The spooky season at B-Movie Enema: The Series kicks off as Geoff and Nurse Disembaudee check into 1972’s Asylum.
Category: 1970s
The Last House on the Left (1972)
Welcome to October, Enemaniacs.
October is a big deal here at B-Movie Enema. Ten years ago on October 3, the blog was created with the release of an Exorcist ripoff with a Rocky Horror-esque title from Italy, The Eerie Midnight Horror Show. I wouldn’t necessarily go back and read too many of those old reviews. They aren’t particularly great as the tone and the vibe of this blog were ever-shifting and evolving. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate milestones and the history of this blog.
To do so, and considering the 450th review is also due next week with a movie I’ve long been planning for such an occasion, we’re going to be celebrating Halloween a little grimier this year. This month, we’re going to dig deep into four 70s movies that encapsulate the harder-edged attitude of horror in the decade. So, look forward to things getting pretty trigger-warningly real over the next four weeks. And we also get a bonus Halloween review as per the usual around here. It all starts right here with one of the most famous, and highly-regarded, exploitation horror films of all time, Wes Craven’s debut film, The Last House on the Left.
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Kiss of the Tarantula (1975)
Spiders… why’d it have to be spiders?
Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema review. This time around, I’m looking at the 1975 horror film Kiss of the Tarantula directed by Chris Munger. Munger only did three films, of which this film was his last. A few years later, he directed a single episode of The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. That was pretty much the end of Munger’s career.
This movie… Well, I thought I knew what this movie was. This found its way onto the list to cover because the title of the film was so recognizable. Kiss of the Tarantula is the title of a movie that somewhere in my mixed-up memory was this creepy movie. That’s when I realized I was thinking of Black Belly of the Tarantula, the Italian gaillo film by Paolo Cavara. Trust me when I say that will eventually make it onto the blog.
But then I thought, “Wait… Isn’t there a movie from the 80s about kissing spiders? Yeah. Is that what I was thinking of?” Then I was like, “Oh, no, you goober, that’s the 1985 Academy Award-winning film Kiss of the Spider Woman.” That movie is probably a little too high-brow for B-Movie Enema. It was at this point that I realized I had no idea what this movie was. This was only furthered by the fact that I recognized no names in the cast. This was a movie that was entirely new to me and I had no idea of anything about it.
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Beast of the Yellow Night (1971)
Happy Friday the 13th, Enemaniacs!
For this week’s B-Movie Enema review, what better way to celebrate this once or twice-a-year occasion than to cover a movie about the one person who best embodies Friday the 13th? That’s right, we’ve got a movie featuring the Lord of the Flies himself, Satan! What… You thought I was gonna do that Jason fella? Well, you shoulda learned last October, the last time the 13th fell on a Friday, I’m gonna be a goof about this and always fuck it up. I’m saving Mr. Voorhees for another time.
No, for this week, I’m going to return to the filmography of Filipino director Eddie Romero. The last time we saw a Romero film was the kooky Beyond Atlantis movie. What we’re looking at today is the movie that preceded that movie by a couple years, 1971’s Beast of the Yellow Night. Like I said, this has a bit more… devilish flavor to it.
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Brain of Blood (1971)
Can you believe, after 441 reviews, Brain of Blood is only the second time Al Adamson has been reviewed on B-Movie Enema?
Yeah. I couldn’t either! Al Adamson is one of the big names in low-budget schlock horror in the 60s and 70s. The only other movie of his I ever mentioned is Black Samurai which I covered, like eight years ago. And, to be honest, I didn’t really know who Al Adamson was at that time. I was still in my fledgling days of being a blogger covering schlock films and just getting into the stuff at the time. Plus, I was more keen to talk about the blaxploitation elements of that movie than the guy making the movie.
Adamson made dozens of movies. His beginnings are that of just assisting his father, Victor Adamson, himself a filmmaker. After helping his dad with the western Half Way to Hell, Al struck out on his own to make his own movies. He could crank out a lot of drive-in fair like a Roger Corman, but the difference was that, for the most part, Adamson seemingly worked way cheaper and with kind of half-baked scripts. For the most part, you’d think of him as a monster movie guy who didn’t so much care about the rest of the stuff as long as they could advertise a monster.
Al Adamson often worked with a lot of the same people, Kent Taylor is someone in this movie who appeared in other Adamson films, and made lots of friends during his filmmaking career. Interestingly, early on, he worked with two pretty big-time cinematographers – Vilmos Zsigmond, a four-time Oscar nominee and winner for Best Cinematography for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and László Kovács who went on to make BIG movies with BIG directors including being the cinematographer on 1984’s Ghostbusters.
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Ravagers (1979)
Welcome back to another installment of B-Movie Enema.
This week, we’re going to the late 70s with a bunch of recognizable faces and names for a post-apocalyptic thriller called Ravagers. This is the pre-Mad Max era of post-apocalytic films. Maybe, to a certain extent, this has more of a lineage to something like Planet of the Apes than what most people my age grew up with in terms of the loner in the wasteland fighting off people trying to steal his gas type of dystopian future flick. Honestly, the cover of the movie and the poster/promotional materials showing roughs attacking people in the streets of a city recall a lot of the early 80s, bonkers Italian dystopian films too.
Now, I don’t necessarily want to set myself up for disappointment, but this might just be a diamond in the rough. The copy I have of Ravagers states that this “all but forgotten post-apocalyptic action thriller is waaaay more decent than some of the reviews and its abandoned status would suggest” so I think this might have something to it. It goes on to talk about grand sets and frequent chases and it even comments on the various names that appear in this movie too. Again, sometimes gassing up something like that in this way can lead to disappointment, but I’ve been known to find some real gems when I go to HorrorHound Weekend and I’m kind of hoping this will be one of those times again.
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Queen Kong (1976)
And a new challenger steps into the ring at B-Movie Enema!
Welcome to a new review and… woof. 1976’s Queen Kong is pretty bad. Pret-ty pret-ty bad. For those who have, somehow, followed me for years as I keep punching myself in my own dick time and again on this blog, you know I got pretty upset around 1986’s King Kong Lives. The reason why I loathed that movie is that I sincerely love the 1976 version of King Kong. In fact, it’s my favorite version. It’s the one I saw so many times when I was growing up. To have a sequel kind of dumps all over the sad ending of that movie. King Kong Lives felt especially hurtful because it was the same guy producing that as the 1976 King Kong and it felt like a kind of cheap follow-up to Godzilla 1985.
Now, when it comes to Queen Kong, this week’s movie, we have a whoooole different story. This is just a deeply bad movie. I can’t even be mad at it. It’s that kind of bad. But… Notice this movie is dated 1976. In a way, this is one of the first instances of a mockbuster. It was well-publicized that Dino De Laurentiis was making a new King Kong film. So British filmmakers decided to slip out ahead of it with a parody. It’s a little exploitation. It’s a little sex comedy. It’s all farce. So, in that, there’s a tiny bit of charm to this very bad movie. I’m not sure if it’s as fun as, say, A*P*E when it comes to bad movies you can watch with your buddies and a case of cheap beer, but there’s charm.
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B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #63 – The Fourth Victim
In this episode, Geoff and Nurse Disembaudee watch an Italian thriller classic directed by Eugenio Martin and starring Caroll Baker – The Fourth Victim!
bmovieenema.com 