It’s 50s juvenile delinquent exploitation on this week’s B-Movie Enema: The Series with the next-level bad Girl Gang!
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!
The Beastmaster (1982)
Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema!
This week, we’re traveling to the kingdom of Aruk for this 80s classic from Don Coscarelli. Now, the origin of The Beastmaster actually goes back to 1959. Andre Norton wrote the novel The Beast Master about a Navajo war veteran set in a futuristic and sci-fi setting. When writers Coscarelli and Paul Pepperman adapted the novel, Norton was unhappy. We’re going to come back around to Norton in just a moment, but Coscarelli would eventually sign on as director for the film and Pepperman then took the role of Producer alongside Lebanese producer Sylvio Tabet. Tabet was a producer on movies like Fade to Black and Evilspeak. Later, he was a producer on The Cotton Club and Dead Ringers. So he was not an unknown at the time.
Interestingly, the only film Tabet directed was 1991’s Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time.
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B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #54 – Kingdom of the Spiders
Geoff and Nurse Disembuadee once again go to William Shatner for an episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series. This week, they go to war against the Kingdom of the Spiders!
Gleaming the Cube (1989)
Oh yeah, dudes and dudettes, it’s some more radical times ahead for this week’s B-Movie Enema review!
This week, we’re going to be Gleaming the Cube and… well, hopefully… trying to learn what that term even means because it was clearly important enough to name an entire movie around it. This movie comes to us in that sweet period in the 80s that was totally trying to ride the gnarly coattails of tubular fads to the max. We’ve talked about skateboarding before on here. For more grindage, check out my review of 1986’s Thrashin’ from David Winters.
I don’t think I have much more to say, but I will bring up three important people connected to Gleaming the Cube that are of note. The first is the screenwriter for this film, Michael Tolkin. Tolkin was still relatively new to the scene at this point. He had one screenplay prior to this movie, the 1982 unfinished film Gossip. Gleaming the Cube was his first film and he also served as Associate Producer as well. Frankly, this isn’t that bad of an accomplishment. Sure, the reviews weren’t great, but a lot of people my age and slightly younger really like this movie. However, his big splash came in 1992 when he wrote The Player for Robert Altman. This would garner Tolkin an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Later in the 90s, he wrote the blockbuster Deep Impact. More recently, he developed the very highly appreciated miniseries The Offer about the making of The Godfather.
Directing Gleaming the Cube is Australian Graeme Clifford who was at the helm for the 1982 drama Frances that racked up a pair of acting Oscar nominations for Jessica Lange and Kim Stanley. While his directing credits aren’t huge, his editing credits are. He directed the wonderful 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now. He followed that up in 1975 with the all-time cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Then, in 1976, he edited David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. He finished out his editing career with Sylvester Stallone’s F.I.S.T. in 1978 and the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice starring Jack Nicholson and, hey… Jessica Lange. I’m guessing that might have led to her getting the role in Frances.
Let’s be serious, though… The draw of Gleaming the Cube is the hot up-and-coming Christian Slater.
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B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #53 – Hannah, Queen of the Vampires
For the Season 5 premiere, Geoff and Nurse Disembaudee go to Vampire Island and check out this Spanish chiller from 1973, Hannah, Queen of the Vampires!
One Dark Night (1982)
It’s time for yet another B-Movie Enema article (the 425th to be exact)!
This week, I’m looking at a movie that I’ve known for decades. Even going back to when I was a little kid and watching scary movies between my fingers trying to hide my eyes, I seem to remember a movie about a girl spending a night alone inside a mausoleum and ultimately getting attacked by zombies and having to fight her way out. The problem was, every time I tried looking up what that movie was I was trying to remember so I can try to find it to watch again, somehow either I kept getting it mixed up with or finding the result to be 1981’s Hell Night starring Linda Blair.
It’s not that because it’s 1982’s One Dark Night starring Meg Tilly!
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W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975)
Oh boy, do we have one that I picked up along the way last year at a convention that I couldn’t wait to feature on B-Movie Enema!
This week, we go to the mid-70s and the first ever movie covered here starring a true American icon of the decade, Burt motherfuckin’ Reynolds. This past August at HorrorHound, I was visiting my favorite table where I often find several, ahem, gray market, movies that aren’t so easy to find in the flesh. Staring at me was this movie with Burt Reynolds smiling right at me. I looked at the title and read it aloud to myself… W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings. I chuckled to myself knowing that Burt was going to give me everything I could possibly want in this and more, especially because it was a comedy.
Before we discuss the man himself, let’s talk about who actually directed this film.
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Death Ship (1980)
Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review. This week, we’ve got ourselves another movie that’s been sitting on the stack of movies I’ve been wanting to cover for a long while. Let me know if you’ve heard this before: Let me know if you’ve heard this before (see what I did there?), this week’s featured movie, 1980’s Death Ship, was something I saw for the first time on the long-defunct, yet always wonderful, Bizarre TV Roku app. I think I probably came into it about halfway through or toward the end of the movie and watched it to the end.
However, because I came into it late and then sought out what the movie was based on the Google keyword search “George Kennedy Richard Crenna on a boat horror movie”, it’s not a movie that I remember much of, so this review is now going to basically be a new first-time watch.
The movie was directed by Alvin Rakoff. Rakoff is a Canadian director who had a pretty long career. Most of his work over the course of, like, 45 years was for television. He didn’t make too many feature films made for movie theaters. In fact, Death Ship was one of the very last feature films he directed. With just a cursory scroll through his IMDb credits, Death Ship and The Saint (the television series which he directed an episode) are really the only two things that I recognize. However, a cursory scroll through his Wikipedia page did reveal something very interesting for me personally. Rakoff’s first wife was Jacqueline Hill. Hill played Barbara Wright, one of the trio of companions of the First Doctor when Doctor Who launched in 1963. Hill and Rakoff were married from 1958 until her death in 1993.
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