Category: 1970s

Truck Turner (1974)

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And just like that… Isaac Hayes is back, baby!

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema, and welcome back, Isaac Hayes, and especially welcome back, blaxploitation! Just not too long ago, we had a quick appearance of Isaac Hayes in Return to Sleepaway Camp, playing the chef at the camp. He was dressed just like his Chef character from South Park. That’s how everyone knew that was Isaac Hayes, aka Chef, playing a chef.

This week, though, we’re getting Isaac Hayes into the place I think most people expect him to be – blaxploitation action. Yes, it’s 1974’s Truck Turner, also known as Black Bullet. By the time Truck Turner hit screens in June 1974, Hayes was already an Oscar winner. Yeah, I don’t think many people realize that Hayes won the Oscar for Best Original Song for his “Theme from Shaft.” That was a major achievement in 1972. Most Best Original Song Oscar winners were kind of stuffy, or sappy, or, to put it mildly, very white. Shaft was a hit, though, and it signified a shift into the 70s that black folks could play in the movie sandbox too… quite well. Isaac Hayes put together a banger of a theme song for the movie, and Oscar history was made.

And that history? It wasn’t so much the act of winning an Oscar as much as Hayes was only the THIRD black person EVER to win a competitive Academy Award. The other two were Hattie McDaniel for Gone with the Wind and Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field. It was an incredible feat.

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Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

It’s time for a palette cleanser here at Camp Crappabuttawipe, my Enemaniacs!

We’ve had a bit of a rough patch here, guys. I think the only way to get B-Movie Enema back to feeling good about, well, life, is to revisit a classic from my childhood. Like with Ernest Goes to Camp, this movie, concerning a group of campers, is one I watched a TON as a kid. It’s time to bring out the Peanuts gang and talk about Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown.

This was chosen for the Camp Crappabuttawipe summer theme, not because it’s crap or something I wanna wipe-a my butt-a with. No. This was chosen because I dearly love this movie and knew, at some point, I needed a pick-me-up if things got dire during this summer. I finally needed my buddy Charlie Brown to come off the bench and pitch me a shutdown inning before things got out of hand with bad movie after bad movie.

And, trust me, after Return to Sleepaway Camp, I needed Chuck to help me out.

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Meatballs (1979)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Welcome back to the start of month #2 here at Camp Crappabuttawipe at B-Movie Enema!

Alright, as we get into July, the months are getting hotter and, naturally, it’s time to really heat things up here at camp, Enemaniacs. Aside from another stop off in the Sleepaway Camp franchise, we’re really ratcheting up the comedy, sexual shenanigans, and horror this month. But we kick things off this July 4th weekend here in the States with… a Canadian comedy. My ability to read a calendar and select the most appropriate movie for that date/weekend knows no bounds.

Especially with what’s coming up in a couple of weeks…

Anyway, 1979’s Meatballs is a significant movie for multiple reasons. First, this is the movie that propelled Bill Murray from Saturday Night Live stardom to movie stardom. This was his first top-billing in a movie. Within a year from this release, he would leave SNL (though part of that is due to changes behind the scenes with Lorne Michaels and NBC), and begin to rattle off hit after hit with Caddyshack, Stripes, a role in Tootsie, and eventually leading to the big blockbuster Ghostbusters. This would also be the first collaboration that Murray would have with Harold Ramis. Ramis was largely known for being a comedy writer, and a very good one. Like Murray, he spent the late 70s on TV on SCTV with the likes of Eugene Levy, John Candy, and Rick Moranis. In 1978, Ramis co-wrote National Lampoon’s Animal House, which, itself, would go on to become a massive influence on comedies through the 80s. If you can think of a comedy from the 70s and 80s that remains funny decades later, it’s very likely it was written in some part by Ramis.

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Caligula (1979/2024)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

B-Movie Enema has existed from the morning of the world, and it shall exist until the last star falls from the night. Although I have taken the form of the Enema Man, I am all men as I am no man and therefore, I am a God… of buttholes.

