Category: 1980s

Twister’s Revenge! (1988)

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Hot diggity god dang!

Welcome to another B-Movie Enema review. I’m Geoff. Nice to meet ya. Been here before? Yeah? Then, I’m glad you came back. This week, we return to the filmography of one Bill Rebane. We previously talked about his bonkers horror-thriller Blood Harvest starring Tiny Tim. This is actually his follow-up. We’re going to the redneck part of Wisconsin for a little Twister’s Revenge!

You know this movie is serious as shit because it has an exclamation point at the end of the title… TWISTER’S REVENGE!

Anyhow, Rebane was actually born in Latvia and came to the States in 1952 while still a teenager. As a kid, he went to school in Germany and was conversationally fluent in German, Russian, and the language of his parents, Latvian and Estonian. He learned English by watching American movies. I find that kind of interesting because it’s not uncommon for people who grew up in Eastern Europe to have learned English this way. I believe Mila Kunis also was one of those people who learned English through entertainment.

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Portrait of a Showgirl (1982)

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Well well well… Look at what the cat dragged in… You guys! I love you guys!

Welcome to another review here at B-Movie Enema. This week, we’ve got ourselves a TV movie. Not only that but a TV movie that is also a Primetime Emmy nominee from 1982! This week, I’ll be talking about Portrait of a Showgirl. Now, check it out… Somewhere along the way, this movie also got titled Portrait of a Stripper. My guess is that the second title there was a little sexier and so it became marketable. I’m not sure if the movie could have been aired on network television as Portrait of a Stripper back then. However, could it have been named that for home video or a cable release? It would certainly be a tiny bit more provocative and attract a little more attention.

Either way, the movie stars some pretty recognizable folk who I’ll talk about here shortly. Directing this TV movie is a director who did a bunch of them. In fact, it’s not even the first time I’ve brought him up. Steven Hilliard Stern made this movie four years after directing the season five finale of B-Movie Enema: The Series – The Ghost of Flight 401. Wait… did I say I talked about Steven Hilliard Stern? I’m sorry, that episode was hosted by Geoff Bob Buckle, that smooth-talkin’ film enthusiast from possibly Texas. I sometimes forget that I took that week off. I do know that he was also the director of the bitchin’ Rolling Vengeance that was about a kid customizing his own revenge death machine. I guess you could say that it was a good year for Steven Hilliard Stern here at B-Movie Enema. As for his career, in just under 30 years, he racked up over 60 credits with a vast majority of those being either episodes of TV shows or TV movies like the one we’re looking at today.

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Mesmerized (1985)

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Welcome to November, Enemaniacs!

As I continue to crank through a backlog of movies that I have built over the course of about 13 or 14 years through buying multi-packs of cheap-o movies on DVD, this was a title I’ve been vaguely aware of for more than 30 years, mostly because of the two lead stars in this movie. This week, we’ll be diving deep into 1985’s Mesmerized starring Jodie Foster and John Lithgow. Mesmerized was a co-production between RKO in the United States as well as the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. The UK would get the original release in November 1985, and then the US got it about 13 months later.

Obviously, the lead actors stand out the most when you’d be perusing the drama section at your video store, but it’s a period piece and it’s hard to say if it really would have stuck out to too many people in the mid-80s. After all, Jodie Foster’s star was brightest in the late 70s and the 90s. Most of her roles in the 80s went largely unnoticed until her Oscar win for The Accused. John Lithgow had lots and lot and lots of roles in the 80s, as well as a pair of Oscar nominations of his own for The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment. Still, he was largely more in line with what you’d consider a character actor for most of his career up to that point. So it’s possible this movie was not really carrying the star power at that time as you might think it could a decade later.

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Xtro (1983)

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I sure hope you like slimy and gross-out horror because that’s what B-Movie Enema has on tap for this week’s review!

Xtro is a 1983 sci-fi horror film that some think is one of the many responses to the 1982 runaway hit E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. I believe that misaligns this movie with those more exploitative or cash-grab knockoffs. Yes, E.T.’s immense popularity led to many movies that wanted to “answer back” by featuring nasty, very unfriendly alien invaders as an almost rejection of the big box office brought in by the very sweet and family-friendly film from Spielberg. This is not one of them for a couple of reasons.

The first is that I think this movie has much more credit to pay toward two late 70s sci-fi horror films; 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and 1979’s Alien. In Xtro, we have a very slimy and gross alien that wears the disguise of a recognizable human character. It is also weirder than that as far as where the alien comes from that we’ll dig into later. The primary reason why I do not think this is a response to E.T.’s popularity is because this film was originally intended to be released by New Line Cinema in 1982. Even if we give the conservative release schedule in 1982 of very late December, the production value, the creature, and some of the design work put into the movie wouldn’t have had time to get written, all the pre-production done, and the film shot and edited and put in the can for release that quickly after E.T. It just couldn’t have been possible.

Even on this film’s very scant $60,000 budget.

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B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #66 – Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned

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In 1980, Toei Animation and Marvel Productions were at the end of an agreement deal to cross-adapt each other’s properties. That resulted in Shogun Warriors, a Japanese tokusatsu Spider-Man series, and this animated adaptation of The Tomb of Dracula – Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned.

The Quiet Earth (1985)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema!

Quly is continuing on and for this third week, we go to the “other” “down under” for this cult classic from New Zealand. This week, I’m going to discuss Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth. Interestingly, I’ve been familiar with Geoff Murphy for almost 35 years. In 1990, I was super excited to see Young Guns II. I love those two Young Guns flicks. In 1992, I went and saw Freejack which he also directed. So, yeah, I was pleasantly surprised that his name was attached to this because I knew who he was.

Plus, us Geoffs stick together.

Anyway, the origins of The Quiet Earth began in 1981. The obvious connection was that the book this was based on was published that year. We’ll touch upon that in just a moment. But 1981 also saw the release of New Zealand’s first bonafide box office hit, Goodbye Pork Pie. The director of Goodbye Pork Pie? That’s right! It’s Geoff Murphy. And, yes, it basically made his career. He followed that up with Utu which led to a discussion around New Zealand’s history and the treatment of Maori people. After Utu, The Quiet Earth was Murphy’s next film and this hit cult classic status as well. Most of the 90s was spent in Hollywood with mixed results for Murphy, but he would return to New Zealand to be the 2nd Unit Director on fellow Kiwi Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Murphy passed away in December 2018.

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