My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Like, no shit this week’s review is going to be My Bloody Valentine, right?

Happy Valentine’s Day, my Enamaniacs. This week’s new review here at B-Movie Enema is a bit overdue. 1981’s My Bloody Valentine is often cited as one of the better slashers of the 80s. Like with 1978’s Halloween, it seems as though there might be a little more going on with this movie. It certainly has more going on with characters and intersecting storylines than, say, Friday the 13th. More on this stuff as we go through the plot later.

George Mihalka is the director of My Bloody Valentine. He was born in the early 50s in Hungary. He was in his mid-20s when directing this film. For the most part, you really aren’t going to find much more interesting in his filmography. Generally speaking, Mihalka’s big claim to fame IS My Bloody Valentine. The same could be said about the screenwriter, John Beaird. Beaird did contribute some uncredited work on the script for Happy Birthday to Me from the same year. But other than that? Nothing really of major note. Sadly, Beaird died young at the age of 40 in 1993.

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Xtro II: The Second Encounter (1991)

Welcome to another B-Movie Enema review descending down from the stars!

In 1983, Xtro came out to little fanfare and a lot of negative reviews. It found itself on the infamous Video Nasties list in its home country, the United Kingdom. But over time, the movie would get a little bit of a following. This is probably thanks to cable and video stores here in the United States, but it is very likely the movie really never did much in terms of success to warrant a sequel (let alone two sequels).

Here’s where the backstory of how we have two Xtro sequels begins. Director Harry Bromley Davenport was in need of a job in the movie-makin’ biz. Well, somewhere along the way, he discovered that while he had no ownership of his 1983 film, he actually legally owned the title “Xtro”. So, this gave Bromley Davenport the idea to create an anthology series of sequels about other alien shenanigans. And that begins with 1991’s Xtro II: The Second Encounter.

But things will take yet another twist…

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Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor (a.k.a. The Deadly Spawn II, 1990)

Howdy Enemaniacs!

This here is what I like to call a “happy little accident” around here at B-Movie Enema. Last week, I reviewed the cult classic sci-fi horror The Deadly Spawn. This week, I’m looking at the 1990 sort of sequel Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor, which is also known as The Deadly Spawn II. This was ABSOLUTELY NOT INTENDED!

If you’re a regular reader here, I’ve mentioned how I was scheduling out the remainder of this year with a bunch of movies that were either in need of a review because they’ve been lying in wait for a long time or they came from the multi-packs of movies I had that played a crucial role tot he start of this blog 10 years ago. The Deadly Spawn was a movie that I wanted to review for a while. Metamorphosis was a movie in one of those packs. I scheduled them next to each other not realizing they were connected.

So, yeah… A happy little accident.

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The Deadly Spawn (1983)

Welcome to a new review here at B-Movie Enema!

This week, I decided to go back to the first half of the 80s for a movie that was made on a really small $25,000 budget but turned out to be much better than most would expect on such a small amount of money. Let’s talk about 1983’s The Deadly Spawn. The origin of the movie came from producer Ted Bohus back in the late 70s. He got the idea after reading a National Geographic article about some seed pods that were found and recovered from the Arctic. Obviously, it sounds an awful lot like the all-time classic sci-fi movie The Thing from Another World, but this real life scientific discovery fueled Bohus and he got right to work on a creature design for an eventual movie.

Originally Bohus thought about a rubber suit that would be worn by an actor, but when John Dods, an associate producer and effects director for the movie, was brought in, his imagination was also put into overdrive. He came back with a bunch of alternate looks and the primary creature that would be used to spawn her deadly offspring that is in the movie. From that, the money was raised and they brought in director Douglas McKeown to bring everything to life.

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The Vampires Night Orgy (1972)

Happy Halloween and welcome to the annual tradition of the B-Movie Enema special Halloween review!

This year, the annual October theme that I always choose to celebrate not just the earliest days of B-Movie Enema but also the spooky season was 1970s Women-in-Peril films. Now, for the most part, the movies I choose each October will fit some kind of theme. Sometimes the Halloween special will follow the theme and sometimes they don’t. This is one of those years where it kind of doesn’t, but there’s a specific reason why I chose this movie to celebrate Halloween.

The Vampires Night Orgy was selected because it was a movie from the 70s but it’s not really a full-on women-in-peril type film like we’ve seen in weeks past. I selected this because it falls in line with a tradition that I’ve sort of halfway gestured at during the course of this month. If you’ve been around these parts for a while, you know that B-Movie Enema was started in 2014 as a way to do something with a whole bunch of movies that I had from various cheap-o 50-movie multipacks. A few years before that, I had wanted to work with some friends to create a horror host show. These movies let us know what basically was available to us at that time. When that fell apart, I felt I had to do something for a creative outlet and the idea of creating a blog was formed on a random night in September 2014. October 3, 2014, the first review was released – The Eerie Midnight Horror Show. That movie was found in one of these multipacks of movies.

It came from the same set that I looked to for this week’s movie review.

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The Wizard of Gore (1970)

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

A guy I hadn’t yet covered at all to this point is Herschell Gordon Lewis. That’s a little bit of a surprise, isn’t it? This is B-Movie Enema. I’ve covered everything from Batman and Robin to a number of Russ Meyer films to freakin’ Bloodsucking Freaks. It would seem as though Herschell Gordon Lewis, the Godfather of Gore, would have shown up here before now. But, no, this week’s review, 1970’s The Wizard of Gore is his first go around here on the site.

If I am being kind of honest, I’m not entirely sure where I would have entered into the Lewis filmography. Sure, there are several of his movies that are known for his distinctive style (or lack of typical cinematic ability). Naturally, this movie is probably his crowning achievement as being one of the quintessential independent horror films that gave rise to the horror exploitation era of the 70s. Beyond that, there are other movies that are well known for being directed by Lewis like 1963’s Blood Feast and 1964’s Two Thousand Maniacs! While both of those films would have been good choices, they get talked about a lot. I suppose The Wizard of Gore has been too, but… eh. I had to choose something and this fit the criteria for this month of being women-in-peril and a 70s film. The last movie he made before a 30-year break from making films was 1972’s The Gore Gore Girls which was definitely in consideration for a review too.

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