Category: Theme Months

Tromeo and Juliet (1996)

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It’s Troma Month here at B-Movie Enema!

Heck yeah, this is looooong overdue. I think the best thing I need to do to start things off here is to admit something. I don’t really have a great deal of history with Troma. I like Lloyd Kaufman. I like what he does to inspire new filmmakers. I like the general absurdity with the Troma films, particularly the ones that they create and make in-house. Sure, I’ve seen a handful of them. Of course, I’ve seen The Toxic Avenger. I grew up with Mother’s Day. Troma’s War? Yeah, I’ve seen it. But I had a little more experience seeing movies distributed by Troma as opposed to the movies they made themselves.

That said, Lloyd Kaufman’s personality is so larger than life that it feels like I’ve seen more from him than I have. So, this month, I wanna fix that. Let’s take a look at some of Troma’s catalog. I think I picked four pretty popular films from Kaufman specifically. We kick things off with his 1996 Shakespeare parody, Tromeo and Juliet.

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Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1984)

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Welcome to the final entry in B-Movie Enema’s Pia Zadora Month.

1984’s Voyage of the Rock Aliens, believe it or not, pretty much ended Pia Zadora’s film career. There are still a few film credits in the ten years following this movie, but in only one of those did she ever play a character. That came in John Waters’ 1989 camp musical Hairspray where she played a “Beatnik Chick”. The other three film credits were all playing herself. Perhaps the most notable of those films in which she appeared as herself was in 1994’s Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult.

Fittingly, in that, she is performing at the Academy Awards.

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The Lonely Lady (1983)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle4 Comments

What up, Enemaniacs?

Welcome to week #4 of our five-week trek through the film library of the diminutive starlet Pia Zadora here at B-Movie Enema. This week is the one that you could argue the entire month was built around. It’s one that would end up wracking up something like 11 Razzie nominations and winning six. It’s 1983’s The Lonely Lady.

On paper, The Lonely Lady might have had a chance to work. The movie was based on a novel of the same name written by Harold Robbins. Robbins wrote slightly more lurid novels that had a seedier side. He wrote a few books that either were directly about the underbelly of Hollywood’s film industry or kind of circled that drain. Several of his books were adapted into big-budget films. These included The Carpetbaggers which got adapted into a 1964 film with an all-star cast, A Stone for Danny which was turned into the big-time vehicle for Elvis, King Creole, and 1970’s The Adventurers.

Maybe most notable is that Harold Robbins’ name is often dropped as a joke in terms of an extremely popular writer who writes more lurid pulp than great American novels. His name is often linked to Jacqueline Susann who took inspiration from Robbins when she wrote Valley of the Dolls. For most of my life in pop culture, I had known Robbins and Susann’s names thanks to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Kirk is describing the types of vernacular, often laced with colorful metaphors, used in the late 20th Century to Spock who is trying to understand why Kirk is and a lot of other people in 1986 San Francisco are using curse words. Kirk mentions Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann as notable authors of the time. Spock then calls them “the giants” of literature.

In fact, the novel by Robbins this is based on is rumored to have been something of a recounting of memories Robbins had of Susann.

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Pajama Tops (1983)

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Welcome back to another review here at B-Movie Enema!

January 2025 has been dedicated to Pia Zadora. Right here in the middle of the month dedicated to the lil’ starlet is not a feature film shown on the big screen. We’re going to look at the 1983 TV movie Pajama Tops. This “movie” was directed by Robert Iscove. Iscove has a whole lot of credits on his filmography. This includes a LOT of TV stuff. He directed episodes of Wiseguy, Star Trek: The Next Generation, 21 Jump Street, The Flash, American Playhouse, Great Performances, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

However, Iscove then made two kind of famous movies. One is famous for being one of those 90s movies that gained a huge fanbase and the other is kind of infamous. The one with the fanbase is 1999’s She’s All That. Yeah, everyone loves She’s All That, right? Rachel Leigh Cook, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Paul Walker! Yeah! We love those guys. However, the other film that isn’t so well-liked is 2003’s From Justin to Kelly. That’s the movie that starred the winner and runner-up of the very first season of American Idol – Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini.

Can you believe American Idol is still going?!?

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Fake-Out (a.k.a. Nevada Heat, 1982)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and another entry in January’s Pia Zadora Month!

