Category: 1990s

Soultaker (1990)

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This review of B-Movie Enema will claim your very soul!

This week and next, I’m going to review a couple of movies tied to writer, director, producer, and actress Vivian Schilling. I don’t expect too many people to immediately see that name and think, “Oh, yes… Vivian Schilling. I am intimately aware of her work.” Generally speaking, she has not really worked in film for nearly 15 years. However, she has a few movies in her filmography that are definitely worthy of coverage. This week’s is likely her best-known film. That’s because the fine folks on the Satellite of Love lampooned this movie on the final season of the original run of Mystery Science Theater 3000. That’s right, it’s 1990’s Soultaker starring Schilling, Joe Estevez, and Robert Z’Dar.

As for Vivian Shilling, the co-writer and star of this film, she was born in 1968 in Wichita, Kansas. She went to study acting in New York City at the famed Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. In 1986, at the age of 18, Schilling appeared in The Adventures of Taura: Prison Ship Star Slammer. Not only is that a title that just rolls off the tongue, it’s a movie that I could see myself reviewing on this very site, but it also appeared on one of this year’s episodes of Best of the Worst from RedLetterMedia. Her first taste of actual scripting and leading a film is going to be the focus of next week’s review. It would really be Soultaker that would likely be her most famous movie.

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Eight Days a Week (1997)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema!

We’ve got something of a returning character in this week’s movie. Writer/director Michael Davis originally got started as a storyboard artist. Between 1989 and 1992, he actually had a few interesting credits on his resume. In 1989, he did the storyboards for the Kevin S. Tenney film The Cellar. The very next year, he stepped up in terms of quality films with 1990’s Tremors. The very next year, 1991, he did the storyboards for a highly anticipated sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. In 1993, he wrote the first of three Prehysteria! movies released through Full Moon Features under their Moonbeam Entertainment imprint for children and family films. Then, in 1994, he wrote one of the main stars of 2016’s Alyssa Milano Month, Double Dragon.

But this week, we look at Davis’s sophomore outing as a director, Eight Days a Week.

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Syngenor (1990)

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What up, my lovely fuckfaces, it’s a brand new review here at B-Movie Enema!

So, check it out… A few months back, I covered 1980’s Scared to Death. In that movie, not only did a lady dress up like Sarah Jane Smith from the Classic Doctor Who serial The Hand of Fear, but it also featured an underground creature living beneath Los Angeles, running amok, and killin’ people left and right. The creature in that movie was genetically created by a science dude. However, the doctor who created the creature apparently died before he could kill the adult creature. The name of that creature is also the namesake for this week’s movie we’re going to review – Syngenor.

By the way, I think Syngenor was a mashup of the words SYNthetesized GENetic ORganism. But that’s not necessarily important at the moment. What is important is how this 1990 sequel was conceived and created. The original film’s production team is not involved. That said, Scared to Death director William Malone had a chance to make this movie, but he opted out to make the 1985 sci-fi creature flick appropriately titled Creature. It was producer Jack F. Murphy who led the charge of making the sequel after seeing the original and being mighty impressed by the monster. However, as is the case with a lot of movie sequels of the era, the original’s scarcity when it came to being seen by audiences led to Murphy keeping the monster, keeping the concept of a genetically created creature, but separating the film’s plot from the original to make it its own thing.

I guess you could say it’s somewhat similar to the Xtro movies, except those movies kept the original director and still tossed out any semblance of an actual narrative trilogy.

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Carnosaur 2 (1995)

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It’s time to go back to the Jurassic Era for another dino-rific review at B-Movie Enema!

1993’s Carnosaur was a massive hit. Okay, well, maybe not as big as Jurassic Park, but still, it was a significant hit for Roger Corman’s New Horizons production company. To say that it was riding the coattails of JP is not even facetious. It had to have. Both were based on books and featured dinosaurs. One was getting a ton of attention because that Spielberg guy was directing it. Sure, it was riding coattails, but it worked. The movie made a modest amount of money at the box office and was popular on VHS and cable television.

So, two years later, New Horizons was at it again with Carnosaur 2, which is the movie we’re going to be talking about this week. Because the sequel was greenlit while the first was in production, John Carl Buechler, the effects artist who made the dinosaurs in the first film, could save what he made and take care of it while they got the script and pre-production stuff off the ground. Michael Palmer wrote a script and took a lot of inspiration from Corman acolyte James Cameron’s Aliens plot. Corman tapped director Louis Morneau, who, if we’re being honest here, is mostly known for making sequels and pretty bad movies like The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting, Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead, and the terrible Bats.

