Category: 1990s

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

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For the 400th time, welcome to B-Movie Enema, and, most importantly, allow me to extend to my Enemaniacs a very happy Halloween!

What better way to spend the greatest of all holidays, and this milestone review, than with that murderous monster Michael Myers? Well, you might want to table some of that excitement. That’s because it’s time to take a look at one of the most blasted entries in the entirety of the Halloween franchise. Yeah, we’re cursed, my dear readers. Let’s discuss 1995’s Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.

Alright, check it out… Let’s go back to September 29, 1995, the day the sixth Michael Myers epic hit theater screens. I was 18 years old and a high school graduate. Sure, you might think I should have been a freshman in college, but, well… You don’t realize how absolutely listless and lazy I was (and still am). I didn’t go to college right after high school, pffft. Hell, when I did go to college the following year, I only stuck around for, like, two years.

What was I talking about? Oh, yeah Halloween 6. I didn’t have that interesting story about that September night way back in my youthful days of 1995. But I was excited to see the new movie. I like Mikey Myers. I expected this sixth entry long before 1995. Six years had passed since the previous film’s release and that one ended on a cliffhanger. I had lots of questions about whether or not that would actually be picked up and continued with the Man in Black and Michael Myers being part of some sort of organized thing, hence the tattoo of the Thorn rune symbols on those two characters’ wrists.

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Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

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Spooky season continues at B-Movie Enema!

Welcome to this week’s review. Last week, I checked Leatherface off the list of horror icons that I haven’t checked in with for a long time. This week, it’s Freddy Krueger. Now, here’s what I think is likely a hot take. I don’t actually care much for the Elm Street franchise. Of all the slashers and serial killers, Freddy ranks pretty dang low. I know, I know… There are lots of Freddy stans out there.

I actually get it. The first film in the series, A Nightmare on Elm Street, is really the best slasher film of the 80s. It’s well-written and very well-acted. The first sequel is interesting but not truly a great movie. It’s great camp, so that puts it in another category. The third film is one of the best horror sequels of all time. In 1994, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is a very good new take on the series. I don’t care much for the other sequels much at all. So when it comes to the series itself, the first three films, to me, are pretty watchable. The last one is a completely different type of movie and should be kept separate from the other six. I never saw the remake. I didn’t care to. I already covered the fifth film in the franchise when things were truly and fully off the rails with Freddy’s over-the-top jokey personality.

And then there’s Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995)

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Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review.

We’re celebrating Halloween this month with the traditional horror movie marathon each Friday. This year, I decided to return to some series that I had covered in the past. Now, with it being Friday the 13th today, you probably expected to see this movie covered for the spooky day in the spooky month. Yeah, Leatherface… He’s the Friday the 13th guy, right?

You know I’m just yanking your crank. Honestly, there’s not another Friday the 13th movie that I really want to cover on the blog. So, instead, I opted to go back to a series I haven’t covered in a long time and discuss Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. The only other time I looked at a movie starring the leatheriest of faces was way back in October 2017 when I reviewed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

This is a weird series. At least for me, it is. I love the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There’s a grittiness to it that makes you feel uncomfortable from the start. It’s grainy. It’s sweaty. It looks and feels like you’re right there with the characters. Then, there’s the scene where Marilyn Burns is captured where she is screaming her head off. It’s a moment that actually affects me on a physical level. I’ve been made queasy by that scene on more than one occasion. It’s effective as hell, and one of the most effective scenes in film history to me.

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Night of the Demons 3 (1997)

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NOTE: This review was written prior to the release (or knowledge, for that matter) of the Scream Factory Night of the Demons Trilogy Blu-Ray set. How I sourced this low-quality/VHS-grade version of the movie is explained in the article itself. Enjoy and welcome to October!

It’s that time of year again, my Enemaniacs… It’s spooky times in the spooky month of October!

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema review. October is a VERY special month around these parts. October 3, 2014 saw the very first B-Movie Enema review. Things have come a loooong way since. After knocking out just a handful of articles, I took a break, and returned in March of 2016 with a renewed interest and zest. That would begin a string of 94 more reviews before taking another, shorter break. Then, I returned, as planned after that short podcast birthing break, with even more renewed vigor.

Since returning with that 101st review in March of 2018, I’ve not stopped. I even started hosting movies on YouTube, Vimeo, and OtherWorlds TV. That brings us right back to October and all the goodness, and specialness, that it brings. As is the tradition at B-Movie Enema, I will be featuring a horror film every Friday. On top of that, as per the usual celebrations, I will also be releasing an additional, special Halloween review. That review will also mark 400 reviews at B-Movie Enema. It’s gonna be a good time.

So, for this month, as I made my selections for what I’ll cover, I decided to revisit some old friends in the lead-up to that #400 review. These are all franchises I’ve visited before. It’s also likely I will not be revisiting these franchises again for some time for various reasons. A couple of the franchises just don’t have anything left for me to be arsed with. One franchise is one that I’m not a huge fan of and can’t keep up with all the movies that come along in that franchise every couple of years. And, as is the case with the franchise we’ll be visiting today, one is simply at the end of the road.

So, we start with that end of the road as I look at Night of the Demons 3.

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The Birds II: Land’s End (1994)

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Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema. We’ve got ourselves one of the all-time most ill-advised sequels for this week’s review. Yup, it’s the 1994 made-for-television shitbomb The Birds II: Land’s End.

