1980s

Madman (1981)

Published on July 31, 2026August 6, 2026 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Gather ’round the campfire, kiddos and Enemaniacs… This week’s B-Movie Enema review is going to tell you the harrowing tale of Madman Marz!

Welcome back to Camp Crappbuttawipe! This week, we go to 1981 for Joe Giannone’s Madman. This one is a very interesting movie. Madman has a split audience. On one hand, this movie sucks. Well, maybe not so much that it sucks as much as it has a dual legacy. Critics, of course, hated the movie, with some calling it unremarkable or inept. But, it also has a pretty serious cult following. I think a lot of it is because the Madman Marz character has a cool name, and the type of look Madman Marz has seems more reasonable for a killer that lives in the woods and will kill people at a camp or hanging out in cabins.

I think there are a few things that allowed Madman to grow that cult following. For one, it is one of only three films that starred Gaylen Ross. Ross came from good ol’ Indianapolis, Indiana, the home base of B-Movie Enema Industries. While Creepshow and Madman have their fans, I don’t think anyone would say that’s where they know Ross from. No, there is only one movie that you can link Gaylen Ross to, and that’s the greatest horror film ever made, George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. I already mentioned the character of Madman Marz, with his cool name and cool crazy look.

The third thing that might help this movie be a cult classic is the inspiration for this movie – the legend of Cropsey.

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Twisted Nightmare (1988)

Published on July 24, 2026July 30, 2026 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

It’s week #8 of Camp Crappabuttawipe at B-Movie Enema!

I think we’ve been on a pretty good run over the entirety of this summer camp business we’ve had going on as of late. Okay, sure, you can potentially say the two Sleepaway Camp sequels are far behind the best of the best thus far in the theme season, but… They weren’t thaaaat bad, were they? Ernest Goes to Camp, while far from Shakespeare, and I mean Todd Shakespeare from Corydon, Indiana (who did you think I was referring to?), it was fun reliving a part of my beloved childhood before I grew up and realized the world kinda sucks shit.

Largely, we’re on a hot streak with the likes of Little Darlings being kind of a revelation, Marshmallow being an excellent micro-budget gem, Meatballs being a movie that gave the world of cinema Bill Murray and Harold Ramis working perfectly together, and Wet Hot American Summer.

Well, it’s time to fuck that shit up for a couple of weeks… Yeah, we’re in the back half of Camp Crappabuttawipe, and these long, hot summer days are starting to signal that feeling inside when you really just want to go the fuck home. You’re tired of archery. You’re tired of making wallets and other leather-working stuff. You’re fucking sick of that muddy-ass lake you toss yourself into without the knowledge of whether there are leeches waiting to grab hold of your scrotum. We need to dig deep and just power through because I’m starting to feel like I really frontloaded this theme series.

So, maybe appropriately, this week’s movie is 1988’s Twisted Nightmare.

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Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989)

Published on July 10, 2026July 16, 2026 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

TEENAGE WASTELAND, oh, yeah… TEENAGE WASTELAND!

Oh, hi, Enemaniacs. You’ve caught me singing along to one of my favorite songs from The Who, “Baba O’Riley.” And that brings us to week #6 here at B-Movie Enema’s summer-long theme of Camp Crappa Buttawipe! This week, we bounce back into the Sleepaway Camp franchise with Sleepaway Camp III: Baba O’Riley… er… I mean Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland!

There’s not much more to say about the behind-the-scenes business that wasn’t covered last month when I talked about the first sequel. Both sequels were made back-to-back to save on overall production costs. The first of the two movies was the more expensive of the two, coming in at about a million and a half bucks. This movie used the rest of the $2 million that was granted to make the two movies. Both films were written by Fritz Gordon, and his appreciation for playing around with character names is still on display here. The last film used the first names of the Brat Pack and other young stars of the era. This film uses character names from sources like West Side Story, The Munsters, and The Brady Bunch.

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Ernest Goes to Camp (1987)

Published on June 26, 2026July 2, 2026 by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

We close out the first month of Camp Crappabuttawipe at B-Movie Enema with one that falls into the column of “just for me.”

Despite the overly clever name of this theme summer, not all the movies that are getting covered here are truly crappy or butt-wipe material. No, I think we’ve already seen a couple diamonds in the rough already this month. However, sprinkled in amongst the slate for our summer camp shenanigans are a couple of movies that mean quite a bit to me on a more personal level. 1987’s Ernest Goes to Camp most certainly falls into that, um… camp.

The character of Ernest P. Worrell, played by American actor Jim Varney, was one of those creations that we see crop up from time to time. These are the characters specifically created by an advertising agency (Ernest’s creators being Carden & Cherry from Nashville, Tennessee) that are so popular or catch enough attention beyond the character’s original intention to promote various local businesses, that he becomes a national figure, used to promote global brands, and then launch that into a further pop culture footprint to appear in his own movies and TV shows. Most recently, I think GEICO’s Caveman characters were the last to attempt this, but think if Lily from AT&T or Flo from Progressive Insurance suddenly got to star in their own movies. That’s what Ernest was in the 80s.

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Little Darlings (1980)

Published on June 19, 2026June 25, 2026 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Welcome back for another entry in this year’s Camp Crappabuttawipe at B-Movie Enema.

You know, summer camp isn’t just running for your life from a crazed killer. Nah, it’s also a place where coming-of-age comedy-dramas can be told too. That’s kind of what we have here with 1980’s Little Darlings. This movie comes to us from first-time director Ronald F. Maxwell. He was only 30 years old when this film went into production. However, he had already been a professional working in television since the mid 70s. Maxwell followed this up with another film starring one of the stars of this movie, The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (along with Dennis Quaid and Mark Hamill in between Star Wars sequels). Later in his career, Maxwell shifted to Civil War epics, the largely appreciated Gettysburg in 1993 and the largely despised Gods and Generals in 2003.

