Tag: action

Tomcats (1977)

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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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Space Mutiny (1988)

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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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Mission Kill (1987)

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Just when you didn’t think David Winters Winter could get any better, things heat up with this mid-80s action spectacular with an all-star cast!

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and the third week of this theme month celebrating the man, the myth, and the legend, David Winters! This week, I’m looking at 1987’s Mission Kill. Hoo boy do I have lots to talk about with the cast of this movie. However, I guess we should talk a little bit about the date of release for this movie.

I have put 1987 as the year of this movie and referred to it as 1987’s Mission Kill. If we want to get a little pedantic about this, I guess I could say it’s 1985’s Mission Kill. That’s what IMDb has it listed for. That’s what will show up in everyone’s filmography, but it really kind of is 1985 when this movie was originally released. It played in France at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 1985. It then went to West Germany 13 months later. Another 13 months later, it was in Japan. It wasn’t until December of 1987 before it got released on video in the United States. Is it possible it played here in either 1985 or 1986 in theaters? Maybe. But we’re going with that 1987 date, okay? Okay.

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Thrashin’ (1986)

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After finishing out 2022 with Get Crazy, I decided it wasn’t time to leave the radical 80s behind quite yet.

So to kick off 2023, B-Movie Enema is going to look at a quartet of 80s David Winters movies in a theme month I’m calling David Winters Winter! We aren’t really doing this in any kind of timeline or chronological order. Nah, I don’t think we really need to do that. BUT what I did want to do is look at movies of Winters’ that came from different genres. We get things started with his teen skateboarding drama, Thrashin’!

This comes during a time in which skateboarding exploded. Skateboarding had been around as a relatively popular activity for kids at least back to the 70s when my brothers were kids. By the 80s, it became something of a lifestyle. Skater fashion would eventually kind of take over from the late 70s/early 80s punk fashion before being replaced by more hip hop fashions by the end of the decade and going into the 90s.

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The Farmer (1977)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema. This week, I’m going to look at the 1977 action crime drama, The Farmer. Now, there’s little about this movie that I have the resources or time to really dig too deep into. That said, there’s a whole other thing about this movie that is a real deep rabbit hole that I can kind of traipse around.

But to get started, David Berlatsky directed the movie. It’s his only directing credit. His actual trade was as an editor. He was decent enough at it to get nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for the 1978 mini-series, King. But he also did a lot of other stuff. For example, he edited 1977’s The Deep for director Peter Yates. He also edited 1973’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for Sam Peckinpah.

In the 80s, he edited a couple episodes of the short-lived, 1984, Glen Larson series Automan. What’s Automan? It’s about a computer-generated superhero. That superhero can also computer generate a car to drive around in. How does computer-generated things become physical objects? Who knows and who cares. He also edited the first season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Haven”. Which one is that? That’s the one that introduced Counselor Troi’s horrifically annoying mother and had something to do with a ship of diseased people closing in on a planet that would be wiped out by said disease.

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Enforcer from Death Row (1978)

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We’ve come to the end of a loosely connected, months-long, trio of reviews that featured the late, great Leo Fong.

Welcome to B-Movie Enema. This week, I’m going to take a look at 1978’s Enforcer from Death Row. This film comes pretty early in Fong’s career as an actor. While we are accepting the fact that this movie was released in 1978 and was called Enforcer from Death Row, the film is also listed on IMDb as Ninja Assassins with the date of 1976. Some of this can be explained by a couple factors at play with this movie.

First, the 70s were kind of known for a couple things when it came to film distribution. You had independent studios cranking out low budget movies and then shopping them for distribution. That distribution, especially for movies like these kung fu/exploitation/low budget action flicks would land the films either at drive-ins or in grindhouse theaters. Second, this was a movie made in the Philippines. That was kind of a southeast Asian haven for films to be made quick and on the cheap in the late 60s and 70s. There are some very fine, if not extremely simple, movies that came out of the area during this time.

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Savage Streets (1984)

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This one is a long time coming…

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema. When I say this was a long time coming it’s because I’ve known of this movie for a long time, had a copy of it, and have always wanted to find some way to talk about it because it exists in a peculiar time of exploitation in the movies – the 1980s. In addition to that, it also has some not insignificant people in the cast. This week, I’m going to be digging into the Danny Steinmann film Savage Streets starring Linda Blair.

I’ve been looking for a way to cover this movie somehow. I got it with the possibility of it being featured either here at B-Movie Enema or as part of a theme month of movies with the word “Savage” in the title over at Film Seizure. However, considering I have an extensive backlog of movies to feature here, I decided I needed to pull the trigger and clear this one off the list. By the way, A LOT of next year is going to be clearing backlog, but I digress. Let’s start looking at the people involved with this movie, beginning with director Danny Steinmann.

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