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Carnosaur (1993)

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Welcome back to another rip-roarin’ review at B-Movie Enema!

For pretty much all my life, dinosaurs were immensely popular. Moreover, they ignited a lot of children’s imaginations. In the 80s, not only were there movies like Baby: Secret of the Legend which came out at the exact age for me to not only want to see it but to also convince my mother to take me to a theater to see it. The same year, 1985, the Dinobots made their bow in The Transformers. Dinosaurs couldn’t have been more popular than that period of time. Later, a new generation would get the start of a looooong series of animated features with The Land Before Time. Even before that, for decades, dinosaurs were used in all sorts of sci-fi movies, especially the lower-budget ones.

But then came 1993.

I would argue 1993 was the pinnacle of dino-mania. You like that? Dino mania? I am 100% sure no one else has ever said that term before, and they definitely didn’t say it 32 years ago in 1993. Anyway, that’s when Steven Spielberg would have one of his very biggest years ever… maybe for any director in Hollywood history. He’d make two films that year. One, Schindler’s List, would win him the Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. That was AFTER he released the year’s top-grossing film, and one of the biggest box office champs in the history of movies, Jurassic Park. But we’re going to look at the movie that made 1993 truly the greatest year at the box office for dinosaur movies – Carnosaur.

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Xtro 3: Watch the Skies (1995)

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Welcome to another B-Movie Enema review where we always watch the skies.

That’s Xtro 3: Watch the Skies. Now, we’ve been here, haven’t we? Whether it is yet another Xtro flick that has nothing to do with the original, another ill-advised sequel, or a sequel made because money is needed to live in a world mostly dominated by capitalism, this is nothing new to us around here. Alright, so not that long ago, I reviewed Xtro 2: The Second Encounter and, woof… It was pretty bad.

Creator of the original Xtro, Harry Bromley Davenport couldn’t really get any other work. He did own the rights to the title Xtro and was able to leverage that to Welsh and Canadian producers. He thought he could take the Xtro series and turn it into an anthology series about alien encounters. The first sequel was not an enjoyable experience for the British director, Bromley Davenport. Jan-Michael Vincent was barely functional. The script was kind of dumb and complicated.

This second sequel would be somewhat better for the Briton in some ways and a little more dangerous in others.

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Terror Firmer (1999)

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Welcome back! It’s the third week of Troma Month here at B-Movie Enema and it’s time to go back, sorta, to the James Gunn well. This week, I’m gonna be talking about 1999’s Terror Firmer.

What do I mean about this sorta going back to the James Gunn well? That’s because, to a certain extent, Lloyd Kaufman, along with co-writers Douglas Buck and Patrick Cassidy, based this movie’s script, albeit loosely, on the 1998 book All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger. That book was co-written by Kaufman and James Gunn.

I made the comment last week, in my review for Class of Nuke ‘Em High, that I kind of put Kaufman in the same camp as Roger Corman. Corman, back in the 50s and 60s, were cranking out cheap B-movies quickly. However, quickly those movies were, and however cheaply they were made, most (especially in today’s film culture) could not look at those movies and think they weren’t made professionally. Maybe the monster was kind of goofy, but you couldn’t argue that the cast was well-directed and doing their jobs professionally.

I bring up that commentary I made because Roger Corman wrote the introduction to the book this is sort of based on.

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Tromeo and Juliet (1996)

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It’s Troma Month here at B-Movie Enema!

Heck yeah, this is looooong overdue. I think the best thing I need to do to start things off here is to admit something. I don’t really have a great deal of history with Troma. I like Lloyd Kaufman. I like what he does to inspire new filmmakers. I like the general absurdity with the Troma films, particularly the ones that they create and make in-house. Sure, I’ve seen a handful of them. Of course, I’ve seen The Toxic Avenger. I grew up with Mother’s Day. Troma’s War? Yeah, I’ve seen it. But I had a little more experience seeing movies distributed by Troma as opposed to the movies they made themselves.

That said, Lloyd Kaufman’s personality is so larger than life that it feels like I’ve seen more from him than I have. So, this month, I wanna fix that. Let’s take a look at some of Troma’s catalog. I think I picked four pretty popular films from Kaufman specifically. We kick things off with his 1996 Shakespeare parody, Tromeo and Juliet.

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