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!

Barb Wire (1996)

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Welcome to yet another B-Movie Enema review!

Now, if you’ve been around this year, and you really should because what else do you really have to read while sitting on the toilet taking a morning shit, you might notice something I’ve kind of said a few times over the past few months. A big part of my plan for 2024 was to start knocking off stacks of movies obtained at conventions or through online sales on Vinegar Syndrome or Severin, and basically get through the backlog. This week, I’m pulling form the “bought this many years ago, planned to do it, never did, and now it’s time” pile. Oh yes, it is 1996’s Barb Wire starring Pamela Anderson.

Honestly, I bought this movie on DVD for, like, less than a buck back when Amazon used to do those incredibly low-cost Marketplace sales on things, particularly movies. I remember buying a used copy of something for a penny, paying the $3.99 shipping cost, and being happier than one of Pam Anderson’s boobs in a bustier. That’s something you just don’t see anymore on Amazon. I… I mean the practice on Amazon, not Anderson’s boobs in a bustier. Anyway, the reason why you don’t see those super inexpensive Marketplace listings anymore is likely due to a crackdown on the seller’s part to prevent too many items from being sold for less than Amazon’s actual cost for something. I doubt I paid more than a buck for this movie if I’m being honest.

And I should be honest because even back in 1996 when I was 19 and full of a lot of male hormones that led to a lot of bad thoughts and choices, I never really had any interest in seeing this movie. Pam Anderson was not someone who really represented my tastes in a woman. She’s pretty, sure, but I wasn’t as ga-ga over her as many people my age were. Plus, I was more of a superhero fan when it came to comic books. Aside from the Crow and a passing interest in Spawn when the HBO animated series ran, I liked the heroes from Marvel and DC. I wasn’t that much of an indie guy. No, I bought this movie because, for a while, I was trying to get all the movies that were being covered on the Earwolf podcast How Did This Get Made.

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Brain of Blood (1971)

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Can you believe, after 441 reviews, Brain of Blood is only the second time Al Adamson has been reviewed on B-Movie Enema?

Yeah. I couldn’t either! Al Adamson is one of the big names in low-budget schlock horror in the 60s and 70s. The only other movie of his I ever mentioned is Black Samurai which I covered, like eight years ago. And, to be honest, I didn’t really know who Al Adamson was at that time. I was still in my fledgling days of being a blogger covering schlock films and just getting into the stuff at the time. Plus, I was more keen to talk about the blaxploitation elements of that movie than the guy making the movie.

Adamson made dozens of movies. His beginnings are that of just assisting his father, Victor Adamson, himself a filmmaker. After helping his dad with the western Half Way to Hell, Al struck out on his own to make his own movies. He could crank out a lot of drive-in fair like a Roger Corman, but the difference was that, for the most part, Adamson seemingly worked way cheaper and with kind of half-baked scripts. For the most part, you’d think of him as a monster movie guy who didn’t so much care about the rest of the stuff as long as they could advertise a monster.

Al Adamson often worked with a lot of the same people, Kent Taylor is someone in this movie who appeared in other Adamson films, and made lots of friends during his filmmaking career. Interestingly, early on, he worked with two pretty big-time cinematographers – Vilmos Zsigmond, a four-time Oscar nominee and winner for Best Cinematography for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and LászlĂł Kovács who went on to make BIG movies with BIG directors including being the cinematographer on 1984’s Ghostbusters.

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Xtro (1983)

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I sure hope you like slimy and gross-out horror because that’s what B-Movie Enema has on tap for this week’s review!

Xtro is a 1983 sci-fi horror film that some think is one of the many responses to the 1982 runaway hit E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. I believe that misaligns this movie with those more exploitative or cash-grab knockoffs. Yes, E.T.’s immense popularity led to many movies that wanted to “answer back” by featuring nasty, very unfriendly alien invaders as an almost rejection of the big box office brought in by the very sweet and family-friendly film from Spielberg. This is not one of them for a couple of reasons.

The first is that I think this movie has much more credit to pay toward two late 70s sci-fi horror films; 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and 1979’s Alien. In Xtro, we have a very slimy and gross alien that wears the disguise of a recognizable human character. It is also weirder than that as far as where the alien comes from that we’ll dig into later. The primary reason why I do not think this is a response to E.T.’s popularity is because this film was originally intended to be released by New Line Cinema in 1982. Even if we give the conservative release schedule in 1982 of very late December, the production value, the creature, and some of the design work put into the movie wouldn’t have had time to get written, all the pre-production done, and the film shot and edited and put in the can for release that quickly after E.T. It just couldn’t have been possible.

Even on this film’s very scant $60,000 budget.

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Ravagers (1979)

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Welcome back to another installment of B-Movie Enema.

This week, we’re going to the late 70s with a bunch of recognizable faces and names for a post-apocalyptic thriller called Ravagers. This is the pre-Mad Max era of post-apocalytic films. Maybe, to a certain extent, this has more of a lineage to something like Planet of the Apes than what most people my age grew up with in terms of the loner in the wasteland fighting off people trying to steal his gas type of dystopian future flick. Honestly, the cover of the movie and the poster/promotional materials showing roughs attacking people in the streets of a city recall a lot of the early 80s, bonkers Italian dystopian films too.

Now, I don’t necessarily want to set myself up for disappointment, but this might just be a diamond in the rough. The copy I have of Ravagers states that this “all but forgotten post-apocalyptic action thriller is waaaay more decent than some of the reviews and its abandoned status would suggest” so I think this might have something to it. It goes on to talk about grand sets and frequent chases and it even comments on the various names that appear in this movie too. Again, sometimes gassing up something like that in this way can lead to disappointment, but I’ve been known to find some real gems when I go to HorrorHound Weekend and I’m kind of hoping this will be one of those times again.

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