Tag: canadian

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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Heavenly Bodies (1984)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Every now and then…  Every so often… The stars align and I come across a movie that may be one of the most important films of our time.  If it isn’t necessarily one of “the most important” it certainly is one of the most perfect movies ever made.

Pull up a chair kiddies, and let me tell you the tale of 1984’s dance-ercize epic Heavenly Bodies.

And, besides, summer is coming – it’s time to make sure you got your beach bods ready for the sun and fun of the warmer weather!  Heavenly Bodies is about Samantha Blair, played by the incredibly cute and likable Cynthia Dale, who is an aerobics instructor at a Canadian fitness club named, well, Heavenly Bodies.  She soon finds herself in the battle of her life as she competes against one of the lead instructors at a mega fitness club chain for a spot on a local television workout show.  This brings her face-to-face with big wig bullshit and the only way for her to fight and defeat the evils of capitalism is to dance the fuck out of it. Continue reading “Heavenly Bodies (1984)” →

Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia (1977)

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And here we are, the final entry for the Ilsa She-Wolf of SSeptember theme month at B-Movie Enema.

Thus far, we’ve seen Ilsa run a Nazi concentration camp, a sheikh’s harem and sex slave trade… warehouse(?), and a psychiatric hospital in (probably) Spain.  Now, we turn back the clock to 1953 Soviet Union.  Here, Ilsa runs a gulag in Siberia for political prisoners where she breaks them mentally and physically.

Not only does this come full circle back to Canada as the sole country of production, but we also have a couple star-studded names producing the film.  First, we have Ivan Reitman who, before coming to America to produce and direct some of the biggest and best comedies of the 80s, produced horror and exploitation films like this and David Cronenberg’s Shivers.  He and Cronenberg were great friends both from Canada, and it was Reitman’s suggestion for Cronenberg to cast one of the biggest porn stars of all time, Marilyn Chambers, in Rabid. Continue reading “Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia (1977)” →

Ilsa, The Wicked Warden (1977)

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We’re back for round 3 of Ilsa She-Wolf of SSeptember Month here at B-Movie Enema.  Last time, I mentioned that this week’s installment, Ilsa, The Wicked Warden, was a bit of the redheaded stepchild of the series.  It’s not because Ilsa is a redhead this time around (I mean… yes that too), but it’s really because this movie was never meant to be a part of the series.

The first two, as well as next week’s installment, were legitimately made to all be about a ball-busting chick (sorta) named Ilsa who ran a prison camp or a harem.  This was actually meant to be entirely separate.  This film was legitimately filmed to be like those other women in prison, sexploitation flicks and be marketed overseas.  What better way to sell them than to have Dyanne Thorne be your villainess?  And how do you give it more of the European flavor? Continue reading “Ilsa, The Wicked Warden (1977)” →