Category: 1990s

Frankenstein Unbound (1990)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

A new review from B-Movie Enema is bounding your way!

2025 was the year of Frankenstein. Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel of a scientist who plays God and cobbles together a living thing from dead flesh finally saw the light of day. That del Toro adaptation was well-cast with Oscar Isaac playing Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi doing amazing work as the Creature. It was gorgeously shot and designed. Seeing two perspectives to tell the full story was amazing. It was solidly in my Top 10 list for last year. I’m not alone in this praise. It was nominated for many Academy Awards.

Let’s also not forget that releasing to theaters today is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s reimagining of the themes of loneliness and monstrous love in Mary Shelley’s seminal work, The Bride! So, yeah, Dr. Frankenstein and his creation(s) are all over the place right now. Plus, speaking of awards, while I’m sure del Toro’s Frankenstein will be picking up at least two or three awards come next weekend, the Queen of this year’s awards season, Jessie Buckley, is celebrating her crowning achievement with another solid performance as the titular Bride. If you’re a monster kid like me, you’re eating well at the trough of Shelley’s work and the present-day adaptations.

However, it was the success of last year’s Frankenstein that got me thinking I should do something for Shelley’s creature – especially as Gyllenhaal’s feminist monster movie is hitting screens. Obviously, I’m not so sure about Guillermo’s masterpiece being what should be covered at a site like this, and I literally just watched The Bride! last night. So I needed to look elsewhere. I landed on the movie that had an eye-popping (no pun intended) box art at the video store. 1990’s Frankenstein Unbound isn’t just what we’re going to be talking about in this review, but it also serves as the final film in which the great Roger Corman was ever credited as director.

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Drive Me Crazy (1999)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

We’ve made it, my dear Enemaniacs. It’s the final week of Melissa Joan Hart Month at B-Movie Enema. And this is the headliner for sure.

1999’s Drive Me Crazy has a bit of a story behind it. Very clearly, this was Melissa Joan Hart’s movie. It was released by 20th Century Fox, but with 90s teen movies doing pretty well, and she doing pretty well on ABC’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch, it was impossible to think there wouldn’t at least be an attempt to get her into a movie. In a way, this was accomplished the year before when she made a brief, near cameo appearance in one of the most beloved cult classic teen flicks of the 90s, Can’t Hardly Wait. That was less an attempt to get her onto the big screen and more of a “Hey, we’ve got every young up-and-coming actor in this movie, and the Kid from Dick Tracy, so… Get the teenage witch girl!” thing.

No, Drive Me Crazy was specifically for Melissa to spread her wings a bit and give the movie thing a real try. While the movie had its struggles with critics, it wasn’t that big of a flop when it came to the box office. It cost about $8.5 million and brought in nearly $23 million. Not too bad in terms of the teen movies of the era. While nowhere near the box office darling as 1995’s Clueless or 1999’s She’s All That, Drive Me Crazy turned a profit where Can’t Hardly Wait and Empire Records, both beloved cult films, did not.

I think the problems came with the reviews, and one other very big confusion for audiences that came in the form of Britney Spears.

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Twisted Desire (1996)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and another entry in our Melissa Joan Hart Month!

This week, we have a staple of the network television movie – true crime. Quite frankly, if you’re curious when there was a time when true crime did not have an audience, the answer was never. Whether it was in books, or those old pamphlets that probably led to Jack the Ripper becoming really famous, or plays, or movies, true crime was always a way for people to rope in some audiences. Later, as networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC were making original movies to air as movies of the week, the 70s saw a lot of movies in the horror and thriller genres. However, as the 80s and 90s came along, most of the famous stuff was either historical epics or salacious true crime.

And salacious true crime is what we have for 1996’s Twisted Desire.

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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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