Category: 1990s

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.

Welcome to yet another review right here at B-Movie Enema.

This week, we return to the letter Q with a movie that didn’t quite make the cut for Quly but was a tad bit too juicy to just throw onto the stack to review too far off into the future, so let’s talk about it now! We’re going to be looking at 1991’s Quiet Fire. Quiet Fire was something I know quite intimately… This was a direct-to-video release. I’ve sort of talked about this before but back in the back half of the 90s, I worked at a video store. Because of that, I had a lot of insight about things I didn’t really understand until I got a little older.

One of those things I learned was that there were three genres that shone brightly for people looking to consume home entertainment. Now, I’m not including a very obvious one for men and kinky couples (that being porn) because that’s fairly obvious, as is the fact that people who didn’t want to go to the theater to watch a movie would later catch them on video. No, the three that I’m referring to are thrillers, particularly ones that starred beautiful women being chased by dangerous men (Shannon Tweed was a massive star in this genre), horror, particularly the ones that were kind of at the tail end of the slasher era, and action.

And that’s what we have here, a direct-to-video action flick.