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!

Killer Workout (1987)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema. Here, we care a lot about your well-being and your desire to not look like a complete goblin in the summer. So, with that in mind, I’m going to pull a classic David A. Prior film from the vault to hopefully help us all get into shape. Killer Workout goes by a couple titles, with the aforementioned one the more popular, but it’s also known as Aerobicide. I have the version called Killer Workout, so we’re going with that title.

We’ve dealt with David Prior before with Deadly Prey. He hooked up with David Winters to form Action International Pictures (AIP). Now, we’re also quite familiar with Mr. Winters as I had a whole month of his pictures earlier this year. I don’t think I need to say too much about what Winters has done. But, back to Prior, he was quite well known for making kind of cheap-ish action schlock, but he stepped outside that on a rare occasion. Most notably, he dabbled in the slasher subgenre of horror with Killer Workout, and he dressed up a pair of action schlock films in a veneer of science fiction concepts with Future Force and Future Zone, both starring David Carradine.

Now… I don’t want you to think these movies made by Prior were just a bunch of dudes, some of which would be beefy, some would be more like David Carradine, going around and blasting things for a full 90 minutes alone. Oh no. Prior liked trying to make the same types of movies people would tune into on cable or rent each weekend at the video store. The easiest way to keep them coming back for more?

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Deathstalker II (1987)

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Welcome to the final B-Movie Enema article for June!

So we spent a lot of time this month catching up with sequels to movies I’ve covered before. We started June with introducing ourselves to a series I’ve wanted to dive into for a while – Deathstalker. In the interest of keeping up with the whole point of this month, we’re going to round things out with Deathstalker II. If you think this is going to just be more of the same from the first film, well, you’ll be surprised to hear it isn’t. This is actually more of a comedy.

There could be multiple reasons why this sequel, that came four years after the original that was a success, decided to go this route. First of all, this was the final sword and sorcery film made in the Roger Corman-Argentinian deal. (To find out more about that, hit that link the paragraph above to read the review of that first film.) Honestly, the window had closed on these types of fantasy films by 1987. So why not try doing something a little different? Maybe wink and nod at the audience that these movies are kind of silly. Bringing Jim Wynorski in as director of this sequel certainly changes the mood. Wynorski’s pretty good at infusing a little bit of cheeky self-deprecation into his films. But then also the film was fairly low budget.

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Vice Academy Part 3 (1991)

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Welcome back to yet another B-Movie Enema and yet another entry in the Vice Academy saga!

When Vinegar Syndrome released a box set of Vice Academy movies, they only released the first half. I think we all assumed there would be a second volume with the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries but we’ve not heard anything yet as of this article’s creation. The good news, though, is that the entire series is on Tubi so… I guess all we’re waiting on is for Vinegar Syndrome to get their shit together to clean them up nicer than shit? I dunno.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago as I was setting up Vice Academy Part 2, writer, director, and producer Rick Sloane, for the most part, is really best known for these movies and his two Hobgoblins movies. That said, I think it might be accurate to say he was a student of B-movies as a kid. He seemed to really be into the Roger Corman type stuff as he became deeply inspired by Hollywood Boulevard, a movie produced by Corman, directed by Joe Dante, and featured right here on this blog! But because he was so inspired by that, when he started working on his very first feature, Blood Theater, he was able to convince Hollywood Boulevard star (and Corman alum) Mary Woronov to headline that first movie. He did this at the age of 21.

In a lot of ways, I really do have a great deal of, for a lack of a better word, sympathy for Sloane. His movies have been bashed throughout his career. However, I do wonder if that even bothers him. You see, the guy clearly loves his B-movies. He may be closer to a Jim Wynorski type where he likes to interject sex and comedy into his movies. These aren’t the type of movies that will go over well with critics, but these Vice Academy movies WILL go over well on USA Up All Night where they became hits in the 90s thanks to Rhonda Shear bringing a lot of teenage fellas to the TV on Friday and Saturday nights before they had cars.

But enough of that… Let’s get into Vice Academy Part 3 where our lovely cops to stop and frisk some female inmates on the run!

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Zombie 5: Killing Birds (1988)

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Oh boy… One I’ve long been leaving on the back burner finally flies into the forefront…

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema review. This time around, I check back in with the goofy Zombie series, and leave it to the Italians to be weird. Well… sort of. The weirdness of this is not entirely their fault. It’s partially, for once, our fault. Stupid Americans.

Allow me to explain. If you’re reading this blog, you already basically know that Zombi is the Italian title for George Romero’s masterpiece Dawn of the Dead (dollars-for-donuts my pick as the best horror film ever made). Not willing to let any time pass them by without taking full advantage of a possible ripoff of that greatness that is Dawn, in comes Lucio Fulci and his Zombi 2 (aka Zombie here in America, as it is not a sequel here but a different movie altogether). Nine whole years later, Fulci would start in on another entry that doesn’t seem to have anything related to either Dawn or Zombie, but would continue the whole zombie apocalypse thing and also have a flying head that comes out of a fridge to bite someone. That would be 1988’s Zombi 3. Zombie 3 is a bit of a mess, but it’s also got some fun with the inconsistency of how the zombies operate. One thing that is unfair about Zombie 3 is that Fulci should not get full credit as he got very ill and the film had to basically be mostly shot by Claudio Fragasso (of Troll 2 fame) and Bruno Mattei (of Shocking Dark fame).

Alas… Zombi 3 is the final chapter of a VERY loose trilogy for the Italians.

