Psychomania (1973)

Biker flicks were pretty popular between the mid-50s to the mid-70s. But not like the hero rides around on a bike and is bad ass and saves a little town from, I dunno, Nazis or something. No, some of these movies featured down right psychopathic killers on bikes who come in, drink your beer, rape your women, and, I dunno, wore Nazi paraphernalia. Wait… Anyway, here, in America, bikers kind of represented this “take no shit from anyone” kind of attitude that screams conservo-libertarian “shove your rights up your ass, my rights are more important” mindset.

They were a menace to more normal sensibilities of the typical suburban set. So much so, it got to the point where if you wore too much denim or not enough sleeves and didn’t wash your long hair and beard often enough, people were probably thinking you were a biker and probably going to bust heads. Look, I know I’m kind of shot out of a cannon here for the start of this week’s B-Movie Enema review, but I’m catching up to the thread here again.

Okay, so the origins of the “outlaw biker” films go back to Marlon Brando’s The Wild One in 1953. That was the movie that kind of revealed the subculture of biker clubs that had existed for a few years prior. While the success of that film would lead to a lot more movies, and even a book by Hunter S. Thompson about the most famous gang, Hell’s Angels, it really was our ol’ buddy Russ Meyer who made Motorpsycho in 1965 and turned this into a more exploitation type of biker gang flick. By the 70s, biker flicks were exported to the United Kingdom. Maybe our most popular example is this week’s featured flick – 1973’s Psychomania (originally released as The Death Wheelers in the United States).

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Girly (a.k.a Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly, 1970)

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema, my lovelies!

This week, we have a film from British cinematographer and director Freddie Francis – Girly. Now, this one was more commonly known as Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly in the United Kingdom. We’ll come back around to the utterly bizarre plot of Girly in a bit. First, we should talk about Freddie Francis.

Francis is best known for his work with Hammer Film Productions on films like The Evil of Frankenstein and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave and from Hammer rival Amicus Productions on The Deadly Bees and Tales from the Crypt. But, in truth, Francis was a very keen cinematographer. He twice won Oscars for 1960’s Sons and Lovers and 1989’s Glory. Beyond those films, he has a ton of other significant films he shot like 1980’s The Elephant Man directed by David Lynch, Karel Reisz’s 1981 film The French Lieutenant’s Woman starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, and Martin Scorsese’s creepy as hell 1991 remake Cape Fear.

He also shot Lynch’s 1984 version of Dune, so… you know… they can’t all be winners.

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Hellmaster (1992)

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema, my dearest of dear Enemaniacs!

These last few weeks have kind of turned into an adjunct Greatest Hits album for the blog. I covered a classic from the days gone by of Bizarre TV, a sleazy revenge flick, a sleazy women in prison film, and here we go again, but, this time, with a twist. I’m going waaaaay back to the early days of not just this site, but for B-Movie Enema: The Series, my hosting show you can find at here on the site, or on YouTube, or on Vimeo.

Let’s talk a litlte bit about John Saxon, star of 1992’s Hellmaster.

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Escape from Women’s Prison (1978)

Well, well, well… Last week I did one of those rape revenge exploitation films from the 70s. The week before, I revisited a horror film I once saw on Bizarre TV. Now, I’m looking at a good ol’ fashioned women in prison films. It’s like I’m on a greatest hits of B-Movie Enema tour.

Yes, it’s time to take a look at 1978’s Escape from Women’s Prison. You know what other box this movie ticks? Oh yeah… It’s Italian, baby! This movie was written and directed by Italian actor Giovanni Brusadori. In the director credit, he’s actually credited as Conrad Brueghel, but whatever. Brusadori was best known for appearing in the Laura Gemser Emanuelle: Queen of the Desert in 1982. For whatever reason, he decided to make a movie this time around. Now, supposedly, George Eastman, star of Anthropophagus, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, and Porno Holocaust, co-wrote this movie on (though without credit).

I guess what I’m getting at is that these types of late 70s and early 80s Italian sleazefest movies were all made by a small group of people so it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see George Eastman involved in some way.

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Tomcats (1977)

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema.

I suppose I should give a little bit of a content warning to this review as our feature, Tomcats, is one of those 70s exploitation flicks that deals with some pretty gross stuff. You’ve got a situation where a group of ne’er-do-wells, okay, I guess I can call them “thugs”… Anyway, you’ve got this group of nogoodniks who gang-rape and kill young ladies. They get off on a technicality so it leads to one of the victims’ brothers deciding to go on a good old fashioned revenge tear to get the justice he was robbed.

So, yeah, content warning on this episode. These are unsavory situations to be sure. I do want to say that this does feel a little like a mix of movies we’ve seen before like Steel and Lace and the all-time classic revenge film I Spit on Your Grave. If I’m being fair, I’ve long wanted to do I Spit on Your Grave, but considering how dark that second act gets, I’ve yet to really go for it. So, instead, we’re giving Tomcats a try.

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Nightwish (1989)

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

Nightwish is one I’ve wanted to do for some time. The primary reason is that I saw this some years ago on the defunct Roku channel that we all love and miss, Bizarre TV. This movie has a nice mix of spooky horror business and sci-fi elements. And when I think about it, this is kind of what you might expect in the late 80s moving into the early 90s now that the genre was moving beyond the, at the time, quickly deflating slasher subgenre.

This movie is somewhat unremarkable when it comes to the behind the scenes business. Director Bruce R. Cook made only two films in his directorial career. This was his second of those. Interestingly, the art direction is quite good, though. It calls back memories of something that Stuart Gordon would have made. These would be movies like Re-Animator and From Beyond, and it really should look like that because the art direction on Nightwish was done by Robert A. Burns, the art director on Re-Animator and From Beyond – as well as other genre classics like The Howling, Tourist Trap, The Hills Have Eyes, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He also did two more B-Movie Enema alumni Disco Godfather and the B-Movie Enema: The Series selection Microwave Massacre.

Not a bad career if you ask me.

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Hideous! (1997)

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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