If we were to start with the fact that The Birds II was an Alan Smithee film, you’d understand something kind of interesting in terms of the history of this blog. This is the very first time I’ve ever covered a movie directed by the notable Alan Smithee. The Alan Smithee moniker was a famous pseudonym given to movies in which the director refused to take credit. Basically, it’s for troubled productions and movies so bad the director just throws his hands up and disowns it. It wasn’t supposed to be a thing we outsiders were to be aware of. It was only after mainstream attention was brought to the pseudonym in the late 90s did the Directors Guild of America retire the name.

The Birds II was actually directed by Rick Rosenthal. We know Rosenthal for Halloween: Resurrection. However, he made a far superior Halloween sequel when he did Halloween II in 1981. Rosenthal has done stuff all up and down the scale of good and not-so-good. But he’s mostly worked in television and has been nominated twice for Primetime Emmys.

It’s not totally out of bounds to think that a Hitchcock film could have a sequel. Psycho II is quite a good film and Psycho III is notable for being kind of kooky in interesting ways. But, outside the various sequels and other things based on Psycho, no other property of Hitchcock’s garnered a sequel up through the 1980s. So, the thought of making a TV movie sequel for The Birds seemed ill-advised at best and downright sacrilegious at worst. Considering the budget, the quality of actors, the cheapness of how it looked, and Rosenthal needing his name removed and replaced by Alan Smithee, The Birds II: Land’s End takes the cake for having a pretty awful reputation.

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Vice Academy Part 3 (1991)

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Welcome back to yet another B-Movie Enema and yet another entry in the Vice Academy saga!

When Vinegar Syndrome released a box set of Vice Academy movies, they only released the first half. I think we all assumed there would be a second volume with the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries but we’ve not heard anything yet as of this article’s creation. The good news, though, is that the entire series is on Tubi so… I guess all we’re waiting on is for Vinegar Syndrome to get their shit together to clean them up nicer than shit? I dunno.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago as I was setting up Vice Academy Part 2, writer, director, and producer Rick Sloane, for the most part, is really best known for these movies and his two Hobgoblins movies. That said, I think it might be accurate to say he was a student of B-movies as a kid. He seemed to really be into the Roger Corman type stuff as he became deeply inspired by Hollywood Boulevard, a movie produced by Corman, directed by Joe Dante, and featured right here on this blog! But because he was so inspired by that, when he started working on his very first feature, Blood Theater, he was able to convince Hollywood Boulevard star (and Corman alum) Mary Woronov to headline that first movie. He did this at the age of 21.

In a lot of ways, I really do have a great deal of, for a lack of a better word, sympathy for Sloane. His movies have been bashed throughout his career. However, I do wonder if that even bothers him. You see, the guy clearly loves his B-movies. He may be closer to a Jim Wynorski type where he likes to interject sex and comedy into his movies. These aren’t the type of movies that will go over well with critics, but these Vice Academy movies WILL go over well on USA Up All Night where they became hits in the 90s thanks to Rhonda Shear bringing a lot of teenage fellas to the TV on Friday and Saturday nights before they had cars.

But enough of that… Let’s get into Vice Academy Part 3 where our lovely cops to stop and frisk some female inmates on the run!

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Vice Academy Part 2 (1990)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema, my dear Enemaniacs! This week, we’re going to get back to a series I started back in summer of 2020 when I looked at the first of SIX Vice Academy movies. We had some fun times with the lovely ladies of the academy as they certainly put the bust in busting bad guys. Considering it’s been almost three years since doing that movie, and this month is all about catching up with some old friends in sequels to movies I’ve covered before, it was high time I go back to the Rick Sloane series. So, here we are with Vice Academy Part 2 released the very next year after the first movie’s release.

I know I talked a little bit about Rick Sloane in the first Vice Academy movie, but I kind of want to swing back around to him for this second movie. There really are only three things Sloane has done stuff with in his life. Of course, maybe his longest running gig was cranking out these six Vice Academy flicks. His next most recognizable thing were two Hobgoblins movies. I talked last time about how that was mercilessly riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000 in one of my all time favorite episodes of that series. Since then, alumni of MST3K riffed it again at a life Rifftrax event that was also pretty great.

Interestingly, while Sloane did make other movies here or there, he has a major passion for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He grew up during the explosion of that film becoming the all time kin… er, queen(?) of cult flicks. When he was still fairly young, he worked with 20th Century Fox to help promote The Rocky Horror Picture Show while also producing some silly grindhouse-style shorts cut like trailers. He showed those during a Rocky Horror convention in Southern California. That also coincided with the promotional push for the sequel, Shock Treatment.

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Mommy 2: Mommy’s Day (1997)

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Welcome to another B-Movie Enema, my dear Enemaniacs!

It’s Mother’s Day weekend here in the United States again. Last year, we celebrated the day as I, a good son, should by covering the killer mother thriller movie from 1995, Mommy. We follow that up again this year with the sequel, Mommy 2: Mommy’s Day. Now, despite it being a considerably lower budget film than the first, let’s talk about how this came to be.

1995’s Mommy was a surprise hit and had a great deal of good reviews, particularly for Patty McCormack in the titular role and young Rachel Lemieux as Mommy’s darling daughter Jessica Ann. I would go so far as to say that the movie works more on Lemieux’s performance than McCormack’s because a great deal of that first film hinged upon us really liking Jessica Ann. Writer/Director Max Allan Collins got the opportunity to make a sequel and he acted upon it. For the most part, the cast returned. The only holdout was Jason Miller who wouldn’t return due to a lowered payday.

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