Category: 1970s

Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979)

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Welcome to a new review here at B-Movie Enema.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I proudly call myself a MSTie. One of the great things about MST3K is the fact that it often exposed people to movies or shorts that they wouldn’t have known anything about. Granted, there are some more popular movies they covered on the Satellite of Love like a Gamera movie or a couple Godzilla films and even a couple of the late-stage Universal Classics like Revenge of the Creature and The Mole People. I’m even sure that there are a couple of the shorts they covered that I watched in school in the late 80s and early 90s.

But the real treasures tended to be the movies that were obscure but maybe even had a long-running stint on late-night TV or cable. That’s where this week’s featured movie that I’ll be reviewing likely lived most of its existence. I’m going to be taking a look at 1979’s Parts: The Clonus Horror.

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The Harder They Come (1972)

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Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review. This week, we’re going to do something a little different. We’re going to look at a movie that is an outright classic. This week, I’m going to look at 1972’s The Harder They Come by Perry Henzell starring reggae star Jimmy Cliff.

The Harder They Come is widely considered one of the most important films to ever come out of the Caribbean and very likely the most influential Jamaican film ever made. It was a massive hit in Jamaica. Henzell believed the success was mostly due to the naturalistic portrayal of black Jamaicans in recognizable locations and the local people portrayed in a way that allowed the black folks on the island to see themselves on the screen for the very first time. On top of that, when it was exported around the world in late 1972 and early 1973, the film is largely credited for bringing reggae to the world, especially the United States where it became a sensation. In the U.S., the film was distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures where it eventually became a midnight movie hit.

The only issue is that the Creole dialect spoken by locals, known as Jamaican Patois, was so thick, that it struggled to be the same sensation outside Jamaica. It became the first English language movie that required subtitles in the United States. Still, the reviews were mostly good. It would go on to become a cult classic over the decades.

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Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)

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Welcome to the grand conclusion of Russ Meyer Month II here at B-Movie Enema!

We finish with Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. This 1979 sexploitation satire not only brings our journey through another month of Russ Meyer movies to an end, but it, more or less, also signals the end of Meyer’s career itself. This is the final non-documentary film the King of Sexploitation Films ever made. He would end up doing some additional tongue-in-cheek documentaries like Mondo Topless, Too, Melissa Mounds, and Pandora Peaks but he never did do another narrative film after this movie’s release.

The reason for that is rather simple. While Meyer’s films were still popular, and he was a likable figure in the realm of softcore films, the hardcore porn industry became, for a lack of a better term, mainstream by the 70s with hits like Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat, and Debbi Does Dallas becoming as close to household titles as porn films could get. Meyer did still mostly retire from film a very wealthy fella. He personally oversaw the management and licensing of his own library of films. It’s likely why so many of his movies do not still have HD restorations or Blu-Ray releases. The exact state of the rights to his movies isn’t clearly defined from what I could find after a cursory search. If you go to the right places and the right conventions, you can usually score a 22-film box set for not too expensive at all, but the films’ looks and transfers are not consistent. It’s why some of the pics I used during the course of this month have been a bit rough.

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Black Snake (1973)

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Welcome to the penultimate week of Russ Meyer Month II here at B-Movie Enema! We move from the 60s Russ Meyer sex comedies and romps to his 70s bigger budgeted and slightly more interesting films. This week, I’m reviewing 1973’s flop Black Snake.

This one is an interesting entry in Meyer’s filmography. I labeled it a flop. It was. Meyer was not unaccustomed to making a movie that wouldn’t perform well. Sure, maybe not all of his 60s films scored well with critics, but almost none of them were outright flops. As the 70s dawned, though, Meyer’s films would change. This would mostly be due to 20th Century Fox calling on Meyer to make actual studio-backed films. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was the first and it was a hit – despite critics not really appreciating it. The next film for Fox was assigned to him after the original director had to back out. That film would be an adaptation of the book The Seven Minutes. Meyer’s friend, Roger Ebert, would write that the latter was not well-suited to Meyer’s affection toward eroticism. After all, it was a drama about law and freedom of speech. While the central thing in the movie did evolve around an erotic novel a teenager bought, it’s not really Meyer’s realm, even if the studio felt it was right for him based on the movies he made in the past and how he championed the abolishment of censorship.

