horror – Page 10

Night of the Demons 3 (1997)

Published on October 6, 2023October 13, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

NOTE: This review was written prior to the release (or knowledge, for that matter) of the Scream Factory Night of the Demons Trilogy Blu-Ray set. How I sourced this low-quality/VHS-grade version of the movie is explained in the article itself. Enjoy and welcome to October!

It’s that time of year again, my Enemaniacs… It’s spooky times in the spooky month of October!

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema review. October is a VERY special month around these parts. October 3, 2014 saw the very first B-Movie Enema review. Things have come a loooong way since. After knocking out just a handful of articles, I took a break, and returned in March of 2016 with a renewed interest and zest. That would begin a string of 94 more reviews before taking another, shorter break. Then, I returned, as planned after that short podcast birthing break, with even more renewed vigor.

Since returning with that 101st review in March of 2018, I’ve not stopped. I even started hosting movies on YouTube, Vimeo, and OtherWorlds TV. That brings us right back to October and all the goodness, and specialness, that it brings. As is the tradition at B-Movie Enema, I will be featuring a horror film every Friday. On top of that, as per the usual celebrations, I will also be releasing an additional, special Halloween review. That review will also mark 400 reviews at B-Movie Enema. It’s gonna be a good time.

So, for this month, as I made my selections for what I’ll cover, I decided to revisit some old friends in the lead-up to that #400 review. These are all franchises I’ve visited before. It’s also likely I will not be revisiting these franchises again for some time for various reasons. A couple of the franchises just don’t have anything left for me to be arsed with. One franchise is one that I’m not a huge fan of and can’t keep up with all the movies that come along in that franchise every couple of years. And, as is the case with the franchise we’ll be visiting today, one is simply at the end of the road.

So, we start with that end of the road as I look at Night of the Demons 3.

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The Birds II: Land’s End (1994)

Published on August 25, 2023August 31, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema. We’ve got ourselves one of the all-time most ill-advised sequels for this week’s review. Yup, it’s the 1994 made-for-television shitbomb The Birds II: Land’s End.

If we were to start with the fact that The Birds II was an Alan Smithee film, you’d understand something kind of interesting in terms of the history of this blog. This is the very first time I’ve ever covered a movie directed by the notable Alan Smithee. The Alan Smithee moniker was a famous pseudonym given to movies in which the director refused to take credit. Basically, it’s for troubled productions and movies so bad the director just throws his hands up and disowns it. It wasn’t supposed to be a thing we outsiders were to be aware of. It was only after mainstream attention was brought to the pseudonym in the late 90s did the Directors Guild of America retire the name.

The Birds II was actually directed by Rick Rosenthal. We know Rosenthal for Halloween: Resurrection. However, he made a far superior Halloween sequel when he did Halloween II in 1981. Rosenthal has done stuff all up and down the scale of good and not-so-good. But he’s mostly worked in television and has been nominated twice for Primetime Emmys.

It’s not totally out of bounds to think that a Hitchcock film could have a sequel. Psycho II is quite a good film and Psycho III is notable for being kind of kooky in interesting ways. But, outside the various sequels and other things based on Psycho, no other property of Hitchcock’s garnered a sequel up through the 1980s. So, the thought of making a TV movie sequel for The Birds seemed ill-advised at best and downright sacrilegious at worst. Considering the budget, the quality of actors, the cheapness of how it looked, and Rosenthal needing his name removed and replaced by Alan Smithee, The Birds II: Land’s End takes the cake for having a pretty awful reputation.

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Dark Tower (1987)

Published on August 11, 2023August 18, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Welcome to yet another B-Movie Enema review! This week, I’m looking at Dark Tower. Now, before you connect that title to another thing from Stephen King, just know this is a 1987 film that used that same title and set in Spain. Interestingly, though, this movie comes from a pair of directors I’ve talked about before.

The original director was Ken Wiederhorn. Wiederhorn is best known for horror. In particular, he directed Shock Waves in 1977 which features Nazi zombies. Then, in 1981, he did the quite good Eyes of a Stranger with Jennifer Jason Leigh in an early role. The year after this movie’s release, he did Return of the Living Dead II. He originally wanted to be a documentary director, but once he broke in with horror, he says none of the reputable news organizations wanted to work with him. To be fair, it probably has a lot to do with the spectacularly bad Animal House ripoff King Frat which I watched as part of the second season of B-Movie Enema: The Series.

Wiederhorn was replaced during filming. His replacement was Freddie Francis. Francis appeared recently on the site with 1970’s Girly which turned out to be quite a good movie that uses some salaciousness to draw someone in, but then turns out to be a really interesting movie about a messed up family and arrested development. Francis wasn’t the only replacement piece for this movie. Original leading lady Lucy Gutteridge was replaced by Jenny Agutter. Original leading man Roger Daltrey was replaced by Michael Moriarty.

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Byleth: The Demon of Incest (1972)

Published on August 4, 2023August 10, 2023 by Geoff Arbuckle2 Comments

Welcome to B-Movie Enema – the blog that likes to review movies that either have really iffy content, yikesy poster art, or titles that make you cringe into oblivion.

And, with that, this is my review of the 1972 Italian gothic horror flick Byleth: The Demon of Incest. Sigh… Now, I hear this is a very bad movie. I’m not too unaccustomed to that. I mean, this is a blog named B-Movie Enema. I’m not entirely sure what made me want to buy Byleth when it was released by our friends over at Severin Films. I definitely recognized it was Italian, so that was a plus. I probably saw the cool artwork that adorns the poster/cover of the blu ray. I guess that was enough for me to want to get into it.

