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!

Night of the Demons 3 (1997)

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NOTE: This review was written prior to the release (or knowledge, for that matter) of the Scream Factory Night of the Demons Trilogy Blu-Ray set. How I sourced this low-quality/VHS-grade version of the movie is explained in the article itself. Enjoy and welcome to October!

It’s that time of year again, my Enemaniacs… It’s spooky times in the spooky month of October!

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema review. October is a VERY special month around these parts. October 3, 2014 saw the very first B-Movie Enema review. Things have come a loooong way since. After knocking out just a handful of articles, I took a break, and returned in March of 2016 with a renewed interest and zest. That would begin a string of 94 more reviews before taking another, shorter break. Then, I returned, as planned after that short podcast birthing break, with even more renewed vigor.

Since returning with that 101st review in March of 2018, I’ve not stopped. I even started hosting movies on YouTube, Vimeo, and OtherWorlds TV. That brings us right back to October and all the goodness, and specialness, that it brings. As is the tradition at B-Movie Enema, I will be featuring a horror film every Friday. On top of that, as per the usual celebrations, I will also be releasing an additional, special Halloween review. That review will also mark 400 reviews at B-Movie Enema. It’s gonna be a good time.

So, for this month, as I made my selections for what I’ll cover, I decided to revisit some old friends in the lead-up to that #400 review. These are all franchises I’ve visited before. It’s also likely I will not be revisiting these franchises again for some time for various reasons. A couple of the franchises just don’t have anything left for me to be arsed with. One franchise is one that I’m not a huge fan of and can’t keep up with all the movies that come along in that franchise every couple of years. And, as is the case with the franchise we’ll be visiting today, one is simply at the end of the road.

So, we start with that end of the road as I look at Night of the Demons 3.

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Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)

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Welcome to the grand conclusion of Russ Meyer Month II here at B-Movie Enema!

We finish with Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. This 1979 sexploitation satire not only brings our journey through another month of Russ Meyer movies to an end, but it, more or less, also signals the end of Meyer’s career itself. This is the final non-documentary film the King of Sexploitation Films ever made. He would end up doing some additional tongue-in-cheek documentaries like Mondo Topless, Too, Melissa Mounds, and Pandora Peaks but he never did do another narrative film after this movie’s release.

The reason for that is rather simple. While Meyer’s films were still popular, and he was a likable figure in the realm of softcore films, the hardcore porn industry became, for a lack of a better term, mainstream by the 70s with hits like Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat, and Debbi Does Dallas becoming as close to household titles as porn films could get. Meyer did still mostly retire from film a very wealthy fella. He personally oversaw the management and licensing of his own library of films. It’s likely why so many of his movies do not still have HD restorations or Blu-Ray releases. The exact state of the rights to his movies isn’t clearly defined from what I could find after a cursory search. If you go to the right places and the right conventions, you can usually score a 22-film box set for not too expensive at all, but the films’ looks and transfers are not consistent. It’s why some of the pics I used during the course of this month have been a bit rough.

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Black Snake (1973)

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Welcome to the penultimate week of Russ Meyer Month II here at B-Movie Enema! We move from the 60s Russ Meyer sex comedies and romps to his 70s bigger budgeted and slightly more interesting films. This week, I’m reviewing 1973’s flop Black Snake.

This one is an interesting entry in Meyer’s filmography. I labeled it a flop. It was. Meyer was not unaccustomed to making a movie that wouldn’t perform well. Sure, maybe not all of his 60s films scored well with critics, but almost none of them were outright flops. As the 70s dawned, though, Meyer’s films would change. This would mostly be due to 20th Century Fox calling on Meyer to make actual studio-backed films. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was the first and it was a hit – despite critics not really appreciating it. The next film for Fox was assigned to him after the original director had to back out. That film would be an adaptation of the book The Seven Minutes. Meyer’s friend, Roger Ebert, would write that the latter was not well-suited to Meyer’s affection toward eroticism. After all, it was a drama about law and freedom of speech. While the central thing in the movie did evolve around an erotic novel a teenager bought, it’s not really Meyer’s realm, even if the studio felt it was right for him based on the movies he made in the past and how he championed the abolishment of censorship.

The Seven Minutes was, by far, Meyer’s most expensive movie and it didn’t do well. In the end, it just didn’t work out. He would only complete one of the three films he was contracted to make for Fox after Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. The end was maybe on the horizon anyway. Black Snake would be his next movie and the first of the final five films he would ever make. While his next three would recoup some of his past magic, this film would prove to be a massive disappointment and bomb.

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Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and Russ Meyer Month II.

We got things started on a rough path this month with Common Law Cabin. This is widely known as a lesser Russ Meyer entry which was likely a pretty rough snapback from his mid-60s black and white masterpieces like Mudhoney, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and Motorpsycho. That’s not even discussing the major splash he made with the controversial Lorna. That last one we need to get to sooner than later.

Despite 1967 being a bit of a drop for Meyer in terms of critical appeal (Good Morning and… Goodbye! also didn’t win over many critics), he was still the king of mainstream adult entertainment. 1968 would prove to be a huge success for him as this is the year that Vixen was unleashed on the world and became known for being an actual date night type of films for young, and rather randy, couples to go see together.

But there was another movie released that same year with Vixen, and that’s going to be our focus for this week’s review – Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!

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Motorpsycho (1965)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema. This week, we enter week #2 of Russ Meyer Month II. Admittedly, last week was a rough one, and not a very good way to get things started. It wasn’t very good. It was hardly sexy. It was 70 minutes of exceptionally loose structure and too much plot for what we need from Meyer.

I have a great deal more faith in this week’s selection. The year is 1965. I would argue this was maybe the most important year in Meyer’s career. In the first half of the year, his 1964 German co-production Fanny Hill made its way stateside. The movie’s success was likely boosted by 1964’s Lorna which proved to be so controversial that it grossed roughly a million bucks on a $37,000 budget. Shortly after Fanny Hill was released, Mudhoney made it to theaters. That is a great little flick.

Later, in the late summer of 1965, Meyer’s most influential film, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was unleashed to the world. It would inspire movies featuring bad ass women. It would act as a muse to the music industry for decades. Released one week later, but just before making Faster, Pussycat!, Meyer made another movie that would feature a roving gang of nogoodniks. That’s what we’re focusing on this week. This week’s movie, and the best title of all the films getting the review treatment this month by a wide margin, is Motorpsycho!

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Common Law Cabin (1967)

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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)

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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)

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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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