Phantasm II (1988)

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As promised, here we are at Phantasm Sequel Month on B-Movie Enema.

Earlier this year, I went deep into what I felt the themes of the first Phantasm from 1979 were. I tied it a lot to loss and dealing with death as a teenager, the time in which most people feel pretty invincible and don’t have to deal with the specter of death looming closely behind them. It was pretty clear that Mike had some unresolved issues with the loss of his parents and was scared of losing his brother Jody as well. Naturally, Jody would be lost, so were the events dealing with the Tall Man all in his head or was there some sort of other other-worldly, inter-dimensional, metaphysical thing going on?

Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Did the movie scare you? Did you have a good time watching the movie? That’s all that Don Coscarelli was going for. Okay, sure, maybe he had themes and ideas he was exploring, but he made the movie he wanted to show audiences plain and simple. No one was asking for a sequel. It maybe didn’t need one.

Then, on July 8, 1988, Phantasm II arrived.

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Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold (1995)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle2 Comments

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema. Also, I guess welcome back to Fred Olen Ray who we most recently had here making some real dumb jokes for the right-wing crowd in Sniper: Special Ops. But I guess we’re back to something a little more palatable with his parody Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold.

So, yeah, this is a parody of the classic Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. However… We’ve been in this neighborhood before. Remember back in 2020, we took a look at the Roger Corman-produced Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader. It was the first time Corman made a 3D movie no less. That movie was somewhat entertaining, but you could also tell, at least to a certain extent, that the movie was somewhat tame.

Wikipedia says that this movie has “much nudity”.

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The Beyond (1981)

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Now, this is the Italian stuff I look forward to covering.

After taking on Hercules twice in a row, now I get to return to the warm embrace of Lucio Fulci with his Gates of Hell trilogy. I’ve already knocked out the first chapter, City of the Living Dead, last month. Now it’s time to get to what most would usually list as the best of the trio, The Beyond. So, buckle up and prepare for this week’s dose of B-Movie Enema!

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The Adventures of Hercules (1985)

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How do you follow up one bad movie? With another!

Welcome to this week’s new B-Movie Enema article. Last week, I took a look at Luigi Cozzi’s attempt to revive the classic sword and sandal movies starring the Greek demigod in Cannon Films’ Hercules. This week, we’re just going to go ahead and knock out the sequel, 1985’s The Adventures of Hercules. Now, I typically don’t do stuff like this where I just take two random weeks in the course of a month that has no theme and cover a duology, but, frankly, if I don’t do this right now, I never will.

These movies are dreadfully bad and boring, and I struggle to say they are so in a fun way.

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Hercules (1983)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

Here’s the first of two more movies I’ve wanted to cover on B-Movie Enema for quite some time – 1983’s Hercules. This is Luigi Cozzi’s update of the 50s and 60s tradition of the Italian sword and sandal movies that ran from 1958 to 1965. You might think that, oh, there were only five or six or so Hercules movies released in that time frame. NO! there were a total of NINETEEN Italian Hercules films starring a handful of various American stars with bodybuilder Steve Reeves being among them.

Yeah, the Italians loved them some Hercules. It kind of makes sense. These movies were almost like comic book style movies. You have a beefy hero, scantily clad (and absolutely gorgeous) women, and high action and adventure. It basically offered something for everyone. They were badly dubbed when brought over here and they were kind of goofy. After all, a few of them would be lampooned on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Still, they were popular enough to continue to be made with multiple movies released each year.

Hercules, the movie character and Italian cinema was so well tied together, I’m honestly shocked that it took 18 years between the last of the Italian produced Hercules movies to this one released by… OH BOY… Yup, this is a Cannon Films flick.

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Killpoint (1984)

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Let’s get back into some action stuff and reunite with Leo Fong in Frank Harris’ 1984 action spectacular Killpoint!

This week’s B-Movie Enema article is the second of three new Leo Fong features celebrating this action star this year. Just about five or six weeks ago, I featured Blood Street on the blog, which itself is a sequel to his endlessly enjoyable Low Blow. Later this year, I will take a look at one from the mid 70s. But this week, with Killpoint, we see Fong teamed up with Low Blow co-star Cameron Mitchell as well as director Frank Harris. Here’s hoping we get some of that Low Blow fun feel in this movie too.

Frank Harris only directed films from 1983, Killpoint being his first, to 1990. He was better known for being a camera guy and a cinematographer. In fact, with both this film and 1986’s Low Blow, Harris is pulling down double duty as both director and cinematographer. Outside of those two films, the only other one that immediately jumped out to me on his filmography was as the cinematographer for 1996’s Skyscraper starring Anna Nicole Smith. In television, he worked as cinematographer for several episodes of 2009’s kids’ tokusatsu show Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight. Harris passed away in April 2020 at the age of 76.

Okay, But now, let’s talk about Cameron Mitchell…

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