Author: Geoff Arbuckle

What up, Enemaniacs?

Welcome to week #4 of our five-week trek through the film library of the diminutive starlet Pia Zadora here at B-Movie Enema. This week is the one that you could argue the entire month was built around. It’s one that would end up wracking up something like 11 Razzie nominations and winning six. It’s 1983’s The Lonely Lady.

On paper, The Lonely Lady might have had a chance to work. The movie was based on a novel of the same name written by Harold Robbins. Robbins wrote slightly more lurid novels that had a seedier side. He wrote a few books that either were directly about the underbelly of Hollywood’s film industry or kind of circled that drain. Several of his books were adapted into big-budget films. These included The Carpetbaggers which got adapted into a 1964 film with an all-star cast, A Stone for Danny which was turned into the big-time vehicle for Elvis, King Creole, and 1970’s The Adventurers.

Maybe most notable is that Harold Robbins’ name is often dropped as a joke in terms of an extremely popular writer who writes more lurid pulp than great American novels. His name is often linked to Jacqueline Susann who took inspiration from Robbins when she wrote Valley of the Dolls. For most of my life in pop culture, I had known Robbins and Susann’s names thanks to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Kirk is describing the types of vernacular, often laced with colorful metaphors, used in the late 20th Century to Spock who is trying to understand why Kirk is and a lot of other people in 1986 San Francisco are using curse words. Kirk mentions Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann as notable authors of the time. Spock then calls them “the giants” of literature.

In fact, the novel by Robbins this is based on is rumored to have been something of a recounting of memories Robbins had of Susann.

Happy New Year, Enemaniacs!

B-Movie Enema kicks off 2025 with a whole month dedicated to the pint-sized starlet Pia Zadora. Why? Because why not! She’s spunky and cute and she happened to make some pretty bad movies. But where do we start? Santa Claus Conquers the Martians? How dare you think I would stoop so low to pick this low-hanging fruit! No, like lil Pia herself, I’m going for the fuckin’ gusto. This month is gonna be wild, my friends, but we’re kicking things off with 1982’s Butterfly.

Now, I can hear you already… “What’s Butterfly? Why are you rizzing this up so much already? Is this really the gusto?”

Holy shit, yes it is, and I will explain why in a bit. First and foremost, we’ve got ourselves a returning director, Matt Cimber. Cimber did The Candy Tangerine Man. This will definitely not be the last time you will see his name on this blog in January. And I promise you Mr. Cimber has a whole lot more I could cover on this blog between his sexploitation, blaxploitation, and his fantasy film Hundra. Anyway, this guy was mostly known for lower-budget fare but he might be best known as being the ex-husband of Jayne Mansfield. He and Mansfield divorced about a year before her untimely death in 1967.