The Quiet Earth (1985)

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema!

Quly is continuing on and for this third week, we go to the “other” “down under” for this cult classic from New Zealand. This week, I’m going to discuss Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth. Interestingly, I’ve been familiar with Geoff Murphy for almost 35 years. In 1990, I was super excited to see Young Guns II. I love those two Young Guns flicks. In 1992, I went and saw Freejack which he also directed. So, yeah, I was pleasantly surprised that his name was attached to this because I knew who he was.

Plus, us Geoffs stick together.

Anyway, the origins of The Quiet Earth began in 1981. The obvious connection was that the book this was based on was published that year. We’ll touch upon that in just a moment. But 1981 also saw the release of New Zealand’s first bonafide box office hit, Goodbye Pork Pie. The director of Goodbye Pork Pie? That’s right! It’s Geoff Murphy. And, yes, it basically made his career. He followed that up with Utu which led to a discussion around New Zealand’s history and the treatment of Maori people. After Utu, The Quiet Earth was Murphy’s next film and this hit cult classic status as well. Most of the 90s was spent in Hollywood with mixed results for Murphy, but he would return to New Zealand to be the 2nd Unit Director on fellow Kiwi Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Murphy passed away in December 2018.

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The Quest (1996)

Well hot damn, Enemaniacs! It’s the Fourth of July weekend! Here in the United States, we tend to use this weekend, and the next several weeks afterward (much to the dismay of dogs everywhere), to blow up whole ass chunks of our country with fireworks that are supposedly illegal but everyone can get their hands on them by way of going to a makeshift fireworks store, but I digress…

What was I talking about?

Eh, never mind. Anyway, It’s July and I decided to do something kind of clever for this month’s slate of reviews. I did a little housekeeping by looking at all the movies I covered over the past 435 reviews and came to a realization. I’ve covered a movie starting with 25 of 26 letters in the English alphabet. The only letter I haven’t touched yet? Q. Yeah, I had never covered a movie with a Q title. I mean, for shit’s sake, I have covered THREE movies beginning with X with a fourth planned for later this year!

So with that said, welcome to QULY! All four reviews this month will be a movie starting with the letter Q. To get things started, on this most sacred of sacred weekends in the US, let’s talk about a movie starring a Belgian martial artist in a movie that takes place in Tibet, and then premiered a week early in Turkey… The Quest!

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General Commander (2019)

Welcome to the final week of Steven Seagal Month here at B-Movie Enema.

Thank fucking Christ. Guys… I mean it. Sure, we’ve had some fun with week one’s Attack Force. That movie went through some crazy post-production rewrites. It’s a movie that was bad, but not the kind of shitty bad. I’d argue it’s not fun, but it’s got enough goofy stuff that makes it a halfway decent watch even though it sucks. Week the second was Urban Justice. That movie was, to my shame, enjoyable. I had a good time watching that movie. We don’t need to say much more there. Read that review. Last week’s Contract to Kill suuuuuucked. It was dumb. It was without any energy. It was a lot of Seagal mumbling, and, worse, it was boring.

Knowing Contract to Kill moved us from the 2000s to the 2010s, I knew we were going to be in some trouble. The closer you get to the present year, the shittier his movies get. That makes this week’s movie real dangerous waters for my personal desire to remain alive and breathing in this world. So, let’s talk about 2019’s General Commander.

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Contract to Kill (2016)

Welcome to B-Movie Enema and the continuation of Steven Seagal Month!

And, oh boy… We’ve dodged a couple bullets already. Attack Force was a movie that was originally supposed to be about space vampires and was rearranged, reshot, and turned into a movie about a designer drug that gave people crazy superpowers that made them want to murder. Urban Justice was… actually entertaining. I enjoyed watching that one. There was a fairly straightforward plot and there were some moments I honestly had a good chuckle about.

But Steven Seagal Month moves into some pretty dicey waters with the 2010s. This week, we’re going to look at Contract to Kill from 2016. We’ve not only visited Seagal in his 2010s films before, but we’ve seen another of his films from the same year – Sniper: Special Ops. That movie was awful. In fact, I’d call it embarrassing. Seagal looked like he didn’t give two fucks. He was hardly in the movie that his name appeared above the title on the DVD box. He spent a lot of time sitting down with a high-powered sniper rifle on his lap while another person in his battalion was dying. It was bad. Like, bad bad.

Contract to Kill will likely be no better… or possibly worse.

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Urban Justice (2007)

Welcome to week #2 of B-Movie Enema’s Steven Seagal Month!

