Category: Reviews

Ganja & Hess (1973)

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Welcome to spooky month here at B-Movie Enema!

This year, I decided to do something a little bit different. Throughout the history of B-Movie Enema, and you should be aware of this if you’ve been around here for a bit, I hope I’ve been able to properly state that I love October and I love blaxploitation. For this year’s theme, I thought to myself, “Why not mix the two?” So, yeah… Welcome to Black Horror Halloween!

Now I might have used the term “blaxploitation” in the previous paragraph. I have five movies selected, and I would say that I think three of the movies selected can fall into that subgenre of blaxploitation. The other two can leave a lot of room for debate, that they should not be simply called (or for some, dismissed) as “blaxploitation.” I think director Bill Gunn would say our opener should simply be called a black film. Join me for the vampire horror of Ganja & Hess.

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Loving Feeling (1968)

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B-Movie Enema carries on with the first of another 500 reviews!

This week, we’re returning to the early days of our friend, our grandpa, the man we miss, and the guy who we have covered nearly all of his filmography – Norman J. Warren. Some time ago, I watched the 1968 Warren film, his debut as a feature filmmaker, Her Private Hell. This week, we’re looking at his second film, the other 1968 film on his filmography, Loving Feeling. As a fan of this man’s work, will I get that loving feeling from this movie?

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Dangerous Men (2005)

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What is it with these damn movies with “Men” in their titles?

Welcome to the 500th review at B-Movie Enema. Holy shit, 500! That’s the number of miles they go at the Indianapolis 500, or half the number of miles I would walk to be the man who falls down at your door! That’s how many dollars it would take to get me to… I dunno… visit Delaware or something. Nah, I’m just messin’ with ya, Delawarians.

Anyway, 500 reviews and it’s time to tackle one of the all-timers when it comes to being batshit insane – 2005’s Dangerous Men. This movie was mostly under the radar for a very, very long time. In fact, it had to because it took 21 years to make it! Production started in 1984 when director-producer John S. Rad (the pseudonym for Jahangir Salehi Yeganehrad) decided to try his hand at making movies. Yeganehrad/Rad was from Iran and worked as an architect on films. He came to the United States during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Five years later, he began to audition actors for his first American film.

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Trapped (1982)

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You can’t say we don’t get around here at B-Movie Enema.

Over the last month and a half or so, we’ve gone from outer space by way of Japan to the sewers under Los Angeles before we hopped across the Atlantic to hang out with crooks in Italy to a top secret facility out in the American desert lousy with dinosaurs to New Zealand to Tromaville, back to Japan, and here we are… headed to Canada for some thrills and chills. We are definitely piling up the frequent flyer miles. Anyway, this week, B-Movie Enema is reviewing a 1982 film that has a few different titles. We’re going to refer to it, as seen above in this article’s headline, as Trapped. The other titles it is known by are The Killer Instinct and Baker County, U.S.A. The latter is one I’ve either seen at a video store or heard of somewhere along the way (as well as being the title given to the film by IMDb).

Trapped has some returning folks that we’ve talked about before. The director of this flick is William Fruet. Fruet directed 1986’s Killer Party, which is a VERY old review here dating back to, like, 2017. Fruet also worked on the 1983 Peter Fonda/Oliver Reed horror film Spasms, which is definitely one I remember from the video stores thanks to an eye-catching box. Seriously… was I supposed to be looking at the naked girl screaming in the shower or the monster-faced man below her?

The answer was “yes.”

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The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989)

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Welcome back to another trip to Tromaville, New Jersey, for a brand new B-Movie Enema review!

Back for Christmas 2022, I took a trip to everyone’s nuclear waste-ridden town to discuss Lloyd Kaufman’s original superhero, The Toxic Avenger. That 1984 breakout hit for Kaufman’s Troma Entertainment was brash, offensive, slapdash, but brilliant in many ways. The sheer irreverence in Kaufman’s style of comedy is in full display here. That wasn’t Lloyd’s first film he directed, and it certainly was not his first comedy, but this was the one that skyrocketed Troma into the vocabulary for all those exploitation, trash cinema fans scouring the video store shelves looking for some depraved weekend entertainment in the 80s.

