Tag: exploitation

Lucky Bastard (2013)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema!

It’s Friday the 13th! As is the case commonly over the last few Friday the 13ths, I am totally fumbling the bag on what I’m reviewing. Oh, sure, I could surely find another outing from good ol’ Jason Voorhees to write about. That Jason Goes to Hell is a shitfest, but it’s a shitfest I take no pleasure in watching. So, instead, I’m going to celebrate Friday the 13th with a movie from 2013 that features something that we all like watching… found footage!

What, did you think I was going to say porn? I dunno about you, but I’m strictly anti-porn. Who on Earth would possibly want to watch succulent naked bodies doing things to give themselves pleasure with toys or digits or appendages or, I dunno… cucumbers or something? No sirree… I do not condone sexual gratification.

Nah, I’m fuckin’ with ya. Porn is great… in moderation. And pornography is at the heart of the movie getting reviewed this week, 2013’s Lucky Bastard from director Robert Nathan. Nathan got his start in media as a novelist, most notably for writing the political thriller The White Tiger, which was set in China back in Mao’s rule. In the 90s, Nathan started writing a ton of episodes for Law and Order. Lucky Bastard is the only film he wrote and directed aside from a TV movie the same year called The Grim Sleeper.

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The Burning (1981)

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Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review, and welcome to the official start of summer.

Yeah, you read the right, bitches. I say when summer starts. And it starts right now as we say goodbye to May this weekend and hello to June. With the warmer months, traditionally speaking, people start taking vacations in various ways. Families might plan trips to lakes to go boating and maybe fish or something. They may plan on going to Disney World. The days get longer and the movies get more fun and entertaining (for better or worse). Parents are ready, after a long, grueling school year dealing with piss poor report cards and parent-teacher conferences, to send their kids to a camp to get them out of their goddamn hair for a few weeks.

That desire to make your kids someone else’s problem gave birth to two very distinctly 80s subgenres in movies. The first were comedies like 1979’s Meatballs. The second, much more popular subgenre, was the slasher horror like 1980’s Friday the 13th. The latter is where this week’s featured movie, 1981’s The Burning, lies.

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Her Private Hell (1968)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Welcome to another review here at B-Movie Enema.

If you have been around this website for a while, you know that we’re fans of the works of British director Norman J. Warren. So much so, of the nine feature films he directed between 1968 and 1987, I’ve already covered two-thirds of them over the years. Well, it’s time to start getting into that final third I’ve not yet touched. While I’ve mostly covered his best known films in the horror genre, the last time out, I looked at 1979’s Spaced Out, a return for Warren into the world of the sexploitation circles.

Sexploitation was where Warren got his start. In 1967, our favorite director was 25 years old and already had two shorts under his belt, 1963’s Drinkin Time and 1965’s Fragment. As he would put it, he was desperate for a job, especially one on a feature film. Enter producer Bachoo Sen and arthouse cinema owner Richard Schulman. The two had just entered into a partnership to start making their own films. It just so happens that Schulman had been screening Warren’s Fragment at his cinema. They needed a director for their first film, and they approached Warren. Warren, as I mentioned, was desperate and had no idea what he would be asked to make, but a job was a job.

Norman J. Warren’s feature film career began with this week’s movie, Her Private Hell.

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Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and the final week of Troma Month!

This month has been a fun one, hasn’t it? Whether it’s a love letter to Kaufman’s appreciation of William Shakespeare in the romance Tromeo and Juliet, or the earlier Tromaville kids run amok horror Class of Nuke ‘Em High, or the most Troma film of them all, Terror Firmer… It’s been a good time visiting these classics from the 80s and 90s master of gross-out comedy, horror, and comedy-horror, Lloyd Kaufman. But now, we bring things to a close with another dark comedy-horror from the man himself. However, this time, we have a bit of a twist.

This time we have a musical.

Yes, it’s Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. This time around, Kaufman has a little uncredited help from one of the co-writers of the film, Gabriel Friedman. Friedman would go on to be a producer for specials for the cable channels E! and G4, as well as for online series like The IGN Show. In fact, he mostly worked on a lot of specials and behind-the-scenes stuff, including making-of documentaries for Troma films like Terror Firmer and Citizen Toxie. His writing credits are mostly for Troma films like this one, Make Your Own Damn Movie!, the aforementioned fourth Toxie flick, and Lloyd Kaufman’s most recent, #ShakespearesShitstorm.

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Terror Firmer (1999)

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Welcome back! It’s the third week of Troma Month here at B-Movie Enema and it’s time to go back, sorta, to the James Gunn well. This week, I’m gonna be talking about 1999’s Terror Firmer.