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Vice Academy Part 2 (1990)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema, my dear Enemaniacs! This week, we’re going to get back to a series I started back in summer of 2020 when I looked at the first of SIX Vice Academy movies. We had some fun times with the lovely ladies of the academy as they certainly put the bust in busting bad guys. Considering it’s been almost three years since doing that movie, and this month is all about catching up with some old friends in sequels to movies I’ve covered before, it was high time I go back to the Rick Sloane series. So, here we are with Vice Academy Part 2 released the very next year after the first movie’s release.

I know I talked a little bit about Rick Sloane in the first Vice Academy movie, but I kind of want to swing back around to him for this second movie. There really are only three things Sloane has done stuff with in his life. Of course, maybe his longest running gig was cranking out these six Vice Academy flicks. His next most recognizable thing were two Hobgoblins movies. I talked last time about how that was mercilessly riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000 in one of my all time favorite episodes of that series. Since then, alumni of MST3K riffed it again at a life Rifftrax event that was also pretty great.

Interestingly, while Sloane did make other movies here or there, he has a major passion for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He grew up during the explosion of that film becoming the all time kin… er, queen(?) of cult flicks. When he was still fairly young, he worked with 20th Century Fox to help promote The Rocky Horror Picture Show while also producing some silly grindhouse-style shorts cut like trailers. He showed those during a Rocky Horror convention in Southern California. That also coincided with the promotional push for the sequel, Shock Treatment.

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Deathstalker (1983)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema, my friends! This month, we’re kind of setting aside time to cover two things. The first will be sequels to other movies we’ve covered in the past. The second is to cover the first movie and subsequent sequel in a series that I’ve been looking forward to dealing with for some time. It’s the latter that we are dealing with this week and the final week of June.

Hot off the heels of two quite successful sword and sorcery films in 1982, Conan the Barbarian (grossing somewhere near $80 million on a $20 million budget) and The Sword and Sorcerer (grossing around $40 million on a much more economic $4 million budget), audiences were hot for these types of movies. It’s kind of funny that the early 80s saw the rise in three distinct genres: fantasy, which sword and sorcery falls right smack-dab in the middle of, science fiction, thanks to Star Wars, and ninja action films. I think it’s safe to say that the fantasy genre lost the battle relatively quickly. More on that in just a moment.

It was thanks to Conan the Barbarian and The Sword and the Sorcerer that this week’s movie, Deathstalker, was made and was a modest hit, bringing in nearly $12 million against a $457,000 budget. This was brought to screens by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. This was the first of ten international co-productions with Argentina. I’m not being facetious here, but I can’t name any other U.S.-Argentina co-productions. But this was definitely Roger Corman doing Roger Corman things. He quickly jumped on the fantasy trend and loaded this full of tits.

God, I love Roger Corman.

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Memorial Valley Massacre (1989)

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Happy Memorial Day weekend, my Enemaniacs in the USA!

This week’s B-Movie Enema is going to take a look at a pretty obscure one that got a little bit of a boost from a fairly recent Blu Ray remastering at Vinegar Syndrome – Memorial Valley Massacre. This is a bit of a weird one for multiple reasons. But let me know if you’ve heard this one before… I first saw this a few times on everyone’s favorite Roku channel, Bizarre TV. That’s not the only time the word “bizarre” might come to mind in this article.

This movie is mostly known for kind of squirting out of the cinematic butthole that supplied video stores and cable with content. And when I say it’s known for that, it’s a pretty unknown movie that blended into the landscape of video store shelves and late night cable TV fodder. Some people who saw the names in the cast like William Smith or our great B-movie daddy in the sky, Cameron Mitchell, and those names might have been juuuust good enough to get people watch or rent it, but they would have likely been quickly turned off by it because it’s a horror film.

But… let’s back up to some of the most bizarre stuff about Memorial Valley Massacre.

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Graduation Day (1981)

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When you get to the month of May, and you’re in school (especially high school), you’re all about getting the hell out of there for a summer of goofing off and sleeping in. So, with this week’s B-Movie Enema review, let’s celebrate the impending graduation of the class of 2023 with a look at the 1981 slasher horror film Graduation Day.

This comes from director Herb Freed who made only about ten movies. In 1976, he made Haunts with everyone’s favorite B-movie star, Cameron Mitchell. Then, in 1980, just before making Graduation Day, he made another horror film called Beyond Evil. Now, what’s interesting is that Beyond Evil starred Linda Day George. when he made Graduation Day a year later, he cast Linda’s husband Christopher George as his lead. Interesting how that comes around. Then, in 1985, he made another kind of cult classic 80s film, Tomboy, starring Betsy Russell. However, by the end of the decade and into the 90s, it seemed that Freed then mostly made video store and cable type movies that have a bit of a reduced budget and lesser marketing.

So, yeah, we have Christopher George in Graduation Day. Now, we saw him previously in City of the Living Dead. This is definitely at the end of his career. He would die in 1983 from a heart attack at the age of 52. He’s not the only character actor to be found here in this movie, as we also have Michael Pataki. Pataki appeared in the Spider-Man TV movies of the late 70s as well as bit parts in Rocky IV and Halloween 4 where he appeared as Dr. Hoffman. Additionally, we have an appearance of Linda Shayne who as in classics of B-Movie Enema lore like Humanoids of the Deep, Screwballs, and Lovely But Deadly. Not only that, but we have Linnea Quigley who has been in too many of B-Movie Enema alumni films to list. Finally, we have the queen of gameshow letter flipping, Vanna White, in one of her seven feature and television film appearances.

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