Tag: action

Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and spooky month 2025’s theme, Black Horror Halloween!

This week, I’m not entirely sure how much I want to talk about this movie before diving right in. To get this out of the way, I’ll be reviewing 1975’s Welcome Home Brother Charles. Generally speaking, this month was intended to kind of highlight blaxploitation and horror. This movie is probably technically neither. I will talk a little more about what I think the actual horror of this movie is directed at, but why it’s hard to frame this as a blaxploitation movie is due to the writer/producer/director, Jamaa Fanaka.

Fanaka is back for his third time on this blog. Previously, I covered Penitentiary and its sequel, Penitentiary II. Brother Charles would be his first commercial film. In 1972, before making this movie, he made a short called A Day in the Life of Willie Faust, or Death on the Installment Plan. That was his student film made at UCLA, which was received fairly well. It was about a heroin addict. When I covered those two Penitentiary films, I made mention that Fanaka was keen to not have his films be called blaxploitation by audiences or critics. He felt the term was a little reductive or dismissive of his attempts to portray life for black men.

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Dangerous Men (2005)

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What is it with these damn movies with “Men” in their titles?

Welcome to the 500th review at B-Movie Enema. Holy shit, 500! That’s the number of miles they go at the Indianapolis 500, or half the number of miles I would walk to be the man who falls down at your door! That’s how many dollars it would take to get me to… I dunno… visit Delaware or something. Nah, I’m just messin’ with ya, Delawarians.

Anyway, 500 reviews and it’s time to tackle one of the all-timers when it comes to being batshit insane – 2005’s Dangerous Men. This movie was mostly under the radar for a very, very long time. In fact, it had to because it took 21 years to make it! Production started in 1984 when director-producer John S. Rad (the pseudonym for Jahangir Salehi Yeganehrad) decided to try his hand at making movies. Yeganehrad/Rad was from Iran and worked as an architect on films. He came to the United States during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Five years later, he began to audition actors for his first American film.

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The Toxic Avenger Part II (1989)

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Welcome back to another trip to Tromaville, New Jersey, for a brand new B-Movie Enema review!

Back for Christmas 2022, I took a trip to everyone’s nuclear waste-ridden town to discuss Lloyd Kaufman’s original superhero, The Toxic Avenger. That 1984 breakout hit for Kaufman’s Troma Entertainment was brash, offensive, slapdash, but brilliant in many ways. The sheer irreverence in Kaufman’s style of comedy is in full display here. That wasn’t Lloyd’s first film he directed, and it certainly was not his first comedy, but this was the one that skyrocketed Troma into the vocabulary for all those exploitation, trash cinema fans scouring the video store shelves looking for some depraved weekend entertainment in the 80s.

Funny enough, Lloyd Kaufman’s sex comedies between 1979 and 1983 all had titles with exclamation points: Squeeze Play!, Waitress!, Stuck on You!, and The First Turn-On! You gotta love Lloyd’s commitment to the schtick. Then again, considering how bombastic his mannerisms and the way he speaks, I have to assume he shouted the titles he wanted to put on his movies, and the guy who made the title cards just thought that was part of the title.

Eh… Anyway, considering a bigger budget remake of the original The Toxic Avenger is now hitting theaters across the country, starring a for-real Emmy Award-winning actor, Peter Dinklage, I figured it’s time to revisit the world of Toxie. This week, we’re going to look at the 1989 sequel to the original, The Toxic Avenger Part II.

(Oh, and my official review of the new Toxic Avenger movie? It’s a lot of fun and has a surprising amount of heart but keeps the counterculture vibes of Lloyd’s original intact. 4 out of 5 stars!)

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Carnosaur 2 (1995)

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It’s time to go back to the Jurassic Era for another dino-rific review at B-Movie Enema!

1993’s Carnosaur was a massive hit. Okay, well, maybe not as big as Jurassic Park, but still, it was a significant hit for Roger Corman’s New Horizons production company. To say that it was riding the coattails of JP is not even facetious. It had to have. Both were based on books and featured dinosaurs. One was getting a ton of attention because that Spielberg guy was directing it. Sure, it was riding coattails, but it worked. The movie made a modest amount of money at the box office and was popular on VHS and cable television.

So, two years later, New Horizons was at it again with Carnosaur 2, which is the movie we’re going to be talking about this week. Because the sequel was greenlit while the first was in production, John Carl Buechler, the effects artist who made the dinosaurs in the first film, could save what he made and take care of it while they got the script and pre-production stuff off the ground. Michael Palmer wrote a script and took a lot of inspiration from Corman acolyte James Cameron’s Aliens plot. Corman tapped director Louis Morneau, who, if we’re being honest here, is mostly known for making sequels and pretty bad movies like The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting, Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead, and the terrible Bats.

