Category: Theme Months

Black Snake (1973)

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Welcome to the penultimate week of Russ Meyer Month II here at B-Movie Enema! We move from the 60s Russ Meyer sex comedies and romps to his 70s bigger budgeted and slightly more interesting films. This week, I’m reviewing 1973’s flop Black Snake.

This one is an interesting entry in Meyer’s filmography. I labeled it a flop. It was. Meyer was not unaccustomed to making a movie that wouldn’t perform well. Sure, maybe not all of his 60s films scored well with critics, but almost none of them were outright flops. As the 70s dawned, though, Meyer’s films would change. This would mostly be due to 20th Century Fox calling on Meyer to make actual studio-backed films. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was the first and it was a hit – despite critics not really appreciating it. The next film for Fox was assigned to him after the original director had to back out. That film would be an adaptation of the book The Seven Minutes. Meyer’s friend, Roger Ebert, would write that the latter was not well-suited to Meyer’s affection toward eroticism. After all, it was a drama about law and freedom of speech. While the central thing in the movie did evolve around an erotic novel a teenager bought, it’s not really Meyer’s realm, even if the studio felt it was right for him based on the movies he made in the past and how he championed the abolishment of censorship.

The Seven Minutes was, by far, Meyer’s most expensive movie and it didn’t do well. In the end, it just didn’t work out. He would only complete one of the three films he was contracted to make for Fox after Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. The end was maybe on the horizon anyway. Black Snake would be his next movie and the first of the final five films he would ever make. While his next three would recoup some of his past magic, this film would prove to be a massive disappointment and bomb.

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Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and Russ Meyer Month II.

We got things started on a rough path this month with Common Law Cabin. This is widely known as a lesser Russ Meyer entry which was likely a pretty rough snapback from his mid-60s black and white masterpieces like Mudhoney, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and Motorpsycho. That’s not even discussing the major splash he made with the controversial Lorna. That last one we need to get to sooner than later.

Despite 1967 being a bit of a drop for Meyer in terms of critical appeal (Good Morning and… Goodbye! also didn’t win over many critics), he was still the king of mainstream adult entertainment. 1968 would prove to be a huge success for him as this is the year that Vixen was unleashed on the world and became known for being an actual date night type of films for young, and rather randy, couples to go see together.

But there was another movie released that same year with Vixen, and that’s going to be our focus for this week’s review – Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!

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Motorpsycho (1965)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle2 Comments

Welcome to B-Movie Enema. This week, we enter week #2 of Russ Meyer Month II. Admittedly, last week was a rough one, and not a very good way to get things started. It wasn’t very good. It was hardly sexy. It was 70 minutes of exceptionally loose structure and too much plot for what we need from Meyer.

I have a great deal more faith in this week’s selection. The year is 1965. I would argue this was maybe the most important year in Meyer’s career. In the first half of the year, his 1964 German co-production Fanny Hill made its way stateside. The movie’s success was likely boosted by 1964’s Lorna which proved to be so controversial that it grossed roughly a million bucks on a $37,000 budget. Shortly after Fanny Hill was released, Mudhoney made it to theaters. That is a great little flick.

Later, in the late summer of 1965, Meyer’s most influential film, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was unleashed to the world. It would inspire movies featuring bad ass women. It would act as a muse to the music industry for decades. Released one week later, but just before making Faster, Pussycat!, Meyer made another movie that would feature a roving gang of nogoodniks. That’s what we’re focusing on this week. This week’s movie, and the best title of all the films getting the review treatment this month by a wide margin, is Motorpsycho!

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Common Law Cabin (1967)

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As we pass out of the dog days of summer, and transition into the colorful days of autumn, I think it’s time we checked in with an old friend – Russ Meyer! We begin with this week’s new B-Movie Enema review with 1967’s Common Law Cabin.

I might as well go ahead and call this month Russ Meyer Month II. I’ve visited the works of the great Mr. Meyer in two different ways. First, if you go back to May 2020, COVID was raging like a bad case of hemorrhoids and the first Russ Meyer Month was rocking and rolling with some of the nudie film master’s most recognizable films. The second time I came to something Russ Meyer, it was to warm things up last December with the pretty great (and fairly sexy) Supervixens. It was very clearly time to return.

This month, I’ve got five more classics to discuss. I very specifically chose four films for their titles. The fifth, well, it’s another time Meyer worked with my all-time favorite critic, Roger Ebert. This first movie is, on the surface, maybe, the oddest of this month’s collection.

