Category: 1970s

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

“This is my happening, and it freaks me out!”

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema’s Russ Meyer Month.  We’ve finally gotten to the back end of the month and his 70s features.  It also brings us to two features Meyer did with famous Chicago movie critic Roger Ebert.  First up, it’s the one the duo is most famous for – Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Meyer and Ebert cranked out a treatment that came to 127 pages in about a week and a half.  Ebert completed the screenplay in three weeks.  It was intended to be a straight sequel to the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls.  Now, here’s where we start in on the rabbit hole that leads to Meyer and Ebert coming in. Continue reading “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)” →

The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (1976)

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Not that long ago, I covered the movie The Single Girls which starred Claudia Jennings.  Our lovely leading lady is back in a fun little action/exploitation/heist movie this week!

The Great Texas Dynamite Chase comes to us from director Michael Pressman.  Pressman is hardly a schlock auteur.  He would go on to make the cult classic Boulevard Nights which has been selected to be preserved by the Library of Congress as well as working with comedy heavyweights like Dan Aykroyd (Doctor Detroit) and Richard Pryor (Some Kind of Hero).  He’s more recently gone into television directing having done episodes of some Law and Order shows, Blue Bloods, and winning Emmys for Picket Fences.

My point is, this is hardly a flash in the pan kind of filmmaker.  And of course, The Great Texas Dynamite Chase would also be released by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.  However, it should be of note that this is an exploitation movie that comes with fairly decent reviews.  This was praised for being exciting and sexy enough for the drive-in crowd while still being tongue-in-cheek with its comedy to attract the older audiences.  I suspect it played better to the Texas and southwest crowd, but found an audience over the years and is truly an exploitation gem.

Continue reading “The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (1976)” →

Felicity (1978)

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Oh, and you thought I was done with Severin Films releases that are connected in some way to the French book/movie/character Emmanuelle…

Well, we’re not.  This week’s feature, Felicity, features a young girl, played by the lovely Glory Annen, who is a sheltered Catholic school girl who indulges in erotic novels… as well as a lesbian love affair.  You might remember Annen in another late 70s film in which she was indulging in a lesbian affair that I’ve already covered – Norman J. Warren’s Prey.  In that, she was the kept orphan of her parents’ housekeeper who ran afoul of an alien who was more fox than man.

I find Annen particularly interesting.  If you check out that previous article on Prey, I touch upon her involvement with a man who was possibly involved in some pretty deep criminal shit in the horse racing industry.  Since her death in 2017, her various notes and documents compiled about her relationship with Ivan Allan have begun the editing process to create exposés and a series of books detailing that alleged criminality of Allan.  Continue reading “Felicity (1978)” →

Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

Oh boy…  That Emanuelle girl is back, and guess what, Enemaniacs…  She’s more erotic and exotic than ever!

That’s how they advertised Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals on posters and various other ads.  That does beg the question of exactly how erotic she can be if there are cannibals and shit running about.  Trust me, folks, I have seen some Italian cannibal flicks and they tend not to be especially sexy.  In fact, they tend to be, like, super duper gross.

So leave it to Joe D’Amato to come in and see what he can do.  First thing’s first, he brings Laura Gemser along as a photojournalist who finds a woman in a loony bin who isn’t just a cannibal herself, but has Amazonian tattoos all over her skin.  That’s a plus…  Not the tatted up cannibal broad, but Laura Gemser.  She’s always welcome here at B-Movie Enema. Continue reading “Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977)” →

Caged Heat (1974)

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Oh baby do we have lots to talk about today, my dear Enemaniacs!

This week’s B-Movie Enema is Caged Heat.  It might, at first, come off as just a run of the mill, women-in-prison flick from the mid-70s.  It might even come off as some of that sleaze Roger Corman was trading in during the 70s as well.  To a very minor degree, I’d say you’re right about both things.

But… there’s a twist.  You see, Corman wasn’t happy with the women-in-prison flicks previously released by his New World Pictures.  He thought they were maybe missing something, something important, something fresh and new.  So he tapped a producer at the studio to see what life can be breathed into this subgenre of exploitation.  Enter Jonathan Demme.  He had produced a previous Corman women-in-prison release, The Hot Box.   This time, though, Demme wasn’t going to settle as a writer or producer.  He wanted to direct. Continue reading “Caged Heat (1974)” →

Hollywood Boulevard (1976)

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Happy Valentine’s Day, ya jerks!

Sorry, I get surly around Valentine’s Day.  And there are many reasons for that.  I always get one year older (and one step closer to sweet, merciful peace that is death) around this time of year.  I tend not to like seeing all the stupid commercials that remind me that, yeah, I’m eating for one on VD with my cats.  It’s just a general reminder of a dark, lonely existence…

But not this year!

Nope!  This year, I decided to send all you Enemaniacs a Valentine in the form of a Roger Corman-produced, Candice Rialson-starring romp called Hollywood Boulevard!  The story of this movie, though, helps make this a little more fun. Continue reading “Hollywood Boulevard (1976)” →

The Single Girls (1974)

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“If they couldn’t get him easy…  They got him hard…”

With a tagline like that, how could this NOT be featured on B-Movie Enema?!?  This week’s feature, 1974’s The Single Girls, will open the book on two elements that I’m kind of surprised has taken me over 200 articles to finally get to:

  1. Ferd and Beverly Sebastian
  2. Claudia Jennings

And, if you ask me, this comes not a moment too soon. Continue reading “The Single Girls (1974)” →

Chinese Hercules (1973)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle2 Comments

Oh boy, I’m pretty excited for this one.

Back in June, I attended PopCon here in Indianapolis, and this guy had a table full of posters of various sizes.  He had this stack of lobby posters that he was selling for five bucks each.  It’s in this stack that I found a Goldengirl poster to gift to Brad Jones, the Cinema Snob, himself, and I also found one for this movie… Chinese Hercules.

This marks the return of Bolo Yeung, billed in this movie as Yang Sze, who appeared in The Clones of Bruce Lee that I covered back in August.  Bolo wasn’t just a martial artist and actor, but he was also a bodybuilder.  That probably is why 1) he’s often portrayed as a giant beast and 2) is Chinese Hercules. Continue reading “Chinese Hercules (1973)” →