Geoff and Nurse Disembuadee once again go to William Shatner for an episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series. This week, they go to war against the Kingdom of the Spiders!
Category: 1970s
B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #53 – Hannah, Queen of the Vampires
For the Season 5 premiere, Geoff and Nurse Disembaudee go to Vampire Island and check out this Spanish chiller from 1973, Hannah, Queen of the Vampires!
W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975)
Oh boy, do we have one that I picked up along the way last year at a convention that I couldn’t wait to feature on B-Movie Enema!
This week, we go to the mid-70s and the first ever movie covered here starring a true American icon of the decade, Burt motherfuckin’ Reynolds. This past August at HorrorHound, I was visiting my favorite table where I often find several, ahem, gray market, movies that aren’t so easy to find in the flesh. Staring at me was this movie with Burt Reynolds smiling right at me. I looked at the title and read it aloud to myself… W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings. I chuckled to myself knowing that Burt was going to give me everything I could possibly want in this and more, especially because it was a comedy.
Before we discuss the man himself, let’s talk about who actually directed this film.
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Drive-In (1976)
Let’s pile into the car and go to a movie at the local Drive-In!
Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review. As you can see by the title and my clever little opening salvo for the review, I’m looking at 1976’s Drive-In directed by Rod Amateau. If you look at the poster for Drive-In, and then look at the poster for George Lucas’ 1973 charmer American Graffiti… I think it’s clear that Columbia Pictures was leaning heavily on the coming-of-age style and depictions of the characters used by American Graffiti to sell Drive-In.
It’s obvious others picked up on it as it often was pointed out in reviews at the time. However, what’s interesting that some critics had some positive things to say about a movie that was very easy to call exploitation and trying to suckle at the teet of American Graffiti’s success. Critics pointed out that while not every performance by the young cast works, it’s got appeal. Others just flat-out called it likable for being easygoing. It’s often called funny by retaining a youthful, juvenile energy. So, yeah, this is a movie that, despite me just becoming aware of it over the last six months or so, was somewhat fondly reviewed during its day.
The one standout in the reception section of Wikipedia was good ol’ Gene Siskel. In a negative review, he said he wished the script for Drive-In had been tossed out in favor of the fake movie, Disaster ’76, to have been made instead. Oh, Gene…
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The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)
Welcome to B-Movie Enema for another review to sate your appetites.
So I was trying to think what would make for a good review for this week. I was driving along the roads of New South Wales in Australia and took a detour into the French countryside. I eventually found my way through my European GPS, which was just some road signs, to a strange little village. That’s when it struck me… I want to talk about Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris.
Turns out, the same inspiration that struck me to talk about this movie with a very peculiar title was the same inspiration that struck Weir to make the film to begin with. He was in Europe and claimed that the road signs on the French roads diverted him into what he called strange little villages. From this, being an outsider from a wholly different continent, he got the idea to make a movie where the inhabitants of a small village, that he named Paris, profit from car wrecks.
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Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979)
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)
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)
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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