Category: 1990s

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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The Final Sacrifice (1990)

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35 years ago, The Final Sacrifice was released in Canada. 27 years ago, Mystery Science Theater 3000 made the film widely known to Americans. This week, it’s being reviewed at B-Movie Enema.

Hmm… One of those things is not like the others in terms of significance.

If I may, I’m going to pull the curtain back on the behind-the-scenes business of this review. Listen, I covered Space Mutiny at some point in the past. I had to dance around carefully to not make too many jokes similar to those in that classic episode of MST3K. I need to be careful here too, but there is one thing I wanted to mention because it’s kind of perfect. While this article is being released on March 28, I am writing this article on Super Bowl weekend.

Now, I want you all to know that I am a super cool jock. I have EXTENSIVE knowledge about the Super Bowl. One of those two previous sentences is an exaggeration, the other most definitely is not. The fact that MST3K makes constant reference to former All-Pro Dolphins Running Back Larry Csonka as the character Troy’s father is fucking amazing. And, yes, it is a perfect joke. The guy looks just like Csonka did after his football career and during his Miller Lite commercial era.

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Black Belt Angels (1994)

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Welcome to another week and another review here at B-Movie Enema.

Martial Arts… I’m not entirely sure exactly how popular they are for kids these days, but I’m of the age, being someone born in the late 70s, who knows how freaking massively popular the idea of having kids go to a karate dojo or some other martial arts studio and learn the act of either kicking someone’s ass into oblivion or knowing how to defend one’s self by way of kicking someone’s ass into oblivion was. The phenomenon of the general interest people had in martial arts had to come with the popularity of both Bruce Lee in the 60s and 70s and the entire action subgenre of the kung fu flicks coming from the East. By the mid to late 70s, martial arts were even more popular with the rising popularity of the American actor Chuck Norris. It wouldn’t take long for people to see a couple of uses for learning martial arts for themselves.

The first of these reasons centers around the general exercise and getting a little bit of a workout from doing the various gestures, the movements, and the mental workout of the sort of meditative state that could come from practicing the arts and doing the workouts. The second reason was more to give people some sort of ability to defend themselves if they were attacked by a crazed gang member or some sort of Middle Eastern terrorist that would generally roam the streets of every city, town, and village in the United States. Well, at least I was told by Chuck Norris and Cannon movies that these types of people could be lurking behind every tree and under every rock when I was a kid.

This week, we’re going to be punching deep into the 1994 film Black Belt Angels. Now, admittedly, I thought that title evoked something that would be something a little more like Ninja Cheerleaders that I covered many, many moons ago now. However, I was disappoin… I mean SURPRISED to find out this was a family film from co-writer and director Chi Kim. More on Kim and his co-writer in just a moment. This does sprinkle in something that I mentioned previously. If various martial arts were being taught to people for self-defense purposes, that usually means these studios were attractive to both bullied kids AND women who needed to be able to take care of themselves now that they could be working jobs that got them out of the safe zone of the suburban homelife.

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Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1991)

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Welcome to another B-Movie Enema review descending down from the stars!

In 1983, Xtro came out to little fanfare and a lot of negative reviews. It found itself on the infamous Video Nasties list in its home country, the United Kingdom. But over time, the movie would get a little bit of a following. This is probably thanks to cable and video stores here in the United States, but it is very likely the movie really never did much in terms of success to warrant a sequel (let alone two sequels).

Here’s where the backstory of how we have two Xtro sequels begins. Director Harry Bromley Davenport was in need of a job in the movie-makin’ biz. Well, somewhere along the way, he discovered that while he had no ownership of his 1983 film, he actually legally owned the title “Xtro”. So, this gave Bromley Davenport the idea to create an anthology series of sequels about other alien shenanigans. And that begins with 1991’s Xtro II: The Second Encounter.

But things will take yet another twist…

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Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor (a.k.a. The Deadly Spawn II, 1990)

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Howdy Enemaniacs!

This here is what I like to call a “happy little accident” around here at B-Movie Enema. Last week, I reviewed the cult classic sci-fi horror The Deadly Spawn. This week, I’m looking at the 1990 sort of sequel Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor, which is also known as The Deadly Spawn II. This was ABSOLUTELY NOT INTENDED!

If you’re a regular reader here, I’ve mentioned how I was scheduling out the remainder of this year with a bunch of movies that were either in need of a review because they’ve been lying in wait for a long time or they came from the multi-packs of movies I had that played a crucial role tot he start of this blog 10 years ago. The Deadly Spawn was a movie that I wanted to review for a while. Metamorphosis was a movie in one of those packs. I scheduled them next to each other not realizing they were connected.

So, yeah… A happy little accident.

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A Brilliant Disguise (1994)

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Ah… the 90s. Man, what a decade, right? Fuckin’ grunge music. Fuckin’ video stores. Fuckin’ Arnold Schwarzenegger is kicking ass all over the place. Cheers was followed by Seinfeld. I attended and graduated high school in the first half of that decade where it’s totally fair I peaked in life. I dunno… I’m sure there were other cool things going on.

One other thing that happened in the 90s was this movie that’s about to get the ol’ review treatment here at B-Movie Enema. 1994’s A Brilliant Disguise was a movie I vividly remember seeing in my days as a video store clerk in the mid to late 90s. I think it’s stark white cover with our lead character Michelle’s sunglasses reflecting some stuff, her black scarf, and her ruby red lips that were very easy to stand out on a shelf. It is certainly a movie that seems to be coming in the wake of the breakout 1992 smash hit Basic Instinct.

Erotic thrillers have been around for a bit, definitely if you think about movies like Body Heat, Body Double, Dressed to Kill, Fatal Attraction, and more. The genre, and the style that often spiced things up, were kind of the mature genre that titillated and frightened married couples who didn’t get into slashers but definitely liked looking at someone like Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas and feeling their naughty bits tremble on date night before ultimately going home and falling asleep while trying to pull out the sexy lingerie that’s collected dust for the past several years. But with Basic Instinct, the genre was back, it was a big deal, and a whole bunch of movies started immediately trying to get in on the piles of cash these sexy little murder tales could bring from cable (especially on late-night Cinemax and Showtime), video, and ticket sales. If there is something that I can say is the closest thing to “exploitation” in the 90s, it would be these erotic thrillers.

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