Tag: drama

Little Darlings (1980)

Published on by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Welcome back for another entry in this year’s Camp Crappabuttawipe at B-Movie Enema.

You know, summer camp isn’t just running for your life from a crazed killer. Nah, it’s also a place where coming-of-age comedy-dramas can be told too. That’s kind of what we have here with 1980’s Little Darlings. This movie comes to us from first-time director Ronald F. Maxwell. He was only 30 years old when this film went into production. However, he had already been a professional working in television since the mid 70s. Maxwell followed this up with another film starring one of the stars of this movie, The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (along with Dennis Quaid and Mark Hamill in between Star Wars sequels). Later in his career, Maxwell shifted to Civil War epics, the largely appreciated Gettysburg in 1993 and the largely despised Gods and Generals in 2003.

As for our leading ladies in this movie, the other one who would work with Maxwell follow-up is Kristy McNichol. McNichol was already a veteran of television shows from her teenage years. She was a regular nominee for Emmys in the late 70s for the drama series Family. Later in her career, she would appear in 100 episodes of the comedy Empty Nest. With Little Darlings, McNichol would follow that up with the aforementioned The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia along with a Golden Globe-nominated performance in Neil Simon’s Only When I Laugh. Unfortunately, her appearance in the 1982 comedy The Pirate Movie (a movie absolutely slaughtered by critics upon release) probably harmed her ability to keep up the momentum her earlier film appearances granted her.

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Caligula (1979/2024)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

B-Movie Enema has existed from the morning of the world, and it shall exist until the last star falls from the night. Although I have taken the form of the Enema Man, I am all men as I am no man and therefore, I am a God… of buttholes.

Ah yes… This was bound to happen, wasn’t it? There are infamous movies, and there is 1979’s Caligula. Known as the gigantic budget sex film produced by Bob Guccione and Penthouse Films International. Guccione was the founder of Penthouse Magazine. Penthouse, as per my reckoning, as a guy who once had a subscription to both that and Playboy in my younger years, was known for two things. The first was the Penthouse Forum, in which people supposedly wrote letters that sounded a little more like erotic fiction than anything else. The second was the fact that the women in the magazine, at least when I had the subscription, tended to be more of the adult actress type of models, and therefore, unlike Playboy, which specialized in girls-next-door types, the Penthouse Pets tended to be a little raunchier in their pictorials. Playboy was more artful. Penthouse was more sexual. Hustler was dirty.

But what people don’t really know is that Penthouse was involved in funding for films for a long time. They chipped in funding for studio pictures like Chinatown and The Day of the Locust. Guccione never produced his own film. So he decided he wanted to not just produce a movie of his own, but make a grand spectacle about a time in which spectacle was sexy as fuck. So he said that Caligula would be the guy he’d make his movie about. He started working with an Italian producer, Franco Rossellini, whose uncle, Roberto, was one of the most prominent Italian filmmakers. He then eventually hired author Gore Vidal as his screenwriter.

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Moment by Moment (1978)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Welcome to the most sexually charged review of B-Movie Enema ever.

This week, I’m going to review 1978’s Moment by Moment from director Jane Wagner. We’ll talk about Wagner momentarily, as she is the writer, collaborator, and wife of one of the stars from this infamous movie. But when it comes to Moment by Moment, there are two guys we need to focus on first. That would be the leading man of the movie, John Travolta, and producer Robert Stigwood.

Travolta’s rise to superstardom was already well on the way in 1978. Sure, he was already famous for the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. In 1976, he had a strong supporting role in the Brian De Palma horror masterpiece Carrie. But it was his leap to taking lead roles in 1977 that really made him a household name and one of the great movie stars for a few years to come.

And it was Robert Stigwood who launched that superstardom.

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Mata Hari (1985)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

Alright, everybody, if you’ll take your seat, your B-Movie Enema historical lesson can begin.

Today, I’m reviewing 1985’s Mata Hari from our good friends at Cannon Films. This was during a time in which Cannon was raking in money from the Chuck Norris action flicks, but also was luring a lot of directors with a great deal of artistic talent. A lot of people think it was those Norris action exploitation films, or the authoritarian, at least semi-right-wing coded crime thrillers that Charles Bronson was making, that brought Cannon low. No, what led to Cannon’s demise was a combination of overpaying Sylvester Stallone for two films that didn’t really do the gangbusters that the company expected, and the big time swings for the fences that were utterly destroyed by critics. These were your Brooke Shields vehicle, Sahara, The Wicked Lady with Faye Dunaway, Bolero from John and Bo Derek, Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, and Mata Hari. There were others, but these were the large productions that had massive scale and looked beautiful, but ultimately were not much more than sex and exploitation films that were just never going to sell to mainstream audiences the way Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus expected. I’m probably not really describing all these films in the best, most detailed or nuanced light, but that’s what more or less happened.

