Category: 1970s

Beast of the Yellow Night (1971)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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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Stunt Rock (1978)

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This week, B-Movie Enema goes down under for another Australian treat.

This week’s movie comes from Brian Trenchard-Smith. He’s someone we’ve seen around these parts a few times. The first movie of his I ever looked at was one he was only a co-producer on, 1982’s Blood Tide. However, I later took a look at two other films of his that are way better. The first was also from 1982, the dystopian, Most Dangerous Game-inspired Turkey Shoot. Then, I looked at the first of two sequels to one of my all-time favorite Halloween movies to watch, Night of the Demons 2.

I pretty much knew that Trenchard-Smith was someone I could cover a large portion of his filmography in a few different ways. Hell, 1983’s BMX Bandits features a teenaged Nicole Kidman in the early stages of her career. There was a trio of movies of his that we’ve looked at over at Film Seizure – Leprechaun 3, Leprechaun 4: In Space, and Dead End Drive-In. Those two Leprechaun movies could very easily appear here on this blog. But I decided to go a little more interesting for this week when it comes to Trenchard-Smith’s filmography. This week, I’m going to look at the mockumentary/action/musical Stunt Rock from 1978.

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Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)

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Welcome to a brand new B-Movie Enema review!

This week, we’re going back to the world of Italian cinema and, for the first time in quite a while, the horror subgenre of said Italian cinema – giallo. Not only are we going back to those realms but this week is for something kind of new too. This week’s feature, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, was made by Italian horror/thriller/giallo master Dario Argento.

Now, true, I did cover a couple movies he produced, namely Demons and Demons 2. I also talked about him tangentially when I looked at Shock because it starred his ex-wife, Daria Nicolodi, as well as his daughter, Asia Argento, when she appeared in xXx. However, for nearly 60 years, Argento has been known for being a writer, director, and producer of mostly horror films. But… that’s not exactly where he started. When he was working his way up the ladder, he began as a writer. In the mid-60s, Argento worked on scripts for several different movies of different genres. The biggest film he worked on the script for, without a doubt, was 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

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