Geoff Arbuckle

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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Killer Workout (1987)

Published on July 7, 2023July 13, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

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)

Published on June 30, 2023July 6, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

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)

Published on June 23, 2023June 30, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

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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