This week, our large mound of pounding fudge rounds is doling out some Urban Justice. This comes to us from director Don E. FauntLeRoy. FauntLeRoy previously directed Seagal in Today You Die and Mercenary for Justimce. This would be his third and final collaboration with the actor. Aside from the trio of mid-00s Seagal action flicks, he also workj ed on the Anaconda series directing the thiyrd andm my z,a fourth films. He worked with Jason Connery, Sean’s son, on a superhero movie called Lightspeed which featured a character created bl Stan Lee.

Those directing credits aren’t too impressive, but he still has some impressive films on his resume. You see… FauntLeRoy’s real trade was as a cameraman. He worked behind the lens as an assistant early on in the 70s and 80s. He cut his teeth on TV before getting to be either an assistant cameraman or second unit cameramk,qan on films like Raging Bull, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, and The Goonies. Perhaps his biggest film on the list of films he worked on as a camera guy was in 1991 when e worked on Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

When he graduated to become the Cinematographer on films, he worked on cheap-o movies like Munchie, The Skateboard Kid, and Munchie Strikes Back. However, he did work on three episodes of Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero and eventually hooking up with Victor Salva on the first two Jeepers Creepers films. Maybe the less said about Salva the better, but the point still remains, it’s not like FauntLeRoy hasn’t done some notable stuff. It maybe bodes well that this movie might look decent at the very least.

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Attack Force (2006)

Welcome to my public suicide note!

That’s right, Enemaniacs. This month of B-Movie Enema reviews might just end me. I hope not. I have lots of movies planned and I think 2024 is going to be a good one for the blog. There’s a new season of B-Movie Enema: The Series coming soon. Despite what some people might believe when talking to me, I have no intention of throwing my life away recklessly on foolish pursuits. But… Did I bite off more than I can chew with this opening theme month?

I guess we’ll find out in four weeks’ time. Welcome to Steven Seagal Month at B-Movie Enema. I know, I know… It sure did seem as though I would never again touch a Seagal flick after the torture that was Sniper: Special Ops, but I guess I’m just a glutton for cinematic diarrhea. It’s only four weeks. That can’t lead to that much pain and suffering, right? Right?

Anyway, I start the month off with this 2006 action flick Attack Force.

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Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

For the 400th time, welcome to B-Movie Enema, and, most importantly, allow me to extend to my Enemaniacs a very happy Halloween!

What better way to spend the greatest of all holidays, and this milestone review, than with that murderous monster Michael Myers? Well, you might want to table some of that excitement. That’s because it’s time to take a look at one of the most blasted entries in the entirety of the Halloween franchise. Yeah, we’re cursed, my dear readers. Let’s discuss 1995’s Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.

Alright, check it out… Let’s go back to September 29, 1995, the day the sixth Michael Myers epic hit theater screens. I was 18 years old and a high school graduate. Sure, you might think I should have been a freshman in college, but, well… You don’t realize how absolutely listless and lazy I was (and still am). I didn’t go to college right after high school, pffft. Hell, when I did go to college the following year, I only stuck around for, like, two years.

What was I talking about? Oh, yeah Halloween 6. I didn’t have that interesting story about that September night way back in my youthful days of 1995. But I was excited to see the new movie. I like Mikey Myers. I expected this sixth entry long before 1995. Six years had passed since the previous film’s release and that one ended on a cliffhanger. I had lots of questions about whether or not that would actually be picked up and continued with the Man in Black and Michael Myers being part of some sort of organized thing, hence the tattoo of the Thorn rune symbols on those two characters’ wrists.

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Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

Happy Halloween Weekend, my dearest of Enemaniacs!

If you’ve been around here for a while, you know that October is a big deal with B-Movie Enema. It was in October 2014 that the blog was started. When the blog returned in 2016, I always tried to have some sort of theme (be it loose or a tight theme) each October. I’ve also treated Halloween itself as a kind of big deal. In fact, that SERIES has been visited and revisited a few times over. It started in 2016 when I covered the absolute worst of the series. Then, in 2017, I talked about the one that gets the most misunderstood hatred in the series.

After 2017, I took it kind of easy on the franchise, but last year, I returned to the series with the movie that brought ol’ Mikey Myers back to the franchise after that misunderstood entry. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers wasn’t just a return to the series after six years of the franchise being completely left in the past, but it also kicked off a trilogy of sorts. Today, we follow that up with that movie’s direct sequel and the middle chapter of this sort-of trilogy with Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers.

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