Category: Theme Months

Phantasm: RaVager (2016)

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We’ve come to the end, my dear Enamaniacs. Phantasm: RaVager is today’s feature and B-Movie Enema will finally complete Phantasm Sequels Month.

This one is interesting. I saw this at the Centerbrook Drive-In in Martinsville, Indiana in October of 2016 with a trio of friends. It played as part of a doubleheader with the original movie. It was the first time in a looooong time I had visited a drive-in, so that part was pretty awesome. It’s always fun to watch the original Phantasm. So that was pretty awesome too.

Then Ravager started. I ain’t gonna lie… The first time I saw this I was confused. I was not too happy about the movie. It felt really, really weird. In fact, I would argue that this movie, the only film in the franchise NOT directed by Don Coscarelli, though he did co-write it with director David Hartman, is maybe the most divisive one of the bunch. It’s got a lot of references to past movies, with even a returning character most would have no idea who she is if they hadn’t been watching the series recently just prior to watching this one. It’s not told in a very linear way. It jumps between at least two realities. It’s a strange movie.

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Phantasm: OblIVion (1998)

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Here we go again with another installment of Phantasm Sequels Month here at B-Movie Enema.

We’re up to the fourth entry that goes by a few titles – Phantasm IV: Oblivion, Phantasm: Oblivion, or, my personal favorite, Phantasm: OblIVion. Yeah, stylize that shit! Anyway, believe it or not, after the last two entries getting budgets of something around $3 million, Oblivion would only get about $650,000. However, I should also state there is more to it than just a severely slashed budget.

You see, this movie actually began life as something else. It actually began as this epic script by Roger Avary. If that name rings a bell, that’s because he’s Quentin Tarantino’s writing partner on 1994’s Pulp Fiction. They won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for that movie. Avary is a self-professed Phantasm superfan. He wrote a sequel to Phantasm III that would have seen a major post-apocalyptic world that continued on from that previous entry and would have even brought Bruce Campbell on as a co-star – or so the story goes.

Fundraising for that project fell through.

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Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994)

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Welcome back to Phantasm Sequels Month here at B-Movie Enema!

Phantasm II, to put it mildly, didn’t perform as well as hoped. Sure, it brought in a little more than double its budget. That’s not bad, but it was hard to necessarily say Universal was all that happy. Goddammit, they wanted a franchise like those Jasons and Freddys.

However, Universal still had a little bit of a hold on the franchise. It would go on to distribute the next film, and this week’s featured entry, Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead on VHS. Things get a little sideways here though. Phantasm III played a very limited, couple week run in movie havens Baton Rouge, Louisiana and St. Louis, Missouri. That may feel like places out in the middle of no-frickin’-where for a movie to get a limited, two-week release, and you’d be right.

It also saw Phantasm III become the highest grossing movie of that two-week run in both markets.

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Phantasm II (1988)

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As promised, here we are at Phantasm Sequel Month on B-Movie Enema.

Earlier this year, I went deep into what I felt the themes of the first Phantasm from 1979 were. I tied it a lot to loss and dealing with death as a teenager, the time in which most people feel pretty invincible and don’t have to deal with the specter of death looming closely behind them. It was pretty clear that Mike had some unresolved issues with the loss of his parents and was scared of losing his brother Jody as well. Naturally, Jody would be lost, so were the events dealing with the Tall Man all in his head or was there some sort of other other-worldly, inter-dimensional, metaphysical thing going on?

Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Did the movie scare you? Did you have a good time watching the movie? That’s all that Don Coscarelli was going for. Okay, sure, maybe he had themes and ideas he was exploring, but he made the movie he wanted to show audiences plain and simple. No one was asking for a sequel. It maybe didn’t need one.

Then, on July 8, 1988, Phantasm II arrived.

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Monamour (2006)

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Welcome to the conclusion of Tinto Brass Extravaganza here at B-Movie Enema. So far, we’ve featured a comedy with some fairly mixed morals on sex and love in Cheeky!, followed by a very good drama about an Italian aristocrat falling in love with a Nazi officer in Black Angel, and then a mixed bag of shorts in the anthology Private. Now it’s up to our final entry, the 2006 drama Monamour, to tip the scales to one side or another in terms of full on quality.

