Category: 1980s

The Beastmaster (1982)

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Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema!

This week, we’re traveling to the kingdom of Aruk for this 80s classic from Don Coscarelli. Now, the origin of The Beastmaster actually goes back to 1959. Andre Norton wrote the novel The Beast Master about a Navajo war veteran set in a futuristic and sci-fi setting. When writers Coscarelli and Paul Pepperman adapted the novel, Norton was unhappy. We’re going to come back around to Norton in just a moment, but Coscarelli would eventually sign on as director for the film and Pepperman then took the role of Producer alongside Lebanese producer Sylvio Tabet. Tabet was a producer on movies like Fade to Black and Evilspeak. Later, he was a producer on The Cotton Club and Dead Ringers. So he was not an unknown at the time.

Interestingly, the only film Tabet directed was 1991’s Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time.

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Gleaming the Cube (1989)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

Oh yeah, dudes and dudettes, it’s some more radical times ahead for this week’s B-Movie Enema review!

This week, we’re going to be Gleaming the Cube and… well, hopefully… trying to learn what that term even means because it was clearly important enough to name an entire movie around it. This movie comes to us in that sweet period in the 80s that was totally trying to ride the gnarly coattails of tubular fads to the max. We’ve talked about skateboarding before on here. For more grindage, check out my review of 1986’s Thrashin’ from David Winters.

I don’t think I have much more to say, but I will bring up three important people connected to Gleaming the Cube that are of note. The first is the screenwriter for this film, Michael Tolkin. Tolkin was still relatively new to the scene at this point. He had one screenplay prior to this movie, the 1982 unfinished film Gossip. Gleaming the Cube was his first film and he also served as Associate Producer as well. Frankly, this isn’t that bad of an accomplishment. Sure, the reviews weren’t great, but a lot of people my age and slightly younger really like this movie. However, his big splash came in 1992 when he wrote The Player for Robert Altman. This would garner Tolkin an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Later in the 90s, he wrote the blockbuster Deep Impact. More recently, he developed the very highly appreciated miniseries The Offer about the making of The Godfather.

Directing Gleaming the Cube is Australian Graeme Clifford who was at the helm for the 1982 drama Frances that racked up a pair of acting Oscar nominations for Jessica Lange and Kim Stanley. While his directing credits aren’t huge, his editing credits are. He directed the wonderful 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now. He followed that up in 1975 with the all-time cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Then, in 1976, he edited David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. He finished out his editing career with Sylvester Stallone’s F.I.S.T. in 1978 and the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice starring Jack Nicholson and, hey… Jessica Lange. I’m guessing that might have led to her getting the role in Frances.

Let’s be serious, though… The draw of Gleaming the Cube is the hot up-and-coming Christian Slater.

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One Dark Night (1982)

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It’s time for yet another B-Movie Enema article (the 425th to be exact)!

This week, I’m looking at a movie that I’ve known for decades. Even going back to when I was a little kid and watching scary movies between my fingers trying to hide my eyes, I seem to remember a movie about a girl spending a night alone inside a mausoleum and ultimately getting attacked by zombies and having to fight her way out. The problem was, every time I tried looking up what that movie was I was trying to remember so I can try to find it to watch again, somehow either I kept getting it mixed up with or finding the result to be 1981’s Hell Night starring Linda Blair.

It’s not that because it’s 1982’s One Dark Night starring Meg Tilly!

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Death Ship (1980)

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Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review. This week, we’ve got ourselves another movie that’s been sitting on the stack of movies I’ve been wanting to cover for a long while. Let me know if you’ve heard this before: Let me know if you’ve heard this before (see what I did there?), this week’s featured movie, 1980’s Death Ship, was something I saw for the first time on the long-defunct, yet always wonderful, Bizarre TV Roku app. I think I probably came into it about halfway through or toward the end of the movie and watched it to the end.

However, because I came into it late and then sought out what the movie was based on the Google keyword search “George Kennedy Richard Crenna on a boat horror movie”, it’s not a movie that I remember much of, so this review is now going to basically be a new first-time watch.

The movie was directed by Alvin Rakoff. Rakoff is a Canadian director who had a pretty long career. Most of his work over the course of, like, 45 years was for television. He didn’t make too many feature films made for movie theaters. In fact, Death Ship was one of the very last feature films he directed. With just a cursory scroll through his IMDb credits, Death Ship and The Saint (the television series which he directed an episode) are really the only two things that I recognize. However, a cursory scroll through his Wikipedia page did reveal something very interesting for me personally. Rakoff’s first wife was Jacqueline Hill. Hill played Barbara Wright, one of the trio of companions of the First Doctor when Doctor Who launched in 1963. Hill and Rakoff were married from 1958 until her death in 1993.

