Geoff Arbuckle

Common Law Cabin (1967)

Published on September 1, 2023September 7, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

As we pass out of the dog days of summer, and transition into the colorful days of autumn, I think it’s time we checked in with an old friend – Russ Meyer! We begin with this week’s new B-Movie Enema review with 1967’s Common Law Cabin.

I might as well go ahead and call this month Russ Meyer Month II. I’ve visited the works of the great Mr. Meyer in two different ways. First, if you go back to May 2020, COVID was raging like a bad case of hemorrhoids and the first Russ Meyer Month was rocking and rolling with some of the nudie film master’s most recognizable films. The second time I came to something Russ Meyer, it was to warm things up last December with the pretty great (and fairly sexy) Supervixens. It was very clearly time to return.

This month, I’ve got five more classics to discuss. I very specifically chose four films for their titles. The fifth, well, it’s another time Meyer worked with my all-time favorite critic, Roger Ebert. This first movie is, on the surface, maybe, the oddest of this month’s collection.

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The Birds II: Land’s End (1994)

Published on August 25, 2023August 31, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema. We’ve got ourselves one of the all-time most ill-advised sequels for this week’s review. Yup, it’s the 1994 made-for-television shitbomb The Birds II: Land’s End.

If we were to start with the fact that The Birds II was an Alan Smithee film, you’d understand something kind of interesting in terms of the history of this blog. This is the very first time I’ve ever covered a movie directed by the notable Alan Smithee. The Alan Smithee moniker was a famous pseudonym given to movies in which the director refused to take credit. Basically, it’s for troubled productions and movies so bad the director just throws his hands up and disowns it. It wasn’t supposed to be a thing we outsiders were to be aware of. It was only after mainstream attention was brought to the pseudonym in the late 90s did the Directors Guild of America retire the name.

The Birds II was actually directed by Rick Rosenthal. We know Rosenthal for Halloween: Resurrection. However, he made a far superior Halloween sequel when he did Halloween II in 1981. Rosenthal has done stuff all up and down the scale of good and not-so-good. But he’s mostly worked in television and has been nominated twice for Primetime Emmys.

It’s not totally out of bounds to think that a Hitchcock film could have a sequel. Psycho II is quite a good film and Psycho III is notable for being kind of kooky in interesting ways. But, outside the various sequels and other things based on Psycho, no other property of Hitchcock’s garnered a sequel up through the 1980s. So, the thought of making a TV movie sequel for The Birds seemed ill-advised at best and downright sacrilegious at worst. Considering the budget, the quality of actors, the cheapness of how it looked, and Rosenthal needing his name removed and replaced by Alan Smithee, The Birds II: Land’s End takes the cake for having a pretty awful reputation.

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Unmasking the Idol (1986)

Published on August 18, 2023August 24, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Enema… B-Movie Enema.

That sounded a lot better in my head than it looked on the page. Hmm. Anyway, I’m a huge James Bond fan. When I was little, I remember getting my first looks at the Bond films on TV. At that time, I seem to remember more of the Roger Moore-era movies playing regularly than the Connery films, but I caught up with those older entries by the end of the 80s. It was then that I definitely remember ABC playing the movies on Sunday or Monday nights during the summer. What I didn’t see on TV, I’d rent from the video store.

This was around the same time as Licence to Kill hitting theaters and the first time I saw one of the movies in a theater. It was that summer that I became a huge Bond fan. I never looked back. Starting with GoldenEye in 1995, I started going to see each new Bond film in the theater with my father. I have a single tattoo on my body. It’s of a silhouetted James Bond in the famous gun barrel with his 007 logo under it.

So, when there is a movie like the one I’ll be reviewing this week, Unmasking the Idol, I’m immediately curious about it.

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Dark Tower (1987)

Published on August 11, 2023August 18, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Welcome to yet another B-Movie Enema review! This week, I’m looking at Dark Tower. Now, before you connect that title to another thing from Stephen King, just know this is a 1987 film that used that same title and set in Spain. Interestingly, though, this movie comes from a pair of directors I’ve talked about before.

The original director was Ken Wiederhorn. Wiederhorn is best known for horror. In particular, he directed Shock Waves in 1977 which features Nazi zombies. Then, in 1981, he did the quite good Eyes of a Stranger with Jennifer Jason Leigh in an early role. The year after this movie’s release, he did Return of the Living Dead II. He originally wanted to be a documentary director, but once he broke in with horror, he says none of the reputable news organizations wanted to work with him. To be fair, it probably has a lot to do with the spectacularly bad Animal House ripoff King Frat which I watched as part of the second season of B-Movie Enema: The Series.

Wiederhorn was replaced during filming. His replacement was Freddie Francis. Francis appeared recently on the site with 1970’s Girly which turned out to be quite a good movie that uses some salaciousness to draw someone in, but then turns out to be a really interesting movie about a messed up family and arrested development. Francis wasn’t the only replacement piece for this movie. Original leading lady Lucy Gutteridge was replaced by Jenny Agutter. Original leading man Roger Daltrey was replaced by Michael Moriarty.