I’ll admit, that while not everything in Cheeky! is something I would like to deal with as a lover of a free spirit, I absolutely cannot deny that there is lots of very pretty things to look at whenever Yuliya Mayarchuk was on screen. It made the movie watchable and kind of vaguely enjoyable for its raw sexuality. Hell, I’d say the movie dropped any pretense of sensuality to just give us a lot of Ukrainian beaver cinematography.

Private is split 50/50. Half the stories were interesting or sexy, and one was even kind of sweet at the end to put a bow on the whole anthology. But that didn’t pretend to be sensual either. It was anywhere from 12-15 minutes of the private lives of very horny couples. VERY horny couples. Black Angel was where Brass dumped all his effort into actually exploring sensuality. It had an aging woman aching for excitement even if it had to come from something wrapped in the uniform of objective evil. As an aging person myself, well, well, well past his prime in most everything except for eating McRibs and writing about B-movies, I can identify with that.

Monamour seems to be a bit of a return to that exploration and need of a return to sexual excitement and spontaneity.

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Private (2003)

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Here we are in the third week of Tinto Brass Extravaganza at B-Movie Enema, and, so far, we’ve had a sex comedy with very confusing messaging and a very serious erotic Nazi drama. This week, we do something different again – we have ourselves an anthology. Private, as it is titled here, is made up of six independent vignettes.

The vignettes largely deal with couples and their various sexual turn-ons and either retelling stories that feature them or a pursuit of doing these things. Mostly, we’re looking into the lives of normal people who have kinks. The title in Italian is Fallo! which is translated to English as Do It! However, Fallo is also the Italian word for Phallus. So it’s a little bit of a play on words again as with the Italian title for Cheeky! a couple weeks ago.

Just guessing, but I assume all the potential titles that you can use for this film all tips the film’s hand at showing these private moments of couples, their perversions, and the tendency of these people to want to, or be encouraged to continue to, keep doing what they are doing. I will give Brass one thing – he has lovely free association with his titles and plots. Also, the Italian Fallo! cover of this movie looks like a dick with a giant set of balls. Also, the Private DVD cover looks like an American back room porno tape.

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Black Angel (2002)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and this month’s theme, Tinto Brass Extravaganza!

Wowzers did things get started in a real weird way last week with Cheeky! That movie created all sorts of incredibly confusing thoughts and feelings. Taken on its face, it’s about this drop dead gorgeous woman and her sexual exploits from Italy to England. Taken on a slightly different level, it’s more of a sexual fairy tale of twists and turns in a world where EVERYONE is getting laid. Maybe, just maybe, it really is meant to be taken on that face value based on its popular English title. On the other hand, its Italian title is a play on the words for transgress and betray. Using that, it’s (potentially) a much darker movie than you think. It’s not something to compare so much to the popular Emanuelle films, but instead a much more immature porn film.

So to fix that, this week, we’re looking at Black Angel – an erotic Nazi film.

I sure know how to pick ’em, don’t I, Enemaniacs?

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Cheeky! (2000)

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So far, it seems as though 2022 is about squaring some accounts. In January, it was all about finally digging deep into the Andy Sidaris filmography. For February, I have another box set long overdue for a-crackin’. With that, welcome to B-Movie Enema’s new theme month: The Tinto Brass Extravaganza!

I did not set out to cover these four films that came in this lovely “Tinto Brass: Maestro of Erotic Cinema” box set in order. I didn’t even get the box set because I knew much about it. But, as it would turn out, these four films will be done in order of Brass’ films from 2000 to 2006. We begin with Cheeky! – which is a fun title for a movie that I have lots of concerns with.

How I came to know about this film is actually quite simple… I stumbled upon the opening credits scene of an incredibly beautiful blonde (Ukrainian model/actress Yuliya Mayarchuk) walking through the park with a beguiling outfit that often shows a little cheeky flesh here and there to get the guys nice and excited. I had to learn more about what this film was and who this gorgeous woman was. I found out what it was called, that it was part of a box set, and that this guy Tinto Brass was the maestro of erotic cinema.

SOLD!

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