The Ghost of Cameron Mitchell returns for this week’s B-Movie Enema: The Series in the truly interesting 1976 psychological thriller Haunts.
Tag: drama
B-Movie Enema: The Series #75 – The Beatniks
Hey there Daddy-O… This week’s B-Movie Enema: The Series talks about the cool cats of the Beat Generation as they watch 1959’s The Beatniks.
B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #72 – The Louisiana Hussy
Two brothers from the bayou neighborhood known as “The Pit” find themselves in a heap o’trouble when an alluring and mysterious lady shows up and threatens to turn their lives upside down on this week’s feature on B-Movie Enema: The Series – The Louisiana Hussy!
B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #71 – Private Hell 36
This week’s episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series takes a look at the Don Siegel film noir classic Private Hell 36 starring Ida Lupino.
B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #57 – I Accuse My Parents
This week, Geoff and Nurse Disembaudee get a firsthand look at juvenile delinquency in the 1944 exploitation classic I Accuse My Parents.
B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #55 – Girl Gang
It’s 50s juvenile delinquent exploitation on this week’s B-Movie Enema: The Series with the next-level bad Girl Gang!
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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