Category: Reviews

Strangeland (1998)

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Gather ’round, kiddies. This week’s B-Movie Enema is going to tell you a tale about urban primitives and their desire to find transcendence via pain and all sorts of fucked up shit. Oh, and also, Dee Snider is here.

Yes, this week, we’re scouring the dusty shelves of the horror section at the video store to talk about 1998’s Strangeland, written by and starring Dee Snider. Snider rose to prominence in the 80s with his band Twisted Sister. He was a hard glam rocker who dressed in a gender-bending way. I’d go so far as to say it was a little gender-bending and a little pro wrestling in style, but it was purely 80s through and through. It was Twisted Sister’s third album, Stay Hungry, that featured two very popular singles, “We’re Not Going to Take It” and “I Wanna Rock”. “We’re Not Going to Take It” is one of those 80s anthems that still gets a lot of airplay and use in movies to this day.

Snider, along with a few other artists of the time, became a favorite target of the Parents Music Resource Center who wanted to bring a warning system to music albums and singles in the pearl-clutching hope that children would not be turned into murderers or something when they listen to “Darling Nikki” or something. Snider was joined by the likes of Frank Zappa and John Denver to speak out against censorship in music. This did lead to the creation of the Explicit Content label we saw on just about every cool ass album of the 90s.

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American Rickshaw (1989)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema!

This week, we’ve got a sort of strange one. American Rickshaw, also known as American Tiger, was released in 1989 as an Italian/American co-production filmed in Miami. The film was directed and co-written by Sergio Martino. Martino was a major figure in Italian giallo films of the 70s. His films All the Colors of the Dark and Torso are A+ stuff in the genre. While he continued to make gialli and other styles of horror films throughout his career, he also dabbled quite a bit in comedies and crime thrillers, known as poliziottesco films.

Despite his mastery on display in All the Colors of the Dark and Torso, Martino faded somewhat quickly. He still had a few 80s films that I’ve heard of. Most notably, he directed 1982’s The Scorpion with Two Tails, 1983’s 2019: After the Fall of New York, and 1986’s Hands of Steel. But each of the latter two films really come off as fairly cheap dystopian/post-apocalyptic types of movies. By the end of the decade, when American Rickshaw was released, Martino seemed to be making mostly cheap content for home video rentals.

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Summer Camp Nightmare (1987)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Every so often, your humble author and narrator here at B-Movie Enema looks at the calendar, considers what movies I have to cover, and chooses something to review that is timely.

O-okay… Sure, a movie from 37 years ago is hardly “timely” by the strictest of definitions, but stick with me here for a second. Here, in the northern hemisphere of this insignificant ball of rock in space we call Earth, it’s May 31st and we are on the doorstep of warm weather and long days. Looking at some pickups from last year’s HorrorHound Weekend, I saw a movie that sounds far more familiar than it really is to me – Summer Camp Nightmare.

It’s a movie with a title that, if uttered, you’d think you could immediately respond with, “Of course! That’s a movie I remember being on cable all the time. I’m pretty sure I saw it all the time on the video store shelves. And, yes! It sure does seem like a movie that would have come out in 1987!”

However, there is NOTHING about the description of this movie that rings a bell with me.

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Rolling Vengeance (1987)

Published on by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Welcome to B-Movie Enema. I’m Geoff Arbuckle and this is the blog you come to when you’re taking a shit, or looking for a website run by a guy you’re pretty sure you are far more cultured and smarter than, or, I dunno… you have nothing better to do on a weekend night with nowhere to go. Hmmm… Maybe I’m not doing a good job at promoting my site. Let’s see if I can do better.

The 80s! That’s the decade of Ronald Reagan, cocaine-fueled American exceptionalism running rampant, and bitchin’ music. But you know what else the 80s had? Fuckin’ monster trucks! Monster trucks rolled out of the late 70s trend of modified pickup trucks in various specialized motorsport competitions. By the end of the 70s, one truck in particular, named Bigfoot, was so modified from its original 1974 Ford F-250 that it became known as the world’s first monster truck. Following that, other popular monster trucks were USA-1, Bear Foot, and King Kong. These trucks became the star of various events like Monster Jam where they’d do high-flyin’ jumps and crushing beat-up cars under their giant wheels. If you were a little boy at the time Monster Jam started up, and word on the street is I was, or if you are a grown man, and people tell me that’s what I am, you LOVED the mayhem, the majesty, and the machinery of giant trucks smashing beaters under their tires.

Apparently, Canada was into it too because, in 1987, Steven Hilliard Stern made this week’s movie – Rolling Vengeance.

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