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!

The Unseen (1980)

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Welcome to a killer new review here at B-Movie Enema.

This week, we’re looking at an early 80s film that I think has a little underground cult appeal. We’re going to discuss 1980’s The Unseen from director Danny Steinmann. Steinmann is likely a name horror fans will recognize, even though, for The Unseen, he used the credit Peter Foleg. Like with last week’s movie, Carnosaur, which had special effects done by Friday the 13th Part VI: The New Blood director John Carl Buechler, Steinmann is also a Camp Crystal Lake alum. In 1985, he co-wrote and directed his final film, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. By far, that is Steinmann’s most famous movie, for better or worse.

I don’t envy the guy who had to make the only other movie without Jason Voorhees in the franchise after the character became the most defining part of the series.

After getting his start in the 70s in the adult industry, directing the porno High Rise in 1973, Steinmann didn’t really do much with film for another seven years when he crossed over into the mainstream with The Unseen. At least, he wasn’t in the director’s chair or writing scripts. He did work as an assistant on 1975’s The Man in the Glass Booth and a 1977 TV movie for Gene Roddenberry’s Spectre.

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Carnosaur (1993)

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Welcome back to another rip-roarin’ review at B-Movie Enema!

For pretty much all my life, dinosaurs were immensely popular. Moreover, they ignited a lot of children’s imaginations. In the 80s, not only were there movies like Baby: Secret of the Legend which came out at the exact age for me to not only want to see it but to also convince my mother to take me to a theater to see it. The same year, 1985, the Dinobots made their bow in The Transformers. Dinosaurs couldn’t have been more popular than that period of time. Later, a new generation would get the start of a looooong series of animated features with The Land Before Time. Even before that, for decades, dinosaurs were used in all sorts of sci-fi movies, especially the lower-budget ones.

But then came 1993.

I would argue 1993 was the pinnacle of dino-mania. You like that? Dino mania? I am 100% sure no one else has ever said that term before, and they definitely didn’t say it 32 years ago in 1993. Anyway, that’s when Steven Spielberg would have one of his very biggest years ever… maybe for any director in Hollywood history. He’d make two films that year. One, Schindler’s List, would win him the Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. That was AFTER he released the year’s top-grossing film, and one of the biggest box office champs in the history of movies, Jurassic Park. But we’re going to look at the movie that made 1993 truly the greatest year at the box office for dinosaur movies – Carnosaur.

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Honorable Men (2004)

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Happy Independence Day, you dirty, dirty, dirty rebel Americans!

Okay, yes, I’m also an American, but I’m kind of trying to downplay that right now because, frankly, we’re kind of in our suck era, but whatever. That said, welcome to a new review at B-Movie Enema! This week, we have another film that was made somewhat infamous by the fine folks at RedLetterMedia. Those hacks and mega-single white boys have that show Best of the Worst each month, in which they feature bad movies and pick which one they find the most entertaining. Sometimes, they get one that’s fun. Sometimes, one of the movies is just utter shit. Sometimes, they are special.

That’s what we’re looking at today. That last one… The special classification. A couple of weeks ago, I looked at a movie that was a James Bond ripoff with a guy who has a partner who is a baboon. That was one that got featured on Best of the Worst. This week, we have one that would blow the balls off that James Bond ripoff and likely leave a lot of people staring blankly and saying, “Whoa…” if they took the time to watch it.

It’s a movie about guys, and girls, and cops, and bad guys… It’s Honorable Men.

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Monsturd (2003)

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There’s a line in that last song in Grease that has been cut out due to no one understanding what the fuck it meant in 1978: We go together like Monsturd and B-Movie Enema. And then there’s a bunch of nonsense words like someone is doing a 50s white boy scat before it says something about being remembered forever or some such shit.

Heh… scat.

Double heh… shit.

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The Order of the Black Eagle (1987)

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Hey there, Enemaniacs, and welcome to another review here at B-Movie Enema.

