The Last House on the Left (1972)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle8 Comments

Welcome to October, Enemaniacs.

October is a big deal here at B-Movie Enema. Ten years ago on October 3, the blog was created with the release of an Exorcist ripoff with a Rocky Horror-esque title from Italy, The Eerie Midnight Horror Show. I wouldn’t necessarily go back and read too many of those old reviews. They aren’t particularly great as the tone and the vibe of this blog were ever-shifting and evolving. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate milestones and the history of this blog.

To do so, and considering the 450th review is also due next week with a movie I’ve long been planning for such an occasion, we’re going to be celebrating Halloween a little grimier this year. This month, we’re going to dig deep into four 70s movies that encapsulate the harder-edged attitude of horror in the decade. So, look forward to things getting pretty trigger-warningly real over the next four weeks. And we also get a bonus Halloween review as per the usual around here. It all starts right here with one of the most famous, and highly-regarded, exploitation horror films of all time, Wes Craven’s debut film, The Last House on the Left.

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A Brilliant Disguise (1994)

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Ah… the 90s. Man, what a decade, right? Fuckin’ grunge music. Fuckin’ video stores. Fuckin’ Arnold Schwarzenegger is kicking ass all over the place. Cheers was followed by Seinfeld. I attended and graduated high school in the first half of that decade where it’s totally fair I peaked in life. I dunno… I’m sure there were other cool things going on.

One other thing that happened in the 90s was this movie that’s about to get the ol’ review treatment here at B-Movie Enema. 1994’s A Brilliant Disguise was a movie I vividly remember seeing in my days as a video store clerk in the mid to late 90s. I think it’s stark white cover with our lead character Michelle’s sunglasses reflecting some stuff, her black scarf, and her ruby red lips that were very easy to stand out on a shelf. It is certainly a movie that seems to be coming in the wake of the breakout 1992 smash hit Basic Instinct.

Erotic thrillers have been around for a bit, definitely if you think about movies like Body Heat, Body Double, Dressed to Kill, Fatal Attraction, and more. The genre, and the style that often spiced things up, were kind of the mature genre that titillated and frightened married couples who didn’t get into slashers but definitely liked looking at someone like Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas and feeling their naughty bits tremble on date night before ultimately going home and falling asleep while trying to pull out the sexy lingerie that’s collected dust for the past several years. But with Basic Instinct, the genre was back, it was a big deal, and a whole bunch of movies started immediately trying to get in on the piles of cash these sexy little murder tales could bring from cable (especially on late-night Cinemax and Showtime), video, and ticket sales. If there is something that I can say is the closest thing to “exploitation” in the 90s, it would be these erotic thrillers.

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Kiss of the Tarantula (1975)

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Spiders… why’d it have to be spiders?

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema review. This time around, I’m looking at the 1975 horror film Kiss of the Tarantula directed by Chris Munger. Munger only did three films, of which this film was his last. A few years later, he directed a single episode of The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. That was pretty much the end of Munger’s career.

This movie… Well, I thought I knew what this movie was. This found its way onto the list to cover because the title of the film was so recognizable. Kiss of the Tarantula is the title of a movie that somewhere in my mixed-up memory was this creepy movie. That’s when I realized I was thinking of Black Belly of the Tarantula, the Italian gaillo film by Paolo Cavara. Trust me when I say that will eventually make it onto the blog.

But then I thought, “Wait… Isn’t there a movie from the 80s about kissing spiders? Yeah. Is that what I was thinking of?” Then I was like, “Oh, no, you goober, that’s the 1985 Academy Award-winning film Kiss of the Spider Woman.” That movie is probably a little too high-brow for B-Movie Enema. It was at this point that I realized I had no idea what this movie was. This was only furthered by the fact that I recognized no names in the cast. This was a movie that was entirely new to me and I had no idea of anything about it.

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Beast of the Yellow Night (1971)

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Happy Friday the 13th, Enemaniacs!

For this week’s B-Movie Enema review, what better way to celebrate this once or twice-a-year occasion than to cover a movie about the one person who best embodies Friday the 13th? That’s right, we’ve got a movie featuring the Lord of the Flies himself, Satan! What… You thought I was gonna do that Jason fella? Well, you shoulda learned last October, the last time the 13th fell on a Friday, I’m gonna be a goof about this and always fuck it up. I’m saving Mr. Voorhees for another time.

No, for this week, I’m going to return to the filmography of Filipino director Eddie Romero. The last time we saw a Romero film was the kooky Beyond Atlantis movie. What we’re looking at today is the movie that preceded that movie by a couple years, 1971’s Beast of the Yellow Night. Like I said, this has a bit more… devilish flavor to it.

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