Nightwish (1989)

Welcome to a new review right here at B-Movie Enema.

Nightwish is one I’ve wanted to do for some time. The primary reason is that I saw this some years ago on the defunct Roku channel that we all love and miss, Bizarre TV. This movie has a nice mix of spooky horror business and sci-fi elements. And when I think about it, this is kind of what you might expect in the late 80s moving into the early 90s now that the genre was moving beyond the, at the time, quickly deflating slasher subgenre.

This movie is somewhat unremarkable when it comes to the behind the scenes business. Director Bruce R. Cook made only two films in his directorial career. This was his second of those. Interestingly, the art direction is quite good, though. It calls back memories of something that Stuart Gordon would have made. These would be movies like Re-Animator and From Beyond, and it really should look like that because the art direction on Nightwish was done by Robert A. Burns, the art director on Re-Animator and From Beyond – as well as other genre classics like The Howling, Tourist Trap, The Hills Have Eyes, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He also did two more B-Movie Enema alumni Disco Godfather and the B-Movie Enema: The Series selection Microwave Massacre.

Not a bad career if you ask me.

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Hideous! (1997)

No, no… That’s not the title of my Tinder profile. Nope, Hideous! is the final chapter of the Full Moon Fever III: For the Love of Jacqueline Lovell theme month here on B-Movie Enema. It’s been a pretty good one, hasn’t it? We had Head of the Family, which was a solid entry from Charles Band himself. We had Ms. Lovell seductively host an anthology in the confusingly titled Lolida 2000. We had a somewhat infamous entry from the end of the 90s that she headlined, The Killer Eye.

Alas, all good things must come to an end.

And an end is what we’ll experience with 1997’s Hideous! Much like with other mid to late 90s Full Moon films (i.e. the Subspecies series), we find ourselves in Romania for this final entry. Romania has long been attracting film companies, particularly those wanting to save some scratch on production costs, for a number of reasons. A lot of people in Romania are skilled enough laborers to build sets, do bit role or extra work, do stunts, and the location is generally interesting in terms of looks. Hell, even today you can find many productions being made in Eastern Europe like xXx from the earlier part of the 2000s, Season of the Witch with Nic Cage and Ron Perlman, or much more recently like with Watcher starring Maika Monroe. It seems as though it’s easy to spot when a movie gets made in that part of the country for some reason. Oftentimes, it’s not spectacularly great that you recognize that as a shooting location because it could some indication of the quality of the film.

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The Killer Eye (1999)

Tentacle sex.

It’s a whole thing, ain’t it? Mostly, it’s known to be a Japanese fetish thing but we like to flirt with it over here in America from time to time. If we could draft a guy to make a movie to do a little more than flirt with it, my #1 pick would be David DeCoteau. How could you not?

Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema review, and, for this third chapter of our theme month called Full Moon Fever III: For the Love of Jacqueline Lovell, we’re going to take a look at the 1999 sci-fi/horror/sexploitation flick The Killer Eye. There’s a lot to talk about here in the lead up. First of all, we’ve already looked at the sequel to this movie, Killer Eye: Halloween Haunt, waaaaay back in the first Full Moon Fever in 2017. That one was directly made by the main man of Full Moon himself, Charles Band. However, that was during a time in which Band was kind of cranking out much, much lower budget films than he did before. It’s a cheap movie that just has the Killer Eye prop itself actually being a real Killer Eye and going around and zapping babes in the eyes and making them do sexy things. It’s got some qualities, but none of those are in the plot, if you know what I mean.

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Head of the Family (1996)

Welcome to B-Movie Enema! And welcome to another new theme month. However, what’s old is new again because this theme month is the third time I’ve come down with a case of FULL MOON FEVER! Oh yeah! In February 2017, I did my first ever Full Moon Fever and covered a quartet of classic flicks from Charles Band, the creator of both Empire Pictures in the mid 80s and then closed out the 80s with Full Moon Productions.

Full Moon came along during the boom of the video stores. They partnered up with Paramount Pictures to help stock the shelves of your local Blockbuster (or, my preference, the ma and pop video stores in strip malls or crammed into some dilapidated building somewhere dark and dangerous). However, by the mid 90s, that started to fade and Full Moon was producing stuff on their own, and those productions were shaky at best.

But Full Moon had another angle to their movies. Sure, they’d release some sci-fi and horror flicks – which were their most popular releases – yet they also had a soft core porn side to their business. That helped fill my second Full Moon Fever theme month in January 2021, Torchlight Diaries. For this third trip into the moonlight, I’m going to kind of do a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B and bridge the horror and sci-fi side with their more erotic type stuff through one spectacularly pretty actress that worked in many Full Moon films – Jacqueline Lovell.

Welcome to Full Moon Fever III – For the Love of Jacqueline Lovell and we start right here with 1996’s Head of the Family!

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The Last Horror Film (a.k.a Fanatic, 1982)

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and our special January theme month, David Winters Winter.

This week, we’re going a little earlier in the 80s to see what David Winters would do in the horror slasher genre with The Last Horror Film. This movie also goes by the title Fanatic. In fact, my DVD that I have of the movie comes with that second title. I’m not sure if this was something that played in theaters with Fanatic, or if that’s just the home video distribution title from Troma Entertainment.

Either way, The Last Horror Film co-stars musician Judd Hamilton who also co-wrote the movie and co-produced the film with Winters. Hamilton was the brother of Dan Hamilton of Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds who had the 70s hit “Don’t Pull Your Love”. Judd did a little bit of surf music to rock to country. He was married to the lovely Caroline Munro from 1970 to 1982.

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Dolly Dearest (1991)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays my dear, and dearest, Enemaniacs!

Now, I’ll admit that B-Movie Enema isn’t that good at celebrating other holidays outside of Halloween. That’s so easy with the type of stuff we cover around these parts. In the past, I have touched upon Christmas and New Year’s. I’m trying. But these holidays are rough to go much further, especially for Christmas, because, before long, I’m going to be starting to run into a lot of movies that a lot of people have already talked about.

But when it comes to Christmas, let’s face it… It’s all about the gifts, right? And when it comes to gifts and Christmas, kids love toys. Many times over, at least once upon a time, little girls would get some sort of large, realistic looking, and EXTREMELY creepy, doll. That’s the angle here, folks. This week, I’m going to dig into 1991’s Dolly Dearest!

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Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

Happy Halloween to all my Enemaniacs!

It’s been quite some time since I did an actual Halloween film from the franchise that gave us a guy in a spray-painted William Shatner mask. In 2016, I was watching Fear Fest on AMC and Halloween: Resurrection was on and I realized how really bad that movie was and I needed to put my thoughts to the world. And I did! Then, in 2017, I did it againwith my favorite of all the Halloween sequels, Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

But, much like it was on October 21, 1988, the wait is finally over. I’m back to covering the exploits of one Michael Myers with Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. This feels good. This feels like home. I’m back to talking about Halloween sequels that are either kind of oddballs or flat out bad. This one lands somewhere in between, but we’ll talk about that more in a bit.

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