As for our leading ladies in this movie, the other one who would work with Maxwell follow-up is Kristy McNichol. McNichol was already a veteran of television shows from her teenage years. She was a regular nominee for Emmys in the late 70s for the drama series Family. Later in her career, she would appear in 100 episodes of the comedy Empty Nest. With Little Darlings, McNichol would follow that up with the aforementioned The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia along with a Golden Globe-nominated performance in Neil Simon’s Only When I Laugh. Unfortunately, her appearance in the 1982 comedy The Pirate Movie (a movie absolutely slaughtered by critics upon release) probably harmed her ability to keep up the momentum her earlier film appearances granted her.

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Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988)

Published on June 5, 2026June 11, 2026 by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

The summer is upon us, campers, and to celebrate, B-Movie Enema is spending the next three weeks camping in the great outdoors.

While movies set at summer camps are largely a horror thing, there are comedies, dramas, and kids’ flicks we can pull from over the next 13 weeks. Some are pretty crappy. Some are pretty funny. One is just for me. It’s gonna be a good time. So, with that, I want to welcome all my Enemaniacs to what I’m calling:

Here at Camp Crappabuttawipe, we aren’t on stolen land. No, we paid for it, and it was surprisingly expensive too. But we’ve got lots of activities for the Enemaniac looking to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday, modern life. We’ve got slasher killers, crazy hulking killers, and… um… legends of crazy slasher killers. But wait! There’s more! We’ll have raft races against other cabins. We’ll probably play a little grab ass here and there. We’ll even try to reconnect with our actress mother, who was known as a scream queen in her career before her tragic death. It’s gonna be fun!

And it all starts with the long-awaited return of a horror franchise to B-Movie Enema – Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers.

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Missing in Action (1984)

Published on May 22, 2026May 28, 2026 by Geoff Arbuckle4 Comments

This review was written in advance of Chuck Norris passing away on March 19,2026 following a medical emergency. It’s not exactly written to be a tribute or an in memoriam to Norris, but more of a typical review of Missing In Action. That said, this movie is one of the more important ones in his filmography and the start of a franchise we will return to later in the year. It will be at that point that there will be more to say about the passing of an 80s action icon.

Oh boy, it’s time for some Chuck Norris/Cannon Films goodness on this week’s B-Movie Enema!

1984’s Missing in Action is kind of an important movie for our two primary entities. First and foremost, this was the first film Chuck Norris made for The Cannon Group and producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. That also meant that Cannon got Chuck Norris, an action star already, to more or less become the face for the company for years to come. This movie also brings director Joseph Zito back for another go at B-Movie Enema. Zito had previously directed The Prowler in 1981, but 1984 probably brought his two most recognizable films to his filmography – Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and Missing in Action. In 1985, Zito, Cannon, and Norris teamed up again for another movie that really should find its way to the blog someday soon, Invasion U.S.A.

It’s really hard not to compare Missing in Action to 1982’s First Blood. First Blood probably kicked off the subgenre that Letterboxd likes to call vetsploitation. And how could it not? It was Sylvester Stallone in a really good performance as John Rambo, which then led to several leading action characters in the 80s being somehow a part of the Vietnam War. Missing in Action originated as a treatment by James Cameron for Rambo: First Blood Part II. That’s where the Rambo flicks and the Missing in Action series both get their pretty tight similarities. Golan and Globus totally owned up to the fact that Cameron’s treatment served as the inspiration for their series. So they released Missing in Action and Missing in Action 2: The Beginning as quickly as they could to get it out ahead of Rambo to avoid any legal issues. I wasn’t entirely sure how that avoided issues, but whatever, it was the Go-Go Boys doing what they do best, go-going.

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Mata Hari (1985)

Published on April 24, 2026April 30, 2026 by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

Alright, everybody, if you’ll take your seat, your B-Movie Enema historical lesson can begin.

Today, I’m reviewing 1985’s Mata Hari from our good friends at Cannon Films. This was during a time in which Cannon was raking in money from the Chuck Norris action flicks, but also was luring a lot of directors with a great deal of artistic talent. A lot of people think it was those Norris action exploitation films, or the authoritarian, at least semi-right-wing coded crime thrillers that Charles Bronson was making, that brought Cannon low. No, what led to Cannon’s demise was a combination of overpaying Sylvester Stallone for two films that didn’t really do the gangbusters that the company expected, and the big time swings for the fences that were utterly destroyed by critics. These were your Brooke Shields vehicle, Sahara, The Wicked Lady with Faye Dunaway, Bolero from John and Bo Derek, Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, and Mata Hari. There were others, but these were the large productions that had massive scale and looked beautiful, but ultimately were not much more than sex and exploitation films that were just never going to sell to mainstream audiences the way Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus expected. I’m probably not really describing all these films in the best, most detailed or nuanced light, but that’s what more or less happened.

With Mata Hari, they did have a very capable director, though, brought in to tell a war epic. Curtis Harrington was no hack job. Harrington was an experimental filmmaker in the 50s and 60s, but his career actually began as a film critic. In the mid 60s, Roger Corman brought Harrington to make Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and Queen of Blood. He also made Whoever Slew Anutie Roo. He also worked on well-known TV movies like How Awful About Allan and Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell. Most importantly, though, Harrington, himself a gay man, was instrumental in two things related to James Whale (most famous for Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein). He was instrumental in rediscovering and recovering Whale’s thought-to-be-lost film The Old Dark House. He also served as an advisor on Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters about Whale in his later years.