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!

Shock (aka Beyond the Door II, 1977)

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It’s October!  It’s the spoooooookiest month of the year!

In years past, I generally would find some sort of loose theme to tie all the movies covered in the month (with usual exception to the actual Halloween “special” article).  This year is no different!  This is B-Movie Enema and that means I can’t do no movies like The Exorcist or its sequels.  They are hardly “B” in quality of production, even if Exorcist II really fucking tried pretty hard.  I can, however, do the next best thing.

Welcome to the 2020 October theme month I’m calling Exorcist Rip-Off Month!  We’re getting things started with Mario Bava’s Shock from 1977.  Here’s the thing about Shock…  It’s a possession movie, yes.  However, it may only be an Exorcist Rip-Off in sort of name only.  You see, Shock was released in the United States as Beyond the Door II.  Beyond the Door was a 1974 rip-off of The Exorcist and a B-Movie Enema alum.  I really really really needed to cover this. Continue reading “Shock (aka Beyond the Door II, 1977)” →

The Working Girls (1974)

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Welcome back for another round of B-Movie Enema goodness.

This week’s movie, The Working Girls, has a lot of interesting things going for it.  First, it’s yet another exploitation film.  It’s about a group of liberated women living together in a Los Angeles apartment.  They all have different types of jobs and start dating different types of guys.  However, the girls each start to have issues in which they are endangered by the men in their lives.

Second, the director, Stephanie Rothman, is quite a figure in exploitation film in the 60s and 70s.  She worked with Roger Corman as an associated producer shortly after she finished college.  She got the opportunity to make a couple movies under Corman’s tutelage.  She did eventually venture out on her own and made another film I’ve written about before – The Velvet Vampire.

What’s most interesting about Rothman, though, is that she never liked being linked to the exploitation subgenre.  After making a couple films with Corman, she learned that label was given to her movies.  It horrified her.  However, after learning more about what that meant, how it worked in film, and what she might be able to do with that, she thought, “Fine, I’ll do the best exploitation movies I could.”  It didn’t go unnoticed. Continue reading “The Working Girls (1974)” →

Jem and the Holograms (2015)

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I’m a child of the 80s.  I bathed in the glory of the awesome toys and amazing cartoons of the decade.  While a lot of the sheen of those shows faded as I grew up, it’s okay.  That’s because I’m a grown up and can understand that those things are special for what they were then and it’s hard to recapture that love and the exact feelings I had when I first discovered the cartoons.

That said, I still love the toys and still smile at everything surrounding those glory days of cartoon and capitalist infusion.

Now, while I didn’t exactly watch or love the show Jem and the Holograms, I knew A LOT of people who did.  Regardless of watching or not, and certainly not having the dolls that were released, I still liked the gimmick and idea of the whole concept.  I talked about it a couple weeks ago when I reviewed Teen Witch, but wish fulfillment is really, really, really important to young people.  Jem certainly encapsulated that too, but it wasn’t entirely made specifically for girls.  Maybe not the toys, but the show had a fairly decent mass appeal. Continue reading “Jem and the Holograms (2015)” →

Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader (2012)

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Yay!  Roger Corman!  If he can’t do it, nobody can!

So, yeah, at some point B-Movie Enema was going to come back around to a movie with direct production involvement from Roger Corman.  And with a title like Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader?  Oh you bet.  I’m on board.

This movie got premiered at none other than Comic Con International in 2012 about a month before showing to the masses on Epix (a lovely little-known cable network).  Yet another month later, it played at the 3D Film Festival.  Oh yeah…  This movie was originally made as a 3D feature.  If you want to know something utterly fascinating too, then know this:

Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader is the first 3D film ever produced by Roger Corman.

For real.  The guy who produced like 40 gabillion movies for the last 70 years never produced a 3D feature before this film.  All those drive-in movies he made.  All those creature features.  Not a single one beyond the second dimension. Continue reading “Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader (2012)” →

Teen Witch (1989)

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As a kid who did a lot of growing up in the 1980s, it was well into the 2010s before I knew much of anything about this week’s featured B-Movie Enema, Teen Witch.

Now…  Back in the day, I didn’t live under a rock.  I kind of do now, but not back then.  I went to movies constantly.  Every other day or so I was at Videoland renting movies and NES games.  I was once “with it” and vaguely cool…?  Somehow, Teen Witch escaped my notice.

It’s probably safe to say that it wasn’t really “made for me” – for whatever that really means.  I was a 13 year old boy in 1989.  So a movie about a girl getting the ultimate wish fulfillment opportunities didn’t really jump right out at me like, say, fuckin’ Batman or something.  Now, that said…  I feel it likely that I would have probably crushed on Robyn Lively.

Let’s talk about Ms. Lively, shall we? Continue reading “Teen Witch (1989)” →

Penitentiary (1979)

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We’re getting back to some good old blaxploitation with this week’s B-Movie Enema.  Penitentiary was written, produced, and directed by Jamaa Fanaka.

Fanaka was part of the L.A. Rebellion from the late 60s and into the late 80s.  This was a movement of black filmmakers whose whole intent was to make films that offered an alternative to what most deemed “classical” Hollywood films.  This was mostly influenced by Latin American and Italian cinema, but also from an emerging African cinema.

You see, the 1960s was a particularly turbulent time.  After a series of events like the Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action, and the Watts Riots, society shifted and evolved very quickly.  Affirmative Action allowed for many more black students to attend colleges – and particularly at UCLA which got urged to create an ethnographic studies program to allow black filmmakers to tell more of their story and stories that would expose their struggles. Continue reading “Penitentiary (1979)” →

Mutant War (1988)

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Last week, I checked in on site favorite Norman J. Warren.  This week, it’s time to check in with another favorite of the site, Brett Piper.

Toward the end of 2019, I wrote about his fun, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, alien invasion flick Battle for the Lost Planet from 1985.  This time around, let’s look at the 1988 sequel – Mutant War.  Whereas the first movie finds our hero Harry Trent first remembering a series of events that started with him hijacking a space shuttle to being stuck on a pre-planned, five-year course to finally returning to Earth to discover that aliens have landed and more or less messed things up pretty bad.  It made for a nice little movie that, at times, gave me real classic Doctor Who vibes.

As was the case with his later film, Drainiac, and, to a certain degree, They Bite, I appreciate the spirit in which Piper works with and his general effort he puts out for the movies.  I truly do get the feeling that Piper just likes making movies and he doesn’t take himself too seriously.  Good on him.  In truth, he mostly just likes doing effects and creatures, which is obvious in his movies.  That said, sometimes, you just need these little types of movies that don’t take themselves very seriously and just wants to entertain. Continue reading “Mutant War (1988)” →

Satan’s Slave (1976)

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Well hey there!  It’s another Norman J. Warren joint!

If you’ve been around the site for a while, you know I’m a fan.  Prey is a good little home invasion story that is wrapped up in an alien invasion story – that also features lesbians.  Terror is a fun supernatural flick that has a vengeful witch – that may or may not have included a near miss for a fat guy on a train to have sex with a really pretty British lady.  Bloody New Year is just…  Well, it’s just bonkers, silly fun – that also happens to include an experimental plane that broke time and space.

Satan’s Slave is the first horror film that Warren made that pre-dates all of the above mentioned greatest hits.  As it turns out, it’s not the first of his films I covered in 2020 and it won’t be the last.  That said, I should maybe hold up because I’m quickly running out of his movies! Continue reading “Satan’s Slave (1976)” →