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.
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.
Continue reading “The Quiet Earth (1985)” →
Things are getting weird on this episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series! Geoff and Nurse Disembaudee are in kung fu fightin’ moods as they watch Kill Squad. Can anyone save them from their aggressive feelings?
Cannon Films is back for this week’s B-Movie Enema review and they are bringing one of their biggest stars with ’em!
It’s hard to believe this is only the second time I’ve done a Charles Bronson movie on this site. To think, he has all those Death Wish movies. He’s got some cool-ass-sounding thrillers and action flicks in the 70s. With all that, the best I could do is Assassination? Well, it’s time to do better, and, this week, I do have one that is better.
Remember when I did the Chuck Norris 1982 thriller Silent Rage? That was this cop thriller that also had some horror and even some science fiction elements. That was part of a time in which crime thrillers were still a big deal, but horror was on the rise big time. If we were to add to that the fact that Norris was becoming a rising star who was just a couple years away from becoming the other “Chuck” at Cannon Films, it’s hard to not kind of tie all of this into this week’s movie that is getting the review treatment, 10 to Midnight.
Continue reading “10 to Midnight (1983)” →
Geoff and Nurse Disembuadee hit the road in the post-apocalypse with this episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series as they check out Robert Ginty in Warrior of the Lost World.
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This week, we’ve got a sort of strange one. American Rickshaw, also known as American Tiger, was released in 1989 as an Italian/American co-production filmed in Miami. The film was directed and co-written by Sergio Martino. Martino was a major figure in Italian giallo films of the 70s. His films All the Colors of the Dark and Torso are A+ stuff in the genre. While he continued to make gialli and other styles of horror films throughout his career, he also dabbled quite a bit in comedies and crime thrillers, known as poliziottesco films.
Despite his mastery on display in All the Colors of the Dark and Torso, Martino faded somewhat quickly. He still had a few 80s films that I’ve heard of. Most notably, he directed 1982’s The Scorpion with Two Tails, 1983’s 2019: After the Fall of New York, and 1986’s Hands of Steel. But each of the latter two films really come off as fairly cheap dystopian/post-apocalyptic types of movies. By the end of the decade, when American Rickshaw was released, Martino seemed to be making mostly cheap content for home video rentals.
Continue reading “American Rickshaw (1989)” →
B-Movie Enema: The Series goes all the way to paradise for this week’s movie. Geoff watches The Beach Girls while Nurse Disembaudee parties out!
Every so often, your humble author and narrator here at B-Movie Enema looks at the calendar, considers what movies I have to cover, and chooses something to review that is timely.
O-okay… Sure, a movie from 37 years ago is hardly “timely” by the strictest of definitions, but stick with me here for a second. Here, in the northern hemisphere of this insignificant ball of rock in space we call Earth, it’s May 31st and we are on the doorstep of warm weather and long days. Looking at some pickups from last year’s HorrorHound Weekend, I saw a movie that sounds far more familiar than it really is to me – Summer Camp Nightmare.
It’s a movie with a title that, if uttered, you’d think you could immediately respond with, “Of course! That’s a movie I remember being on cable all the time. I’m pretty sure I saw it all the time on the video store shelves. And, yes! It sure does seem like a movie that would have come out in 1987!”
However, there is NOTHING about the description of this movie that rings a bell with me.
Continue reading “Summer Camp Nightmare (1987)” →
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