Tag: canadian

Trapped (1982)

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You can’t say we don’t get around here at B-Movie Enema.

Over the last month and a half or so, we’ve gone from outer space by way of Japan to the sewers under Los Angeles before we hopped across the Atlantic to hang out with crooks in Italy to a top secret facility out in the American desert lousy with dinosaurs to New Zealand to Tromaville, back to Japan, and here we are… headed to Canada for some thrills and chills. We are definitely piling up the frequent flyer miles. Anyway, this week, B-Movie Enema is reviewing a 1982 film that has a few different titles. We’re going to refer to it, as seen above in this article’s headline, as Trapped. The other titles it is known by are The Killer Instinct and Baker County, U.S.A. The latter is one I’ve either seen at a video store or heard of somewhere along the way (as well as being the title given to the film by IMDb).

Trapped has some returning folks that we’ve talked about before. The director of this flick is William Fruet. Fruet directed 1986’s Killer Party, which is a VERY old review here dating back to, like, 2017. Fruet also worked on the 1983 Peter Fonda/Oliver Reed horror film Spasms, which is definitely one I remember from the video stores thanks to an eye-catching box. Seriously… was I supposed to be looking at the naked girl screaming in the shower or the monster-faced man below her?

The answer was “yes.”

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The Final Sacrifice (1990)

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35 years ago, The Final Sacrifice was released in Canada. 27 years ago, Mystery Science Theater 3000 made the film widely known to Americans. This week, it’s being reviewed at B-Movie Enema.

Hmm… One of those things is not like the others in terms of significance.

If I may, I’m going to pull the curtain back on the behind-the-scenes business of this review. Listen, I covered Space Mutiny at some point in the past. I had to dance around carefully to not make too many jokes similar to those in that classic episode of MST3K. I need to be careful here too, but there is one thing I wanted to mention because it’s kind of perfect. While this article is being released on March 28, I am writing this article on Super Bowl weekend.

Now, I want you all to know that I am a super cool jock. I have EXTENSIVE knowledge about the Super Bowl. One of those two previous sentences is an exaggeration, the other most definitely is not. The fact that MST3K makes constant reference to former All-Pro Dolphins Running Back Larry Csonka as the character Troy’s father is fucking amazing. And, yes, it is a perfect joke. The guy looks just like Csonka did after his football career and during his Miller Lite commercial era.

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Rolling Vengeance (1987)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema. I’m Geoff Arbuckle and this is the blog you come to when you’re taking a shit, or looking for a website run by a guy you’re pretty sure you are far more cultured and smarter than, or, I dunno… you have nothing better to do on a weekend night with nowhere to go. Hmmm… Maybe I’m not doing a good job at promoting my site. Let’s see if I can do better.

The 80s! That’s the decade of Ronald Reagan, cocaine-fueled American exceptionalism running rampant, and bitchin’ music. But you know what else the 80s had? Fuckin’ monster trucks! Monster trucks rolled out of the late 70s trend of modified pickup trucks in various specialized motorsport competitions. By the end of the 70s, one truck in particular, named Bigfoot, was so modified from its original 1974 Ford F-250 that it became known as the world’s first monster truck. Following that, other popular monster trucks were USA-1, Bear Foot, and King Kong. These trucks became the star of various events like Monster Jam where they’d do high-flyin’ jumps and crushing beat-up cars under their giant wheels. If you were a little boy at the time Monster Jam started up, and word on the street is I was, or if you are a grown man, and people tell me that’s what I am, you LOVED the mayhem, the majesty, and the machinery of giant trucks smashing beaters under their tires.

Apparently, Canada was into it too because, in 1987, Steven Hilliard Stern made this week’s movie – Rolling Vengeance.

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Death Ship (1980)

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Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review. This week, we’ve got ourselves another movie that’s been sitting on the stack of movies I’ve been wanting to cover for a long while. Let me know if you’ve heard this before: Let me know if you’ve heard this before (see what I did there?), this week’s featured movie, 1980’s Death Ship, was something I saw for the first time on the long-defunct, yet always wonderful, Bizarre TV Roku app. I think I probably came into it about halfway through or toward the end of the movie and watched it to the end.

