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!

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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Queen Kong (1976)

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And a new challenger steps into the ring at B-Movie Enema!

Welcome to a new review and… woof. 1976’s Queen Kong is pretty bad. Pret-ty pret-ty bad. For those who have, somehow, followed me for years as I keep punching myself in my own dick time and again on this blog, you know I got pretty upset around 1986’s King Kong Lives. The reason why I loathed that movie is that I sincerely love the 1976 version of King Kong. In fact, it’s my favorite version. It’s the one I saw so many times when I was growing up. To have a sequel kind of dumps all over the sad ending of that movie. King Kong Lives felt especially hurtful because it was the same guy producing that as the 1976 King Kong and it felt like a kind of cheap follow-up to Godzilla 1985.

Now, when it comes to Queen Kong, this week’s movie, we have a whoooole different story. This is just a deeply bad movie. I can’t even be mad at it. It’s that kind of bad. But… Notice this movie is dated 1976. In a way, this is one of the first instances of a mockbuster. It was well-publicized that Dino De Laurentiis was making a new King Kong film. So British filmmakers decided to slip out ahead of it with a parody. It’s a little exploitation. It’s a little sex comedy. It’s all farce. So, in that, there’s a tiny bit of charm to this very bad movie. I’m not sure if it’s as fun as, say, A*P*E when it comes to bad movies you can watch with your buddies and a case of cheap beer, but there’s charm.

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