Tag: horror

Brain of Blood (1971)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Can you believe, after 441 reviews, Brain of Blood is only the second time Al Adamson has been reviewed on B-Movie Enema?

Yeah. I couldn’t either! Al Adamson is one of the big names in low-budget schlock horror in the 60s and 70s. The only other movie of his I ever mentioned is Black Samurai which I covered, like eight years ago. And, to be honest, I didn’t really know who Al Adamson was at that time. I was still in my fledgling days of being a blogger covering schlock films and just getting into the stuff at the time. Plus, I was more keen to talk about the blaxploitation elements of that movie than the guy making the movie.

Adamson made dozens of movies. His beginnings are that of just assisting his father, Victor Adamson, himself a filmmaker. After helping his dad with the western Half Way to Hell, Al struck out on his own to make his own movies. He could crank out a lot of drive-in fair like a Roger Corman, but the difference was that, for the most part, Adamson seemingly worked way cheaper and with kind of half-baked scripts. For the most part, you’d think of him as a monster movie guy who didn’t so much care about the rest of the stuff as long as they could advertise a monster.

Al Adamson often worked with a lot of the same people, Kent Taylor is someone in this movie who appeared in other Adamson films, and made lots of friends during his filmmaking career. Interestingly, early on, he worked with two pretty big-time cinematographers – Vilmos Zsigmond, a four-time Oscar nominee and winner for Best Cinematography for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and László Kovács who went on to make BIG movies with BIG directors including being the cinematographer on 1984’s Ghostbusters.

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Xtro (1983)

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I sure hope you like slimy and gross-out horror because that’s what B-Movie Enema has on tap for this week’s review!

Xtro is a 1983 sci-fi horror film that some think is one of the many responses to the 1982 runaway hit E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. I believe that misaligns this movie with those more exploitative or cash-grab knockoffs. Yes, E.T.’s immense popularity led to many movies that wanted to “answer back” by featuring nasty, very unfriendly alien invaders as an almost rejection of the big box office brought in by the very sweet and family-friendly film from Spielberg. This is not one of them for a couple of reasons.

The first is that I think this movie has much more credit to pay toward two late 70s sci-fi horror films; 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and 1979’s Alien. In Xtro, we have a very slimy and gross alien that wears the disguise of a recognizable human character. It is also weirder than that as far as where the alien comes from that we’ll dig into later. The primary reason why I do not think this is a response to E.T.’s popularity is because this film was originally intended to be released by New Line Cinema in 1982. Even if we give the conservative release schedule in 1982 of very late December, the production value, the creature, and some of the design work put into the movie wouldn’t have had time to get written, all the pre-production done, and the film shot and edited and put in the can for release that quickly after E.T. It just couldn’t have been possible.

Even on this film’s very scant $60,000 budget.

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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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10 to Midnight (1983)

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Cannon Films is back for this week’s B-Movie Enema review and they are bringing one of their biggest stars with ’em!

It’s hard to believe this is only the second time I’ve done a Charles Bronson movie on this site. To think, he has all those Death Wish movies. He’s got some cool-ass-sounding thrillers and action flicks in the 70s. With all that, the best I could do is Assassination? Well, it’s time to do better, and, this week, I do have one that is better.

Remember when I did the Chuck Norris 1982 thriller Silent Rage? That was this cop thriller that also had some horror and even some science fiction elements. That was part of a time in which crime thrillers were still a big deal, but horror was on the rise big time. If we were to add to that the fact that Norris was becoming a rising star who was just a couple years away from becoming the other “Chuck” at Cannon Films, it’s hard to not kind of tie all of this into this week’s movie that is getting the review treatment, 10 to Midnight.

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