However, because I came into it late and then sought out what the movie was based on the Google keyword search “George Kennedy Richard Crenna on a boat horror movie”, it’s not a movie that I remember much of, so this review is now going to basically be a new first-time watch.

The movie was directed by Alvin Rakoff. Rakoff is a Canadian director who had a pretty long career. Most of his work over the course of, like, 45 years was for television. He didn’t make too many feature films made for movie theaters. In fact, Death Ship was one of the very last feature films he directed. With just a cursory scroll through his IMDb credits, Death Ship and The Saint (the television series which he directed an episode) are really the only two things that I recognize. However, a cursory scroll through his Wikipedia page did reveal something very interesting for me personally. Rakoff’s first wife was Jacqueline Hill. Hill played Barbara Wright, one of the trio of companions of the First Doctor when Doctor Who launched in 1963. Hill and Rakoff were married from 1958 until her death in 1993.

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Ghostkeeper (1981)

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So we’ve come the end of 2021. Was it better? Did you have a good time in 2021? I mean, 2020 was pretty shit. 2021 started real rough. I think we corrected course just in time to get back in the muck again. Sure there were deltas and omicrons and probably even persei 8s. But did you take care of yourselves? I mean it, my dear Enemaniacs, I hope you took care of yourselves. I hope if you had to recover from 2020, you did so. I hope if you tried to do something to better yourself in 2021 you were able.

We’re closing out the 22nd year of the 21st century with a film from the 20th.

This week’s film, Ghostkeeper, is a somewhat appreciated moody spirit movie from Canada with some traces of The Shining. Now, I know we’ve had a sketchy history with Canadian horror, but I’m promised that this is an atmospheric movie. It also at least starts on New Year’s Eve. That’s kind of awesome because there aren’t too many movies I can cover that run congruent to the day.

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Cannibal Girls (1973)

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Let’s check back in with 70s horror exploitation, shall we?

But let’s mix it up a little bit too by going north of the border to Canada! But this isn’t just any ol’ Canadian filmmaker and cast, oh no, dear Enemaniacs… We’re getting director Ivan Reitman for this week’s movie, Cannibal Girls! Now, if that name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the producer of David Cronenberg’s fantastic Shivers and Rabid. And if that’s not enough for you, he was then a man of mighty hits in the 80s with Stripes, Twins, and a little movie called Ghostbusters (and its sequel). So, yeah, he’s a big freakin’ deal.

Not for nuthin’, he also produced Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia.

But yeah, he got his start doing exploitation. But with Cannibal Girls, we kind of get some classic exploitation horror tropes that are almost uniquely 70s in its flavor. This is a type of situation where we have a young couple, or group of people, who are traveling and all of a sudden their car breaks down or they make a stop someplace out in the middle of nowhere, or at least in an unfamiliar place. There, they come across maniacs or… worse. Like cannibals! This is the sort of thing that mostly became popular post Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it wasn’t exactly new at the time of its release.

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Kenneyville (2011)

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This week’s B-Movie Enema article comes from our neighbors to the north. Kenneyville is an interesting piece of independent media. I am going to label it as a horror movie because I think it deals with some concepts that some indie horror movies of the 70s dealt with. However, I also have to label it as exploitation as well – for the exact same reasons.

Let’s dissect that a bit, shall we?

A couple months back, I covered the infamous depravity known as Bloodsucking Freaks. I explored some of the core concepts that lies under the surface of cruelty and violence toward women in particular, and, to a certain extent, elitist scholars. It’s a movie about a guy who twists brains and drives women to insanity to do his bidding. I posited that the movie featured a more violent side of sexual kink. A desire to dominate and control as well as the attractiveness of twisting a submissive object of desire. Bloodsucking Freaks possesses layers of making you feel icky.

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