Category: Reviews

Quiet Fire (1991)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle2 Comments

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.

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The Ward (2010)

Published on by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

This week, B-Movie Enema has something new for you, my dear Enemaniacs!

Yeah. This week, it’s the first ever movie directed by John Carpenter that gets the review treatment here at the blog. Sure, he’s been mentioned. After all, I’ve done several entries in the Halloween franchise. His longtime producing partner, Debra Hill, got featured here too with Confessions of Sorority Girls which was a part of a whole series of movies she did for cable channel Showtime that was remaking or reinvisioning old-school 50s exploitation films.

But 2010’s The Ward is the first time I’ve actually covered a film directed by Carpenter. This film would not be well-received, nor did it make its money back against its budget. While I’m not sure if it was planned, he would ultimately step out of the director’s chair and focus more on making music before doing some executive producing and consulting on other projects. Most notably, he returned to the Halloween franchise with the trilogy that began with David Gordon Green’s Halloween in 2018.

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Barb Wire (1996)

Published on by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Welcome to yet another B-Movie Enema review!

Now, if you’ve been around this year, and you really should because what else do you really have to read while sitting on the toilet taking a morning shit, you might notice something I’ve kind of said a few times over the past few months. A big part of my plan for 2024 was to start knocking off stacks of movies obtained at conventions or through online sales on Vinegar Syndrome or Severin, and basically get through the backlog. This week, I’m pulling form the “bought this many years ago, planned to do it, never did, and now it’s time” pile. Oh yes, it is 1996’s Barb Wire starring Pamela Anderson.

Honestly, I bought this movie on DVD for, like, less than a buck back when Amazon used to do those incredibly low-cost Marketplace sales on things, particularly movies. I remember buying a used copy of something for a penny, paying the $3.99 shipping cost, and being happier than one of Pam Anderson’s boobs in a bustier. That’s something you just don’t see anymore on Amazon. I… I mean the practice on Amazon, not Anderson’s boobs in a bustier. Anyway, the reason why you don’t see those super inexpensive Marketplace listings anymore is likely due to a crackdown on the seller’s part to prevent too many items from being sold for less than Amazon’s actual cost for something. I doubt I paid more than a buck for this movie if I’m being honest.

And I should be honest because even back in 1996 when I was 19 and full of a lot of male hormones that led to a lot of bad thoughts and choices, I never really had any interest in seeing this movie. Pam Anderson was not someone who really represented my tastes in a woman. She’s pretty, sure, but I wasn’t as ga-ga over her as many people my age were. Plus, I was more of a superhero fan when it came to comic books. Aside from the Crow and a passing interest in Spawn when the HBO animated series ran, I liked the heroes from Marvel and DC. I wasn’t that much of an indie guy. No, I bought this movie because, for a while, I was trying to get all the movies that were being covered on the Earwolf podcast How Did This Get Made.

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Brain of Blood (1971)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Can you believe, after 441 reviews, Brain of Blood is only the second time Al Adamson has been reviewed on B-Movie Enema?

Yeah. I couldn’t either! Al Adamson is one of the big names in low-budget schlock horror in the 60s and 70s. The only other movie of his I ever mentioned is Black Samurai which I covered, like eight years ago. And, to be honest, I didn’t really know who Al Adamson was at that time. I was still in my fledgling days of being a blogger covering schlock films and just getting into the stuff at the time. Plus, I was more keen to talk about the blaxploitation elements of that movie than the guy making the movie.

Adamson made dozens of movies. His beginnings are that of just assisting his father, Victor Adamson, himself a filmmaker. After helping his dad with the western Half Way to Hell, Al struck out on his own to make his own movies. He could crank out a lot of drive-in fair like a Roger Corman, but the difference was that, for the most part, Adamson seemingly worked way cheaper and with kind of half-baked scripts. For the most part, you’d think of him as a monster movie guy who didn’t so much care about the rest of the stuff as long as they could advertise a monster.

Al Adamson often worked with a lot of the same people, Kent Taylor is someone in this movie who appeared in other Adamson films, and made lots of friends during his filmmaking career. Interestingly, early on, he worked with two pretty big-time cinematographers – Vilmos Zsigmond, a four-time Oscar nominee and winner for Best Cinematography for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and László Kovács who went on to make BIG movies with BIG directors including being the cinematographer on 1984’s Ghostbusters.

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