I don’t think I saw that subtitle. I probably didn’t see it until I opened my package with it inside. And then, I was, like, “Oh boy. I might have made a mistake.” I shouldn’t be so high and mighty over this. After all, I have dedicated an entire month to the Ilsa series and wrote about The Beast in Heat – both featured a whole lotta Nazis (the latter even included sort of bestiality). There is something about this movie that gives me a little bit of trepidation before diving in.

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The Stepford Wives (1975)

Published on July 28, 2023August 3, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

I might need to tread lightly this week, my dear Enemaniacs.

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema. The featured movie for this review is the 1975 version of The Stepford Wives. The film was based on a novel of the same name by author Ira Levin. Levin is actually quite the author. All but a couple of his novels were adapted into fairly large Hollywood productions. Aside from The Stepford Wives, which was adapted twice with this version having a trio of TV movie sequels, he was also the author of Rosemary’s Baby, The Boys from Brazil, Sliver, and A Kiss Before Dying (this was also adapted into two different films). On top of that, Levin was also a playwright. Several of those plays were also adapted into films as well.

The original 1972 novel of The Stepford Wives is classified as a satirical horror novel. In fact, it was an early example of “feminist horror”. Which, today, seems weird. I mean, in that era, I guess it would have to be a dude writing a feminist something. Today, it might not quite fly. Generally, the novel seemed to go over fairly well, though. It had some themes it wanted to explore.

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Maximum Overdrive (1986)

Published on July 21, 2023July 27, 2023 by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Welcome to B-Movie Enema. This week, we’re going to the mid-80s for the slick-looking horror flick Maximum Overdrive. It’s kind of impossible to talk about this movie without mentioning three things a lot of people who know about it knows (and possibly the main reasons that draw them to it). The first is that this movie bombed fairly hard and was almost unilaterally disliked by critics and a whole lot of the audience. Okay. Fine. The second thing was that this featured a pretty bitchin’ soundtrack from the Australian rock superstar group AC/DC.

But, come on… The third is the biggest reason why most watch this movie. That would be Stephen King. By 1986, King was about as big of a name in American literature as anyone else. In 1974, he released his first novel, Carrie, which was immediately brought to the screen in 1976 by Brian De Palma. With each subsequent novel released, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, and so forth, King was selling like hotcakes. Most of his novels up to this point were adapted into movies as well. King hasn’t often had a great deal of appreciation for the movies made from his movies. Notably, he hated Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining.

At the height of his power, King decided he wasn’t going to write a book and then sell the rights to someone only for them to make a movie he wasn’t satisfied with. Instead, he would make his own film. This was the only film King ever directed. He does admit that he had no idea what he was doing and he was railing on cocaine most of the time anyway, so he barely even remembers anything about the production.

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Killer Workout (1987)

Published on July 7, 2023July 13, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Welcome to B-Movie Enema. Here, we care a lot about your well-being and your desire to not look like a complete goblin in the summer. So, with that in mind, I’m going to pull a classic David A. Prior film from the vault to hopefully help us all get into shape. Killer Workout goes by a couple titles, with the aforementioned one the more popular, but it’s also known as Aerobicide. I have the version called Killer Workout, so we’re going with that title.

We’ve dealt with David Prior before with Deadly Prey. He hooked up with David Winters to form Action International Pictures (AIP). Now, we’re also quite familiar with Mr. Winters as I had a whole month of his pictures earlier this year. I don’t think I need to say too much about what Winters has done. But, back to Prior, he was quite well known for making kind of cheap-ish action schlock, but he stepped outside that on a rare occasion. Most notably, he dabbled in the slasher subgenre of horror with Killer Workout, and he dressed up a pair of action schlock films in a veneer of science fiction concepts with Future Force and Future Zone, both starring David Carradine.

Now… I don’t want you to think these movies made by Prior were just a bunch of dudes, some of which would be beefy, some would be more like David Carradine, going around and blasting things for a full 90 minutes alone. Oh no. Prior liked trying to make the same types of movies people would tune into on cable or rent each weekend at the video store. The easiest way to keep them coming back for more?

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Zombie 5: Killing Birds (1988)

Published on June 16, 2023June 23, 2023 by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Oh boy… One I’ve long been leaving on the back burner finally flies into the forefront…

Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema review. This time around, I check back in with the goofy Zombie series, and leave it to the Italians to be weird. Well… sort of. The weirdness of this is not entirely their fault. It’s partially, for once, our fault. Stupid Americans.

Allow me to explain. If you’re reading this blog, you already basically know that Zombi is the Italian title for George Romero’s masterpiece Dawn of the Dead (dollars-for-donuts my pick as the best horror film ever made). Not willing to let any time pass them by without taking full advantage of a possible ripoff of that greatness that is Dawn, in comes Lucio Fulci and his Zombi 2 (aka Zombie here in America, as it is not a sequel here but a different movie altogether). Nine whole years later, Fulci would start in on another entry that doesn’t seem to have anything related to either Dawn or Zombie, but would continue the whole zombie apocalypse thing and also have a flying head that comes out of a fridge to bite someone. That would be 1988’s Zombi 3. Zombie 3 is a bit of a mess, but it’s also got some fun with the inconsistency of how the zombies operate. One thing that is unfair about Zombie 3 is that Fulci should not get full credit as he got very ill and the film had to basically be mostly shot by Claudio Fragasso (of Troll 2 fame) and Bruno Mattei (of Shocking Dark fame).