Alright, so check this shit out… Last week’s movie, Butterfly, was directed by Matt Cimber. I had mentioned that we had already seen one of his movies (The Candy Tangerine Man) and that it was highly unlikely we would never see him again on this blog. Well, I wasn’t just whistlin’ Dixie. He’s already back! Yeah, Matt Cimber made two films in 1982 and both starred Pia Zadora!

That brings us to Fake-Out. At times, this movie was also released under the title Nevada Heat. I actually know it was called that because that was the name on the box we had at the video store I worked at in the 90s. Anyway, whereas Butterfly was a James M. Cain-adapted crime drama, Fake-Out sticks with the crime part of the genre, but it’s also a comedy. But it also gives Zadora a chance to be on film and sing too.

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Butterfly (1982)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle2 Comments

Happy New Year, Enemaniacs!

B-Movie Enema kicks off 2025 with a whole month dedicated to the pint-sized starlet Pia Zadora. Why? Because why not! She’s spunky and cute and she happened to make some pretty bad movies. But where do we start? Santa Claus Conquers the Martians? How dare you think I would stoop so low to pick this low-hanging fruit! No, like lil Pia herself, I’m going for the fuckin’ gusto. This month is gonna be wild, my friends, but we’re kicking things off with 1982’s Butterfly.

Now, I can hear you already… “What’s Butterfly? Why are you rizzing this up so much already? Is this really the gusto?”

Holy shit, yes it is, and I will explain why in a bit. First and foremost, we’ve got ourselves a returning director, Matt Cimber. Cimber did The Candy Tangerine Man. This will definitely not be the last time you will see his name on this blog in January. And I promise you Mr. Cimber has a whole lot more I could cover on this blog between his sexploitation, blaxploitation, and his fantasy film Hundra. Anyway, this guy was mostly known for lower-budget fare but he might be best known as being the ex-husband of Jayne Mansfield. He and Mansfield divorced about a year before her untimely death in 1967.

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The Vampires Night Orgy (1972)

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Happy Halloween and welcome to the annual tradition of the B-Movie Enema special Halloween review!

This year, the annual October theme that I always choose to celebrate not just the earliest days of B-Movie Enema but also the spooky season was 1970s Women-in-Peril films. Now, for the most part, the movies I choose each October will fit some kind of theme. Sometimes the Halloween special will follow the theme and sometimes they don’t. This is one of those years where it kind of doesn’t, but there’s a specific reason why I chose this movie to celebrate Halloween.

The Vampires Night Orgy was selected because it was a movie from the 70s but it’s not really a full-on women-in-peril type film like we’ve seen in weeks past. I selected this because it falls in line with a tradition that I’ve sort of halfway gestured at during the course of this month. If you’ve been around these parts for a while, you know that B-Movie Enema was started in 2014 as a way to do something with a whole bunch of movies that I had from various cheap-o 50-movie multipacks. A few years before that, I had wanted to work with some friends to create a horror host show. These movies let us know what basically was available to us at that time. When that fell apart, I felt I had to do something for a creative outlet and the idea of creating a blog was formed on a random night in September 2014. October 3, 2014, the first review was released – The Eerie Midnight Horror Show. That movie was found in one of these multipacks of movies.

It came from the same set that I looked to for this week’s movie review.

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The Wizard of Gore (1970)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

Welcome to a new review here at B-Movie Enema.

A guy I hadn’t yet covered at all to this point is Herschell Gordon Lewis. That’s a little bit of a surprise, isn’t it? This is B-Movie Enema. I’ve covered everything from Batman and Robin to a number of Russ Meyer films to freakin’ Bloodsucking Freaks. It would seem as though Herschell Gordon Lewis, the Godfather of Gore, would have shown up here before now. But, no, this week’s review, 1970’s The Wizard of Gore is his first go around here on the site.

If I am being kind of honest, I’m not entirely sure where I would have entered into the Lewis filmography. Sure, there are several of his movies that are known for his distinctive style (or lack of typical cinematic ability). Naturally, this movie is probably his crowning achievement as being one of the quintessential independent horror films that gave rise to the horror exploitation era of the 70s. Beyond that, there are other movies that are well known for being directed by Lewis like 1963’s Blood Feast and 1964’s Two Thousand Maniacs! While both of those films would have been good choices, they get talked about a lot. I suppose The Wizard of Gore has been too, but… eh. I had to choose something and this fit the criteria for this month of being women-in-peril and a 70s film. The last movie he made before a 30-year break from making films was 1972’s The Gore Gore Girls which was definitely in consideration for a review too.

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