Funny enough, Lloyd Kaufman’s sex comedies between 1979 and 1983 all had titles with exclamation points: Squeeze Play!, Waitress!, Stuck on You!, and The First Turn-On! You gotta love Lloyd’s commitment to the schtick. Then again, considering how bombastic his mannerisms and the way he speaks, I have to assume he shouted the titles he wanted to put on his movies, and the guy who made the title cards just thought that was part of the title.

Eh… Anyway, considering a bigger budget remake of the original The Toxic Avenger is now hitting theaters across the country, starring a for-real Emmy Award-winning actor, Peter Dinklage, I figured it’s time to revisit the world of Toxie. This week, we’re going to look at the 1989 sequel to the original, The Toxic Avenger Part II.

(Oh, and my official review of the new Toxic Avenger movie? It’s a lot of fun and has a surprising amount of heart but keeps the counterculture vibes of Lloyd’s original intact. 4 out of 5 stars!)

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Death Warmed Up (1984)

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It’s time for another shambling review here at B-Movie Enema!

We don’t cover New Zealand enough around here, if I’m being honest. The islands that make up the southern hemisphere nation have made quite a splash in film over the last 40+ years. While it’s unfair to tie New Zealand’s film legacy to Australia’s, it might be fair to say that after the rise of Australian cinema in the 70s, New Zealand was able to follow suit and offer its own blend of plots, concepts, and quirks to film audiences.

What’s kind of interesting, this site has been full of Kiwi products over the last year and a half. In March of last year, I looked at Peter Jackson’s adult take on The Muppet Show, 1989’s Meet the Feebles. The wonderful 1985 science fiction drama, The Quiet Earth, came to the site in the form of a review in July. Then, in August of last year, the 70th episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series hopped in our Battletruck to watch Warlords of the 21st Century. All three of those movies have their own qualities that are fun, thought-provoking, or just outright weird. Now, it’s time to discuss another Kiwi film of note – David Blyth’s 1984 sci-fi zombie flick, Death Warmed Up.

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Carnosaur 2 (1995)

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It’s time to go back to the Jurassic Era for another dino-rific review at B-Movie Enema!

1993’s Carnosaur was a massive hit. Okay, well, maybe not as big as Jurassic Park, but still, it was a significant hit for Roger Corman’s New Horizons production company. To say that it was riding the coattails of JP is not even facetious. It had to have. Both were based on books and featured dinosaurs. One was getting a ton of attention because that Spielberg guy was directing it. Sure, it was riding coattails, but it worked. The movie made a modest amount of money at the box office and was popular on VHS and cable television.

So, two years later, New Horizons was at it again with Carnosaur 2, which is the movie we’re going to be talking about this week. Because the sequel was greenlit while the first was in production, John Carl Buechler, the effects artist who made the dinosaurs in the first film, could save what he made and take care of it while they got the script and pre-production stuff off the ground. Michael Palmer wrote a script and took a lot of inspiration from Corman acolyte James Cameron’s Aliens plot. Corman tapped director Louis Morneau, who, if we’re being honest here, is mostly known for making sequels and pretty bad movies like The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting, Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead, and the terrible Bats.

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Puzzle (1974)

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Welcome back to another review here at B-Movie Enema. It’s great to have you here. For real. I mean it. I am glad you’re here.

Anyway, let’s talk about murder!

Italian giallo is what’s on tap for this week’s movie. What exactly the first giallo is is somewhat debatable. Though I think most critics would name 1963’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much by Mario Bava as the first. That film starred John Saxon. Bava followed that up with 1964’s Blood and Black Lace starring none other than Cameron motherfuckin’ Mitchell! Throughout the 60s, gialli remained a little under the radar until the 70s when the genre would kick into hyperdrive. A few weeks back, I talked about Umberto Lenzi a little bit as he co-wrote Primal Rage. This week, we have another key Italian filmmaker to talk about.

1974’s Puzzle, the movie we’ll be figuring out this week, is directed by Duccio Tessari. Tessari’s career began as a writer. Starting around 1958, Tessari worked quite a bit as a writer for several years. He wrote some Hercules films, other peplum, and, of course, spaghetti westerns. In fact, it was one of his 1964 scripts that would kick off the massive popularity of those Italian western films. Yeah, Tessari wrote A Fistful of Dollars.

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