What do I mean about this sorta going back to the James Gunn well? That’s because, to a certain extent, Lloyd Kaufman, along with co-writers Douglas Buck and Patrick Cassidy, based this movie’s script, albeit loosely, on the 1998 book All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger. That book was co-written by Kaufman and James Gunn.

I made the comment last week, in my review for Class of Nuke ‘Em High, that I kind of put Kaufman in the same camp as Roger Corman. Corman, back in the 50s and 60s, were cranking out cheap B-movies quickly. However, quickly those movies were, and however cheaply they were made, most (especially in today’s film culture) could not look at those movies and think they weren’t made professionally. Maybe the monster was kind of goofy, but you couldn’t argue that the cast was well-directed and doing their jobs professionally.

I bring up that commentary I made because Roger Corman wrote the introduction to the book this is sort of based on.

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Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle2 Comments

Welcome back to Troma Month here at B-Movie Enema!

Last week, it just so happened, the month started with a leadoff home run with Tromeo and Juliet, a movie that I believe, by the time we finish this month and I’ve increased my viewership of movies made internally by Troma, will be the best film ever released by the company. I know, I know… Toxie and what have you. There was just something special about Tromeo and Juliet that had my by the balls and shook me about until I cried out for my mommy to save me.

Wait…

Eh… anyway… This week, we’re going back to the 80s when Troma and their fictional hometown of Tromaville was in its infancy. We’re looking at 1986’s Class of Nuke ‘Em High. This horror/sci-fi/comedy was Lloyd Kaufman’s follow-up to his seminal 1984 classic The Toxic Avenger. This time, though, he wasn’t alone. Kaufman shared directing duties with Troma editor Richard W. Haines.

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Tromeo and Juliet (1996)

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It’s Troma Month here at B-Movie Enema!

Heck yeah, this is looooong overdue. I think the best thing I need to do to start things off here is to admit something. I don’t really have a great deal of history with Troma. I like Lloyd Kaufman. I like what he does to inspire new filmmakers. I like the general absurdity with the Troma films, particularly the ones that they create and make in-house. Sure, I’ve seen a handful of them. Of course, I’ve seen The Toxic Avenger. I grew up with Mother’s Day. Troma’s War? Yeah, I’ve seen it. But I had a little more experience seeing movies distributed by Troma as opposed to the movies they made themselves.

That said, Lloyd Kaufman’s personality is so larger than life that it feels like I’ve seen more from him than I have. So, this month, I wanna fix that. Let’s take a look at some of Troma’s catalog. I think I picked four pretty popular films from Kaufman specifically. We kick things off with his 1996 Shakespeare parody, Tromeo and Juliet.

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Black Belt Angels (1994)

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Welcome to another week and another review here at B-Movie Enema.

Martial Arts… I’m not entirely sure exactly how popular they are for kids these days, but I’m of the age, being someone born in the late 70s, who knows how freaking massively popular the idea of having kids go to a karate dojo or some other martial arts studio and learn the act of either kicking someone’s ass into oblivion or knowing how to defend one’s self by way of kicking someone’s ass into oblivion was. The phenomenon of the general interest people had in martial arts had to come with the popularity of both Bruce Lee in the 60s and 70s and the entire action subgenre of the kung fu flicks coming from the East. By the mid to late 70s, martial arts were even more popular with the rising popularity of the American actor Chuck Norris. It wouldn’t take long for people to see a couple of uses for learning martial arts for themselves.

The first of these reasons centers around the general exercise and getting a little bit of a workout from doing the various gestures, the movements, and the mental workout of the sort of meditative state that could come from practicing the arts and doing the workouts. The second reason was more to give people some sort of ability to defend themselves if they were attacked by a crazed gang member or some sort of Middle Eastern terrorist that would generally roam the streets of every city, town, and village in the United States. Well, at least I was told by Chuck Norris and Cannon movies that these types of people could be lurking behind every tree and under every rock when I was a kid.

This week, we’re going to be punching deep into the 1994 film Black Belt Angels. Now, admittedly, I thought that title evoked something that would be something a little more like Ninja Cheerleaders that I covered many, many moons ago now. However, I was disappoin… I mean SURPRISED to find out this was a family film from co-writer and director Chi Kim. More on Kim and his co-writer in just a moment. This does sprinkle in something that I mentioned previously. If various martial arts were being taught to people for self-defense purposes, that usually means these studios were attractive to both bullied kids AND women who needed to be able to take care of themselves now that they could be working jobs that got them out of the safe zone of the suburban homelife.

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