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Byleth: The Demon of Incest (1972)

Published on August 4, 2023August 10, 2023 by Geoff Arbuckle2 Comments

Welcome to B-Movie Enema – the blog that likes to review movies that either have really iffy content, yikesy poster art, or titles that make you cringe into oblivion.

And, with that, this is my review of the 1972 Italian gothic horror flick Byleth: The Demon of Incest. Sigh… Now, I hear this is a very bad movie. I’m not too unaccustomed to that. I mean, this is a blog named B-Movie Enema. I’m not entirely sure what made me want to buy Byleth when it was released by our friends over at Severin Films. I definitely recognized it was Italian, so that was a plus. I probably saw the cool artwork that adorns the poster/cover of the blu ray. I guess that was enough for me to want to get into it.

I don’t think I saw that subtitle. I probably didn’t see it until I opened my package with it inside. And then, I was, like, “Oh boy. I might have made a mistake.” I shouldn’t be so high and mighty over this. After all, I have dedicated an entire month to the Ilsa series and wrote about The Beast in Heat – both featured a whole lotta Nazis (the latter even included sort of bestiality). There is something about this movie that gives me a little bit of trepidation before diving in.

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The Stepford Wives (1975)

Published on July 28, 2023August 3, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

I might need to tread lightly this week, my dear Enemaniacs.

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema. The featured movie for this review is the 1975 version of The Stepford Wives. The film was based on a novel of the same name by author Ira Levin. Levin is actually quite the author. All but a couple of his novels were adapted into fairly large Hollywood productions. Aside from The Stepford Wives, which was adapted twice with this version having a trio of TV movie sequels, he was also the author of Rosemary’s Baby, The Boys from Brazil, Sliver, and A Kiss Before Dying (this was also adapted into two different films). On top of that, Levin was also a playwright. Several of those plays were also adapted into films as well.

The original 1972 novel of The Stepford Wives is classified as a satirical horror novel. In fact, it was an early example of “feminist horror”. Which, today, seems weird. I mean, in that era, I guess it would have to be a dude writing a feminist something. Today, it might not quite fly. Generally, the novel seemed to go over fairly well, though. It had some themes it wanted to explore.

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Maximum Overdrive (1986)

Published on July 21, 2023July 27, 2023 by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Welcome to B-Movie Enema. This week, we’re going to the mid-80s for the slick-looking horror flick Maximum Overdrive. It’s kind of impossible to talk about this movie without mentioning three things a lot of people who know about it knows (and possibly the main reasons that draw them to it). The first is that this movie bombed fairly hard and was almost unilaterally disliked by critics and a whole lot of the audience. Okay. Fine. The second thing was that this featured a pretty bitchin’ soundtrack from the Australian rock superstar group AC/DC.

But, come on… The third is the biggest reason why most watch this movie. That would be Stephen King. By 1986, King was about as big of a name in American literature as anyone else. In 1974, he released his first novel, Carrie, which was immediately brought to the screen in 1976 by Brian De Palma. With each subsequent novel released, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, and so forth, King was selling like hotcakes. Most of his novels up to this point were adapted into movies as well. King hasn’t often had a great deal of appreciation for the movies made from his movies. Notably, he hated Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining.

At the height of his power, King decided he wasn’t going to write a book and then sell the rights to someone only for them to make a movie he wasn’t satisfied with. Instead, he would make his own film. This was the only film King ever directed. He does admit that he had no idea what he was doing and he was railing on cocaine most of the time anyway, so he barely even remembers anything about the production.

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Flesh Gordon (1974)

Published on July 14, 2023July 21, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Some weeks ago, I took a look at the 1972 cult, adult, animated classic Fritz the Cat. In that review, I talked about that movie having a reputation that precedes itself. Just the title almost gives it a mythical aura. I mentioned a couple other movies in that review, and one of those is the topic of this week’s B-Movie Enema review – Flesh Gordon.

Obviously, 1974’s Flesh Gordon is a sex parody of the classic Flash Gordon serials of the early days of swashbuckling matinees. So I guess we should start with the subgenre itself. The sex comedy actually goes waaaaay back to ancient Greek theatre. Basically, it’s farcical sex. This carried into the Roman times which actually then became the major influence of what we know as situational comedies, better referred to as the sitcom.

In the mid to late 17th century, of all peoples, the English brought the sex comedy back into popularity. However, the origins, and the eventual influence, of Flesh Gordon can go to a period of the 50s and earlier 60s when Hollywood would have these cheeky romantic comedies that were charged with a bit of sex appeal. This was directly influenced by the early sexual revolution of Playboy magazine being introduced and sexologist Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University studying the sex lives of women. This would eventually bring us to the late 60s and early 70s when Hollywood itself would shift to a new style and way of business and indie filmmakers looking for a start would make a whole bunch of scandalous comedies that could play with the new lifestyles that grew out of the late 60s as well as nudity and much more open discussion of sex lives.

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