With Mata Hari, they did have a very capable director, though, brought in to tell a war epic. Curtis Harrington was no hack job. Harrington was an experimental filmmaker in the 50s and 60s, but his career actually began as a film critic. In the mid 60s, Roger Corman brought Harrington to make Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and Queen of Blood. He also made Whoever Slew Anutie Roo. He also worked on well-known TV movies like How Awful About Allan and Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell. Most importantly, though, Harrington, himself a gay man, was instrumental in two things related to James Whale (most famous for Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein). He was instrumental in rediscovering and recovering Whale’s thought-to-be-lost film The Old Dark House. He also served as an advisor on Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters about Whale in his later years.

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Drive Me Crazy (1999)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

We’ve made it, my dear Enemaniacs. It’s the final week of Melissa Joan Hart Month at B-Movie Enema. And this is the headliner for sure.

1999’s Drive Me Crazy has a bit of a story behind it. Very clearly, this was Melissa Joan Hart’s movie. It was released by 20th Century Fox, but with 90s teen movies doing pretty well, and she doing pretty well on ABC’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch, it was impossible to think there wouldn’t at least be an attempt to get her into a movie. In a way, this was accomplished the year before when she made a brief, near cameo appearance in one of the most beloved cult classic teen flicks of the 90s, Can’t Hardly Wait. That was less an attempt to get her onto the big screen and more of a “Hey, we’ve got every young up-and-coming actor in this movie, and the Kid from Dick Tracy, so… Get the teenage witch girl!” thing.

No, Drive Me Crazy was specifically for Melissa to spread her wings a bit and give the movie thing a real try. While the movie had its struggles with critics, it wasn’t that big of a flop when it came to the box office. It cost about $8.5 million and brought in nearly $23 million. Not too bad in terms of the teen movies of the era. While nowhere near the box office darling as 1995’s Clueless or 1999’s She’s All That, Drive Me Crazy turned a profit where Can’t Hardly Wait and Empire Records, both beloved cult films, did not.

I think the problems came with the reviews, and one other very big confusion for audiences that came in the form of Britney Spears.

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Twisted Desire (1996)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and another entry in our Melissa Joan Hart Month!

This week, we have a staple of the network television movie – true crime. Quite frankly, if you’re curious when there was a time when true crime did not have an audience, the answer was never. Whether it was in books, or those old pamphlets that probably led to Jack the Ripper becoming really famous, or plays, or movies, true crime was always a way for people to rope in some audiences. Later, as networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC were making original movies to air as movies of the week, the 70s saw a lot of movies in the horror and thriller genres. However, as the 80s and 90s came along, most of the famous stuff was either historical epics or salacious true crime.

And salacious true crime is what we have for 1996’s Twisted Desire.

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Gush (2025)

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Welcome to a new review here at B-Movie Enema.

Congratulations are in order this week. You see, the movie I’m going to be writing about isn’t just the loooooong-awaited return of B-Movie Enema favorites Brian K. Williams and Ellie Church, but this week’s movie, Gush, is also the absolutely most recent movie ever covered on the blog. So, hey… Williams and Church, the super couple of low-budget exploitation art, for the win!

Previous movies involving the pair on this site are Space Babes from Outer Space, which was directed by Williams and starred Church, Amazon Hot Box, in which Church was the villainous warden in the vein of Ilsa with Williams in the role of an editor, and Frankenstein Created Bikers, in which Church was featured as Candy. So it’s great to see these two back in the saddle here once again, but I also get to reference another person whose movies I really could also cover on the site. I mean, I definitely could cover more Ellie Church’s filmography, but there are still a couple movies from Williams I could someday cover as well. No, the person I’m talking about is yet another Hoosier, Scott Schirmer.

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Loving Feeling (1968)

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B-Movie Enema carries on with the first of another 500 reviews!

This week, we’re returning to the early days of our friend, our grandpa, the man we miss, and the guy who we have covered nearly all of his filmography – Norman J. Warren. Some time ago, I watched the 1968 Warren film, his debut as a feature filmmaker, Her Private Hell. This week, we’re looking at his second film, the other 1968 film on his filmography, Loving Feeling. As a fan of this man’s work, will I get that loving feeling from this movie?

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