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Hideous! (1997)

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No, no… That’s not the title of my Tinder profile. Nope, Hideous! is the final chapter of the Full Moon Fever III: For the Love of Jacqueline Lovell theme month here on B-Movie Enema. It’s been a pretty good one, hasn’t it? We had Head of the Family, which was a solid entry from Charles Band himself. We had Ms. Lovell seductively host an anthology in the confusingly titled Lolida 2000. We had a somewhat infamous entry from the end of the 90s that she headlined, The Killer Eye.

Alas, all good things must come to an end.

And an end is what we’ll experience with 1997’s Hideous! Much like with other mid to late 90s Full Moon films (i.e. the Subspecies series), we find ourselves in Romania for this final entry. Romania has long been attracting film companies, particularly those wanting to save some scratch on production costs, for a number of reasons. A lot of people in Romania are skilled enough laborers to build sets, do bit role or extra work, do stunts, and the location is generally interesting in terms of looks. Hell, even today you can find many productions being made in Eastern Europe like xXx from the earlier part of the 2000s, Season of the Witch with Nic Cage and Ron Perlman, or much more recently like with Watcher starring Maika Monroe. It seems as though it’s easy to spot when a movie gets made in that part of the country for some reason. Oftentimes, it’s not spectacularly great that you recognize that as a shooting location because it could some indication of the quality of the film.

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Lolida 2000 (1998)

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Hello hello my B-Movie Enema fans… My Enemaniacs, if you will. Welcome back to our theme month Full Moon Fever III: For the Love of Jacqueline Lovell! Last week, we went right to the source at Full Moon, Charles Band, to watch his incredibly fun monster romp, Head of the Family. This week, we’re gonna be going a little sexier.

This week, we’re going to watch Lolida 2000!

…Or LOLITA 2000. Yeah, IMDb lists this movie as Lolita 2000. It’s also shown as that on Full Moon DVD menus if you go looking for their movie previews. It’s kind of funny, honestly. It kind of shows you how fast and loose things might be over at Full Moon. I’d be curious to find out if Jacqueline Lovell knows there are two versions of this title that even Full Moon can’t agree on. What about director Sybil Richards?

Oh yeah… This also signals the return of Sybil Richards. A few years ago when we did the Torchlight Diaries, we saw two films of hers in that one month, Virgin Hunters 2 and Femalien, which also featured our lovely leading lady of this month, Jacqueline Lovell. I would suspect that Cybil Richards (or Sybil Richards as she’s sometimes credited) is a pseudonym. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it is Charles Band himself, or possibly even David DeCoteau. Either which way, guy or gal or nonbinary pal… Whichever or whoever Cybil Richards really is, they are welcome here!

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Head of the Family (1996)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema! And welcome to another new theme month. However, what’s old is new again because this theme month is the third time I’ve come down with a case of FULL MOON FEVER! Oh yeah! In February 2017, I did my first ever Full Moon Fever and covered a quartet of classic flicks from Charles Band, the creator of both Empire Pictures in the mid 80s and then closed out the 80s with Full Moon Productions.

Full Moon came along during the boom of the video stores. They partnered up with Paramount Pictures to help stock the shelves of your local Blockbuster (or, my preference, the ma and pop video stores in strip malls or crammed into some dilapidated building somewhere dark and dangerous). However, by the mid 90s, that started to fade and Full Moon was producing stuff on their own, and those productions were shaky at best.

But Full Moon had another angle to their movies. Sure, they’d release some sci-fi and horror flicks – which were their most popular releases – yet they also had a soft core porn side to their business. That helped fill my second Full Moon Fever theme month in January 2021, Torchlight Diaries. For this third trip into the moonlight, I’m going to kind of do a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B and bridge the horror and sci-fi side with their more erotic type stuff through one spectacularly pretty actress that worked in many Full Moon films – Jacqueline Lovell.

Welcome to Full Moon Fever III – For the Love of Jacqueline Lovell and we start right here with 1996’s Head of the Family!

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Space Mutiny (1988)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

Oh. Boy.

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and the grand finale of David Winters Winter. If you’ve been reading all month, I’ve been kind of teasing what the finale was going to be. If you know what David Winters is maybe best known for, particularly in the 80s, and if I was teasing an 80s film of his that has some questionable decisions made in the production and set decoration, then you had to know it was going to be Space Mutiny.

Of course, Space Mutiny is best known for being one of the funniest episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. And what that episode is best known for are all the muscleman jokes made at lead star Reb Brown’s expense. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve called someone Rip Steakface, or Brick HardMeat, or Crunch Buttsteak, or Reef Blastbody, or Roll Fizzlebeef, or Big McLargeHuge, or Eat Punchbeef, or even Bob Johnson. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said one of those names when I see Reb Brown. In fact, I’m sure I used some of them when I covered the 1979 Captain America movie he starred in! It’s part of my very blood. Those 40 parody names are just some of the best jokes ever written for a TV show.

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