The Seven Minutes was, by far, Meyer’s most expensive movie and it didn’t do well. In the end, it just didn’t work out. He would only complete one of the three films he was contracted to make for Fox after Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. The end was maybe on the horizon anyway. Black Snake would be his next movie and the first of the final five films he would ever make. While his next three would recoup some of his past magic, this film would prove to be a massive disappointment and bomb.

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Byleth: The Demon of Incest (1972)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle2 Comments

Welcome to B-Movie Enema – the blog that likes to review movies that either have really iffy content, yikesy poster art, or titles that make you cringe into oblivion.

And, with that, this is my review of the 1972 Italian gothic horror flick Byleth: The Demon of Incest. Sigh… Now, I hear this is a very bad movie. I’m not too unaccustomed to that. I mean, this is a blog named B-Movie Enema. I’m not entirely sure what made me want to buy Byleth when it was released by our friends over at Severin Films. I definitely recognized it was Italian, so that was a plus. I probably saw the cool artwork that adorns the poster/cover of the blu ray. I guess that was enough for me to want to get into it.

I don’t think I saw that subtitle. I probably didn’t see it until I opened my package with it inside. And then, I was, like, “Oh boy. I might have made a mistake.” I shouldn’t be so high and mighty over this. After all, I have dedicated an entire month to the Ilsa series and wrote about The Beast in Heat – both featured a whole lotta Nazis (the latter even included sort of bestiality). There is something about this movie that gives me a little bit of trepidation before diving in.

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The Stepford Wives (1975)

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I might need to tread lightly this week, my dear Enemaniacs.

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema. The featured movie for this review is the 1975 version of The Stepford Wives. The film was based on a novel of the same name by author Ira Levin. Levin is actually quite the author. All but a couple of his novels were adapted into fairly large Hollywood productions. Aside from The Stepford Wives, which was adapted twice with this version having a trio of TV movie sequels, he was also the author of Rosemary’s Baby, The Boys from Brazil, Sliver, and A Kiss Before Dying (this was also adapted into two different films). On top of that, Levin was also a playwright. Several of those plays were also adapted into films as well.

The original 1972 novel of The Stepford Wives is classified as a satirical horror novel. In fact, it was an early example of “feminist horror”. Which, today, seems weird. I mean, in that era, I guess it would have to be a dude writing a feminist something. Today, it might not quite fly. Generally, the novel seemed to go over fairly well, though. It had some themes it wanted to explore.

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Fritz the Cat (1972)

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Oh man… This one is long overdue.

Welcome to this week’s new B-Movie Enema review. If you’re roughly my age (46) and frequented cable TV and video stores in the 80s and 90s, there were a few titles that almost seemed mythical in their reputation. These are your Faces of Death movies or Heavy Metal or Flesh Gordon or Wizards or maybe even something like a movie that had a tad more mainstream acceptance like Watership Down. These were movies that were full of wonder in the fact that they were either seemingly explicitly adult or were gory or, as is the case with Wizards, Heavy Metal, and Watership Down, were animated movies that were either not for kids or featured some pretty extreme stuff that would scar kids.

Then, there was Fritz the Cat.

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Psychomania (1973)

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Biker flicks were pretty popular between the mid-50s to the mid-70s. But not like the hero rides around on a bike and is bad ass and saves a little town from, I dunno, Nazis or something. No, some of these movies featured down right psychopathic killers on bikes who come in, drink your beer, rape your women, and, I dunno, wore Nazi paraphernalia. Wait… Anyway, here, in America, bikers kind of represented this “take no shit from anyone” kind of attitude that screams conservo-libertarian “shove your rights up your ass, my rights are more important” mindset.

They were a menace to more normal sensibilities of the typical suburban set. So much so, it got to the point where if you wore too much denim or not enough sleeves and didn’t wash your long hair and beard often enough, people were probably thinking you were a biker and probably going to bust heads. Look, I know I’m kind of shot out of a cannon here for the start of this week’s B-Movie Enema review, but I’m catching up to the thread here again.

Okay, so the origins of the “outlaw biker” films go back to Marlon Brando’s The Wild One in 1953. That was the movie that kind of revealed the subculture of biker clubs that had existed for a few years prior. While the success of that film would lead to a lot more movies, and even a book by Hunter S. Thompson about the most famous gang, Hell’s Angels, it really was our ol’ buddy Russ Meyer who made Motorpsycho in 1965 and turned this into a more exploitation type of biker gang flick. By the 70s, biker flicks were exported to the United Kingdom. Maybe our most popular example is this week’s featured flick – 1973’s Psychomania (originally released as The Death Wheelers in the United States).

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