It’s 50s juvenile delinquent exploitation on this week’s B-Movie Enema: The Series with the next-level bad Girl Gang!
Tag: drama
Gleaming the Cube (1989)
Oh yeah, dudes and dudettes, it’s some more radical times ahead for this week’s B-Movie Enema review!
This week, we’re going to be Gleaming the Cube and… well, hopefully… trying to learn what that term even means because it was clearly important enough to name an entire movie around it. This movie comes to us in that sweet period in the 80s that was totally trying to ride the gnarly coattails of tubular fads to the max. We’ve talked about skateboarding before on here. For more grindage, check out my review of 1986’s Thrashin’ from David Winters.
I don’t think I have much more to say, but I will bring up three important people connected to Gleaming the Cube that are of note. The first is the screenwriter for this film, Michael Tolkin. Tolkin was still relatively new to the scene at this point. He had one screenplay prior to this movie, the 1982 unfinished film Gossip. Gleaming the Cube was his first film and he also served as Associate Producer as well. Frankly, this isn’t that bad of an accomplishment. Sure, the reviews weren’t great, but a lot of people my age and slightly younger really like this movie. However, his big splash came in 1992 when he wrote The Player for Robert Altman. This would garner Tolkin an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Later in the 90s, he wrote the blockbuster Deep Impact. More recently, he developed the very highly appreciated miniseries The Offer about the making of The Godfather.
Directing Gleaming the Cube is Australian Graeme Clifford who was at the helm for the 1982 drama Frances that racked up a pair of acting Oscar nominations for Jessica Lange and Kim Stanley. While his directing credits aren’t huge, his editing credits are. He directed the wonderful 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now. He followed that up in 1975 with the all-time cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Then, in 1976, he edited David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. He finished out his editing career with Sylvester Stallone’s F.I.S.T. in 1978 and the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice starring Jack Nicholson and, hey… Jessica Lange. I’m guessing that might have led to her getting the role in Frances.
Let’s be serious, though… The draw of Gleaming the Cube is the hot up-and-coming Christian Slater.
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The Harder They Come (1972)
Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review. This week, we’re going to do something a little different. We’re going to look at a movie that is an outright classic. This week, I’m going to look at 1972’s The Harder They Come by Perry Henzell starring reggae star Jimmy Cliff.
The Harder They Come is widely considered one of the most important films to ever come out of the Caribbean and very likely the most influential Jamaican film ever made. It was a massive hit in Jamaica. Henzell believed the success was mostly due to the naturalistic portrayal of black Jamaicans in recognizable locations and the local people portrayed in a way that allowed the black folks on the island to see themselves on the screen for the very first time. On top of that, when it was exported around the world in late 1972 and early 1973, the film is largely credited for bringing reggae to the world, especially the United States where it became a sensation. In the U.S., the film was distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures where it eventually became a midnight movie hit.
The only issue is that the Creole dialect spoken by locals, known as Jamaican Patois, was so thick, that it struggled to be the same sensation outside Jamaica. It became the first English language movie that required subtitles in the United States. Still, the reviews were mostly good. It would go on to become a cult classic over the decades.
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Kitten with a Whip (1964)
Welcome a new B-Movie Enema review, my dear Enemaniacs!
I’ve got something a little different than I usually do on this blog, but I would also say it touches upon a few things I’ve referenced before. The movie I’m looking at this week is 1964’s Kitten with a Whip starring Ann-Margret and John Forsythe. I would label this movie as a late example of the 50s and early 60s “girls gone crazy” exploitation boom. Throughout that era, you had bad girls all played by bombshells who were young and curvy and had a bite to them that made men drool all over themselves.
I’ve talked about a movie several years ago that was a part of a Showtime series of made-for-cable TV movies that were produced by Debra Hill that all took names of classic 50s-era exploitation films and made something slightly different from them. That movie was Confessions of Sorority Girls starring Jaime Luner and Alyssa Milano. Some of these movies were also featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 through the early 90s. That’s where I first saw Kitten with a Whip. The movie is, as we’ll definitely talk about throughout this review, okay, but there is no chance you can watch this movie without noticing the 23-year-old Ann-Margret in the lead role of a bad girl who has all sorts of very sexy issues.
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Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968)
Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and Russ Meyer Month II.
We got things started on a rough path this month with Common Law Cabin. This is widely known as a lesser Russ Meyer entry which was likely a pretty rough snapback from his mid-60s black and white masterpieces like Mudhoney, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and Motorpsycho. That’s not even discussing the major splash he made with the controversial Lorna. That last one we need to get to sooner than later.
Despite 1967 being a bit of a drop for Meyer in terms of critical appeal (Good Morning and… Goodbye! also didn’t win over many critics), he was still the king of mainstream adult entertainment. 1968 would prove to be a huge success for him as this is the year that Vixen was unleashed on the world and became known for being an actual date night type of films for young, and rather randy, couples to go see together.
But there was another movie released that same year with Vixen, and that’s going to be our focus for this week’s review – Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!
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B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #51 – Blonde Ice
Come on in and have a drink and a smoke and watch the 40s noir classic crime drama Blonde Ice on this week’s episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series starring your favorite fella and dame duo, Geoff Arbuckle and Nurse Disembaudee.
Thrashin’ (1986)
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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B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #49 – Scrooge (1935)
It’s the holidays, and Geoff’s a bit down. He’s questioning his path as a B-Movie Proctologist. Nurse Disembaudee decides he needs a visit from some friends to remind him of what he enjoys doing as they watch 1935’s Scrooge.
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