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Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)

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Goddamn, I love Godzilla…

And you do too. I know you do. Why? Because you’re here. There is no way in the world that the internet is used for people to only search for stuff they don’t like in order to find people to only affirm your negative thoughts on something, right?

Uh… heh… Um, right?

Anyway, welcome to a new review here at B-Movie Enema! I’m Geoff Arbuckle, your B-Movie Enema dude, and this week, I’m diving into the world of Godzilla for the very first time on this site with 1965’s Invasion of Astro-Monster (also known as Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, or, simply, Monster Zero in America). By 1965, Godzilla was a pretty big star in Japan. His first film, 1954’s Gojira, was a dramatic tale of how nature points out the folly of man. It was successfully imported into the United States, with added footage from the future Perry Mason, Raymond Burr, as Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, and, right away, an international superstar was born. After a sequel that isn’t exactly the best-received of the classic films from Toho, Godzilla blasted his way back into theaters after a seven-year hiatus with a showdown against American superstar monster, King Kong. From that point forward, Godzilla would appear almost every year between 1962 and 1975.

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Honorable Men (2004)

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Happy Independence Day, you dirty, dirty, dirty rebel Americans!

Okay, yes, I’m also an American, but I’m kind of trying to downplay that right now because, frankly, we’re kind of in our suck era, but whatever. That said, welcome to a new review at B-Movie Enema! This week, we have another film that was made somewhat infamous by the fine folks at RedLetterMedia. Those hacks and mega-single white boys have that show Best of the Worst each month, in which they feature bad movies and pick which one they find the most entertaining. Sometimes, they get one that’s fun. Sometimes, one of the movies is just utter shit. Sometimes, they are special.

That’s what we’re looking at today. That last one… The special classification. A couple of weeks ago, I looked at a movie that was a James Bond ripoff with a guy who has a partner who is a baboon. That was one that got featured on Best of the Worst. This week, we have one that would blow the balls off that James Bond ripoff and likely leave a lot of people staring blankly and saying, “Whoa…” if they took the time to watch it.

It’s a movie about guys, and girls, and cops, and bad guys… It’s Honorable Men.

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The Order of the Black Eagle (1987)

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Hey there, Enemaniacs, and welcome to another review here at B-Movie Enema.

Say, do you remember that time I reviewed that James Bond ripoff that was made in North Carolina and was made pretty much by a bunch of North Carolinians? You know the one I’m talkin’ about. Yeah, the one with the guy named Duncan Jax, and he had a baboon buddy named Boon. That’s the one! That one was Unmasking the Idol, and it was not so much unmasked but unearthed by Vinegar Syndrome some years ago and given a nice new shiny Blu-ray release.

A year later, in 1987, after making one James Bond ripoff, director Worth Keeter, along with screenwriter Phil Behrens, decided to run it back and do it again. That’s what I’m reviewing this week, the sequel to Unmasking the Idol, still with Duncan Jax and, most importantly, Boon the Baboon, The Order of the Black Eagle. Interestingly, Wikipedia and the movie’s own promotional stuff title this movie Order of the Black Eagle, while IMDb lists it as THE Order of the Black Eagle. Why the use of the definite article on IMDb but nowhere else? I dunno. Who do you think I am, some sort of investigative blogger?

You should know by now that I do the bare minimum when it comes to investigative work.

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The Super Inframan (1975)

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KAPOW! EXPLOSIONS! PUNCHING MONSTERS! IT’S A NEW B-MOVIE ENEMA!

Welcome back, dear readers. This week, we have a bit of a treat. We’re going to look at 1975’s The Super Infra-Man! This comes to us from Hong Kong and is also known as just Infra-Man or literally translated from Cantonese as Chinese Superman. Now, you might think that literal translation means this is a Shaw Brothers Production ripoff of America’s avatar of DC Comics (no, Batman, not you), Superman, right?

Wellll… It actually isn’t. This is much more influenced by the Japanese TV shows that use tokusatsu. Tokusatsu is the term given to Japanese productions that are live-action AND use a great deal of special effects. The term had been part of Japanese theater dating back to the early 20th century. However, it went big time in the 50s. That’s when the mega superstar, world-famous Godzilla stomped into Tokyo and theaters all over the world. Eiji Tsuburaya was more or less the godfather of tokusatsu techniques. He designed many of Toho’s early monsters, including Godzilla. He then launched the television series Ultra Q, which borrowed costumes from Toho. That would later lead to the various Ultraman series. Ultraman then gave birth to another tokusatsu classic, Kamen Rider.

The Super Inframan is more inspired by those tokusatsu series than the fella in the blue tights and red boots.

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