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Meet the Feebles (1989)

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Welcome to another review here at B-Movie Enema, ya filthy animals! Yeah… I suppose that’s a proper way to start because we have some animals who have filthy lives in this week’s movie. This week, I’m going to be digging deep into the nether regions of Peter Jackson’s 1989 musical black comedy Meet the Feebles.

Now, when you think about Peter Jackson, I think what comes to mind is his very polished films like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the remake of King Kong he made, or maybe the unpopular, but reevaluated, fun romp that was The Frighteners. The point I’m trying to make is that he’s well-known today as a very top-tier filmmaker. Think of him as the George Lucas of the 90s and 00s. He set up his own special effects company, Weta Workshop. He does nothing half-assed. He has big visions and ideas and it usually pays off in moola for studios.

He’s been nominated for nine Academy Awards (and won three of them), he unearthed and revived a lot of old Beatles footage for a hugely successful documentary, and he’s done more to popularize Hobbits and Elves and Wizards than maybe even Wizards of the Coast has, but let’s back it up a little bit to the early part of his career, shall we?

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Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (1984)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle4 Comments

You’ve got monster!

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema. We’re headed to the wilderness of Arkansas this week. I’m going to review a sequel to a very popular cult hit from the early 70s, Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues. Both 1972’s The Legend of Boggy Creek and Boggy Creek II were directed by Charles B. Pierce. Pierce is an interesting character. He was born in Hammond, Indiana. Hammond is best known for being a sort of suburb of Chicago and the hometown of author Jean Shepherd who used it as the template for Hohman, Indiana in the holiday classic A Christmas Story.

Pierce based his movies on the legend of the Fouke Monster who is said to reside in the wooded area and the creek marshes around Fouke, Arkansas. The Fouke Monster is just the Texarkana version of Bigfoot or the Sasquatch. It supposedly attacked the home of a couple in May of 1971. Pierce, fascinated by the tales told about the monster from that story, made a docudrama about the event which was The Legend of Boggy Creek.

While the movie was a massive hit, Pierce has always admitted that he doesn’t necessarily believe in the legend of the creature, but is far more interested and fascinated by the folklore and tales the people told about the monster.

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Ninja in the Claws of the C.I.A. (1981)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and welcome back to me going through my backlog of movies that I’ve either picked up from conventions or, as is the case with this month, bought from Vinegar Syndrome.

I think we might have something of a special little movie this week. We’re going to be looking at John Liu writing and directing himself into Ninja in the Claws of the C.I.A. which was originally known as Sah shou ying as well as simply Claws of the C.I.A. and there’s even a version called Made in China. I really don’t know what I want to reveal to the people who haven’t seen this movie, so… I think we’ll just start by talking about John Liu.

When I went googling for John Liu, something really awesome happened. All I was getting were links, articles, and information on John Liu, Democratic member of the New York State Senate. Now, my brain is utterly shattered and broken in terms of being able to work properly. So I think it’s safe for you to bet that I was thinking that guy and the lead of this movie were the same dude. Then, I began thinking about him bringing legislation to the New York Senate floor by way of kicking motherfuckers’ asses. Like, he steps up to the podium, asks for time from the President of the New York Senate, and then after casually removing his tie, he just walks over to some Republican he beefs with and they just kung fu fight.

I wish that was what really happens in state senates and congresses across the country.

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Amazon Jail 2 (1987)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and the continuation of the Amazon Jail saga with Conrado Sanchez’s Amazon Jail 2!

This month, we’ve got a set of releases from Vinegar Syndrome in 2023. We looked at the first film of the Amazon Jail duology last week. We finish that up this week and move on to some more fun next week. We’re going to be able to get right into the movie very quickly because these movies are wildly obscure so there’s not much of note I can really dive into in the background.

I will follow up on what I discussed for a short bit last week and say this comes from the later days of the Mouth of Garbage exploitation movement in Brazil. That began in the 70s out of Sao Paulo and tackled sex comedies for the most part as well as horror and action films. By this time, a regime change in Brazil led to the loosening of censorship in cinema so porno films began to be produced by the time Amazon Jail 2 was released.

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