Ah yes… This was bound to happen, wasn’t it? There are infamous movies, and there is 1979’s Caligula. Known as the gigantic budget sex film produced by Bob Guccione and Penthouse Films International. Guccione was the founder of Penthouse Magazine. Penthouse, as per my reckoning, as a guy who once had a subscription to both that and Playboy in my younger years, was known for two things. The first was the Penthouse Forum, in which people supposedly wrote letters that sounded a little more like erotic fiction than anything else. The second was the fact that the women in the magazine, at least when I had the subscription, tended to be more of the adult actress type of models, and therefore, unlike Playboy, which specialized in girls-next-door types, the Penthouse Pets tended to be a little raunchier in their pictorials. Playboy was more artful. Penthouse was more sexual. Hustler was dirty.

But what people don’t really know is that Penthouse was involved in funding for films for a long time. They chipped in funding for studio pictures like Chinatown and The Day of the Locust. Guccione never produced his own film. So he decided he wanted to not just produce a movie of his own, but make a grand spectacle about a time in which spectacle was sexy as fuck. So he said that Caligula would be the guy he’d make his movie about. He started working with an Italian producer, Franco Rossellini, whose uncle, Roberto, was one of the most prominent Italian filmmakers. He then eventually hired author Gore Vidal as his screenwriter.

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Killdozer (1974)

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A new review at B-Movie Enema is KILLDOZING ITS WAY INTO YOUR COMPUTERS!

Hell yeah, brother! It’s time for this oddball made-for-television flick from 1974. Look out! It’s Killdozer! Killdozer was first released as a 1944 novella by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon wrote a ton of reviews (somewhere around 400, which means I have written more, so take that, Mr. Killdozer), along with a bunch of short stories, and about 11 novels. He even ghost-wrote an Ellery Queen mystery novel. Ellery Queen was someone my oldest brother would read when I was a kid.

Sturgeon also wrote a couple of very popular Star Trek episodes in the 60s. The first was “Shore Leave” which featured members of an away team seeing a bunch of crazy visions like characters from Alice in Wonderland and damsels in distress. The second was a VERY popular one, “Amok Time.” This introduced the Vulcan mating ritual, pon farr, and the first time the phrase “Live long and prosper” was uttered. It was also the first episode to feature the Vulcan hand salute. Some other scripts he wrote that went unproduced introduced the concept of the Prime Directive, the doctrine that Starfleet and the Federation operated by when visiting new worlds.

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Moment by Moment (1978)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Welcome to the most sexually charged review of B-Movie Enema ever.

This week, I’m going to review 1978’s Moment by Moment from director Jane Wagner. We’ll talk about Wagner momentarily, as she is the writer, collaborator, and wife of one of the stars from this infamous movie. But when it comes to Moment by Moment, there are two guys we need to focus on first. That would be the leading man of the movie, John Travolta, and producer Robert Stigwood.

Travolta’s rise to superstardom was already well on the way in 1978. Sure, he was already famous for the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. In 1976, he had a strong supporting role in the Brian De Palma horror masterpiece Carrie. But it was his leap to taking lead roles in 1977 that really made him a household name and one of the great movie stars for a few years to come.

And it was Robert Stigwood who launched that superstardom.

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Fright (1971)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle4 Comments

Welcome to another FRIGHTening review here at B-Movie Enema!

Quick! What was the first slasher film? The one that created the subgenre that would dominate the horror section of 80s video stores and late night cable TV? I bet you’re thinking Halloween. Or maybe you muttered to yourself, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” If you really wanted to flex some horror muscle or just simply sound like a smarty pants, you might have mentioned Black Christmas. Hell, I think I just heard someone shout Hitchcock’s Psycho.

I don’t know if there is any one real answer, but I want to enter 1971’s Fright into the conversation.

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Golden Needles (1974)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

This week’s B-Movie Enema is on the hunt for a legendary statue with needles, which, when stuck into an adult male in a very particular pattern, will turn that guy into a sexual Tyrannosaurus.

And it’s Joe Don Baker who is one of the men after it!

Yes, you read that right… Joe Don Baker is after the seven Golden Needles that will turn him into a sex machine (well, maybe not so much, but still…). If it wasn’t for a very specific appreciation for Baker, I might just have to barf. *Hurk*

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