Tag: exploitation

Queen Kong (1976)

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And a new challenger steps into the ring at B-Movie Enema!

Welcome to a new review and… woof. 1976’s Queen Kong is pretty bad. Pret-ty pret-ty bad. For those who have, somehow, followed me for years as I keep punching myself in my own dick time and again on this blog, you know I got pretty upset around 1986’s King Kong Lives. The reason why I loathed that movie is that I sincerely love the 1976 version of King Kong. In fact, it’s my favorite version. It’s the one I saw so many times when I was growing up. To have a sequel kind of dumps all over the sad ending of that movie. King Kong Lives felt especially hurtful because it was the same guy producing that as the 1976 King Kong and it felt like a kind of cheap follow-up to Godzilla 1985.

Now, when it comes to Queen Kong, this week’s movie, we have a whoooole different story. This is just a deeply bad movie. I can’t even be mad at it. It’s that kind of bad. But… Notice this movie is dated 1976. In a way, this is one of the first instances of a mockbuster. It was well-publicized that Dino De Laurentiis was making a new King Kong film. So British filmmakers decided to slip out ahead of it with a parody. It’s a little exploitation. It’s a little sex comedy. It’s all farce. So, in that, there’s a tiny bit of charm to this very bad movie. I’m not sure if it’s as fun as, say, A*P*E when it comes to bad movies you can watch with your buddies and a case of cheap beer, but there’s charm.

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Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies (1992)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema review. This week, we have ourselves a treat! Our movie this time around is the horror-comedy (and, at times, kind of sexy) Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies starring the always fun Karen Black.

Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies is yet another movie that I first saw on Bizarre TV some eight or nine years ago. I really can’t tell you how key Bizarre TV was in terms of the explosion of exploitation and obscure movies in my life. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: B-Movie Enema has so much to credit Bizarre TV for in terms of this site’s existence. I saw movies on that Roku channel that I had never seen or heard of before, and it sent me down rabbit hole after rabbit hole seeking out the movie and learning more about others like it. If it weren’t for my turning the channel on late one night in early March 2016 and waking up to this fascinatingly bonkers Mexican monster movie, this site would have never returned from the inactive state it had been in for over a year.

As for Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies, this is one of those movies that has the look, feel, and general attitude of a late night Showtime or Cinemax movie that guys who either just hit puberty or never matured past it would drool over and watch. It is a movie that is shot in southern California. It takes place in sunshine or in scenes washed in a primary color. It features a lot of Playmates. It treats sex and sensuality in a sort of comedic and old fashioned nudie cutie sort of way while being rather explicit at times in one way or another. It’s directed by a guy who mostly made sexploitation movies. That’s a perfect late night Showtime or Skinemax storm.

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Strangeland (1998)

Published on by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Gather ’round, kiddies. This week’s B-Movie Enema is going to tell you a tale about urban primitives and their desire to find transcendence via pain and all sorts of fucked up shit. Oh, and also, Dee Snider is here.

Yes, this week, we’re scouring the dusty shelves of the horror section at the video store to talk about 1998’s Strangeland, written by and starring Dee Snider. Snider rose to prominence in the 80s with his band Twisted Sister. He was a hard glam rocker who dressed in a gender-bending way. I’d go so far as to say it was a little gender-bending and a little pro wrestling in style, but it was purely 80s through and through. It was Twisted Sister’s third album, Stay Hungry, that featured two very popular singles, “We’re Not Going to Take It” and “I Wanna Rock”. “We’re Not Going to Take It” is one of those 80s anthems that still gets a lot of airplay and use in movies to this day.

Snider, along with a few other artists of the time, became a favorite target of the Parents Music Resource Center who wanted to bring a warning system to music albums and singles in the pearl-clutching hope that children would not be turned into murderers or something when they listen to “Darling Nikki” or something. Snider was joined by the likes of Frank Zappa and John Denver to speak out against censorship in music. This did lead to the creation of the Explicit Content label we saw on just about every cool ass album of the 90s.

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American Rickshaw (1989)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema!

This week, we’ve got a sort of strange one. American Rickshaw, also known as American Tiger, was released in 1989 as an Italian/American co-production filmed in Miami. The film was directed and co-written by Sergio Martino. Martino was a major figure in Italian giallo films of the 70s. His films All the Colors of the Dark and Torso are A+ stuff in the genre. While he continued to make gialli and other styles of horror films throughout his career, he also dabbled quite a bit in comedies and crime thrillers, known as poliziottesco films.

Despite his mastery on display in All the Colors of the Dark and Torso, Martino faded somewhat quickly. He still had a few 80s films that I’ve heard of. Most notably, he directed 1982’s The Scorpion with Two Tails, 1983’s 2019: After the Fall of New York, and 1986’s Hands of Steel. But each of the latter two films really come off as fairly cheap dystopian/post-apocalyptic types of movies. By the end of the decade, when American Rickshaw was released, Martino seemed to be making mostly cheap content for home video rentals.

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