Tag: exploitation

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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Rolling Vengeance (1987)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema. I’m Geoff Arbuckle and this is the blog you come to when you’re taking a shit, or looking for a website run by a guy you’re pretty sure you are far more cultured and smarter than, or, I dunno… you have nothing better to do on a weekend night with nowhere to go. Hmmm… Maybe I’m not doing a good job at promoting my site. Let’s see if I can do better.

The 80s! That’s the decade of Ronald Reagan, cocaine-fueled American exceptionalism running rampant, and bitchin’ music. But you know what else the 80s had? Fuckin’ monster trucks! Monster trucks rolled out of the late 70s trend of modified pickup trucks in various specialized motorsport competitions. By the end of the 70s, one truck in particular, named Bigfoot, was so modified from its original 1974 Ford F-250 that it became known as the world’s first monster truck. Following that, other popular monster trucks were USA-1, Bear Foot, and King Kong. These trucks became the star of various events like Monster Jam where they’d do high-flyin’ jumps and crushing beat-up cars under their giant wheels. If you were a little boy at the time Monster Jam started up, and word on the street is I was, or if you are a grown man, and people tell me that’s what I am, you LOVED the mayhem, the majesty, and the machinery of giant trucks smashing beaters under their tires.

Apparently, Canada was into it too because, in 1987, Steven Hilliard Stern made this week’s movie – Rolling Vengeance.

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Drive-In (1976)

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Let’s pile into the car and go to a movie at the local Drive-In!

Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review. As you can see by the title and my clever little opening salvo for the review, I’m looking at 1976’s Drive-In directed by Rod Amateau. If you look at the poster for Drive-In, and then look at the poster for George Lucas’ 1973 charmer American Graffiti… I think it’s clear that Columbia Pictures was leaning heavily on the coming-of-age style and depictions of the characters used by American Graffiti to sell Drive-In.

It’s obvious others picked up on it as it often was pointed out in reviews at the time. However, what’s interesting that some critics had some positive things to say about a movie that was very easy to call exploitation and trying to suckle at the teet of American Graffiti’s success. Critics pointed out that while not every performance by the young cast works, it’s got appeal. Others just flat-out called it likable for being easygoing. It’s often called funny by retaining a youthful, juvenile energy. So, yeah, this is a movie that, despite me just becoming aware of it over the last six months or so, was somewhat fondly reviewed during its day.

The one standout in the reception section of Wikipedia was good ol’ Gene Siskel. In a negative review, he said he wished the script for Drive-In had been tossed out in favor of the fake movie, Disaster ’76, to have been made instead. Oh, Gene…

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The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)

Published on by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Welcome to B-Movie Enema for another review to sate your appetites.

So I was trying to think what would make for a good review for this week. I was driving along the roads of New South Wales in Australia and took a detour into the French countryside. I eventually found my way through my European GPS, which was just some road signs, to a strange little village. That’s when it struck me… I want to talk about Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris.

Turns out, the same inspiration that struck me to talk about this movie with a very peculiar title was the same inspiration that struck Weir to make the film to begin with. He was in Europe and claimed that the road signs on the French roads diverted him into what he called strange little villages. From this, being an outsider from a wholly different continent, he got the idea to make a movie where the inhabitants of a small village, that he named Paris, profit from car wrecks.

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