Say, do you remember that time I reviewed that James Bond ripoff that was made in North Carolina and was made pretty much by a bunch of North Carolinians? You know the one I’m talkin’ about. Yeah, the one with the guy named Duncan Jax, and he had a baboon buddy named Boon. That’s the one! That one was Unmasking the Idol, and it was not so much unmasked but unearthed by Vinegar Syndrome some years ago and given a nice new shiny Blu-ray release.

A year later, in 1987, after making one James Bond ripoff, director Worth Keeter, along with screenwriter Phil Behrens, decided to run it back and do it again. That’s what I’m reviewing this week, the sequel to Unmasking the Idol, still with Duncan Jax and, most importantly, Boon the Baboon, The Order of the Black Eagle. Interestingly, Wikipedia and the movie’s own promotional stuff title this movie Order of the Black Eagle, while IMDb lists it as THE Order of the Black Eagle. Why the use of the definite article on IMDb but nowhere else? I dunno. Who do you think I am, some sort of investigative blogger?

You should know by now that I do the bare minimum when it comes to investigative work.

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Lucky Bastard (2013)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema!

It’s Friday the 13th! As is the case commonly over the last few Friday the 13ths, I am totally fumbling the bag on what I’m reviewing. Oh, sure, I could surely find another outing from good ol’ Jason Voorhees to write about. That Jason Goes to Hell is a shitfest, but it’s a shitfest I take no pleasure in watching. So, instead, I’m going to celebrate Friday the 13th with a movie from 2013 that features something that we all like watching… found footage!

What, did you think I was going to say porn? I dunno about you, but I’m strictly anti-porn. Who on Earth would possibly want to watch succulent naked bodies doing things to give themselves pleasure with toys or digits or appendages or, I dunno… cucumbers or something? No sirree… I do not condone sexual gratification.

Nah, I’m fuckin’ with ya. Porn is great… in moderation. And pornography is at the heart of the movie getting reviewed this week, 2013’s Lucky Bastard from director Robert Nathan. Nathan got his start in media as a novelist, most notably for writing the political thriller The White Tiger, which was set in China back in Mao’s rule. In the 90s, Nathan started writing a ton of episodes for Law and Order. Lucky Bastard is the only film he wrote and directed aside from a TV movie the same year called The Grim Sleeper.

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The Uninvited (2009)

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Hello, Enemaniacs, and welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review!

This week, I’m going to be looking at a movie that would not have been on my radar if not for last year’s AMC Fear Fest, the October tradition of AMC playing horror movies pretty much all day and all night for the entire month leading up to Halloween. One of the things that I often find myself chuckling about when it comes to Fear Fest is that it seems like almost every time I turn on AMC on any random October day, Halloween 5 is usually playing. It’s almost without fail that’s what’s on when I tune in. The other thing that is almost a constant on Fear Fest is a whole slew of underwhelming 2000s horror.

And that’s where we pick up for this week’s review. 2009’s The Uninvited mostly slipped through just about every crack of the rickety dock over a dirty pond. For the most part, I only knew two things before I started watching it that fateful day on AMC Fear Fest. The first is that the trailer for this movie was before every single Friday the 13th movie DVD I had in the multi-pack I had before I upgraded to the Blu-Ray. Second, it starred that one girl who was in Zack Snyder’s shitty Sucker Punch movie.

Sucker Punch may be a review for another day…

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The Burning (1981)

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Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review, and welcome to the official start of summer.

Yeah, you read the right, bitches. I say when summer starts. And it starts right now as we say goodbye to May this weekend and hello to June. With the warmer months, traditionally speaking, people start taking vacations in various ways. Families might plan trips to lakes to go boating and maybe fish or something. They may plan on going to Disney World. The days get longer and the movies get more fun and entertaining (for better or worse). Parents are ready, after a long, grueling school year dealing with piss poor report cards and parent-teacher conferences, to send their kids to a camp to get them out of their goddamn hair for a few weeks.

That desire to make your kids someone else’s problem gave birth to two very distinctly 80s subgenres in movies. The first were comedies like 1979’s Meatballs. The second, much more popular subgenre, was the slasher horror like 1980’s Friday the 13th. The latter is where this week’s featured movie, 1981’s The Burning, lies.

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