. But little is known about the behind the scenes stories of the film, the thoughts on the MST3K episode, and the cultural impact of ROWSDOWER. Launching on Kickstarter on Thanksgiving Day, The Making of The Final Sacrifice promises clarity on some of the mystery around the movie and its history. Director Tjardus Greidanus and composer Rob Skeet sits down with B-Movie Enema and Film Seizure’s Geoff Arbuckle to talk about the movie, and the campaign.
Donate to the Kickstarter campaign HERE
The Allnighter (1987)
Welcome back to another bodacious review at B-Movie Enema!
The 80s… I’m surprised there were any movies like Reds or Gandhi or Terms of Endearment or Out of Africa released during that decade. It seemed like most movies from the era were either muscle-bound hunks of men with giant guns or sexy boner comedies or beach party movies… that were also boner comedies. In a sort of way, the 80s revived the beach party movies of the late 50s and early 60s. I guess people, for some dumb reason, like seeing sexy people in skimpy bathing suits frolicking and making kissy faces with each other.
Enter writer/director Tamar Simon Hoffs and her 1987 comedy The Allnighter. Now, The Allnighter was one of those movies that ALWAYS caught my eye at the video store. Why? Because Tamar Simon Hoffs put her own daughter, singer Susanna Hoffs, on the cover with her graduation gown wide open and her skimpy matching bra and panties showing. That’s a hell of an ad campaign.
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The Prowler (1981)
Just like this week’s killer, B-Movie Enema is peepin’ and sneakin’ up on all you dressed in our best, most spookiest World War II fatigues.
But I’m only here to deliver a rose and a new review! Welcome back, my dear Enemaniacs. This week, I’m finally reviewing one I’ve wanted to do for quite some time – 1981’s The Prowler from Joseph Zito. The Prowler is probably most remembered for those great Tom Savini kills. While the movie didn’t get great reviews upon release, as well as not making a profit off its meager $1 million budget, the movie does have a cult following. Again, I would assume it’s the Tom Savini gore effects, but there are a few more things to consider.
One of those things I’ll talk about later, but I think there is a guy behind the camera who helped get this to cult status, Joseph Zito. Zito is known for genre schlock. Zito’s first film was 1975’s Abduction, and he followed that with 1979’s Bloodrage. Both are considered those extremely sleazy types of exploitation horror. That served him well for his next two movies, the one we’re going to be diving into in much more detail shortly, and 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, the entry many consider to be the best in the franchise.
What’s kind of funny is that The Final Chapter would be the last horror film he’d make.
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Syngenor (1990)
What up, my lovely fuckfaces, it’s a brand new review here at B-Movie Enema!
So, check it out… A few months back, I covered 1980’s Scared to Death. In that movie, not only did a lady dress up like Sarah Jane Smith from the Classic Doctor Who serial The Hand of Fear, but it also featured an underground creature living beneath Los Angeles, running amok, and killin’ people left and right. The creature in that movie was genetically created by a science dude. However, the doctor who created the creature apparently died before he could kill the adult creature. The name of that creature is also the namesake for this week’s movie we’re going to review – Syngenor.
By the way, I think Syngenor was a mashup of the words SYNthetesized GENetic ORganism. But that’s not necessarily important at the moment. What is important is how this 1990 sequel was conceived and created. The original film’s production team is not involved. That said, Scared to Death director William Malone had a chance to make this movie, but he opted out to make the 1985 sci-fi creature flick appropriately titled Creature. It was producer Jack F. Murphy who led the charge of making the sequel after seeing the original and being mighty impressed by the monster. However, as is the case with a lot of movie sequels of the era, the original’s scarcity when it came to being seen by audiences led to Murphy keeping the monster, keeping the concept of a genetically created creature, but separating the film’s plot from the original to make it its own thing.
I guess you could say it’s somewhat similar to the Xtro movies, except those movies kept the original director and still tossed out any semblance of an actual narrative trilogy.
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