Nefarious real estate guy Malcolm McDowell buys New York’s Hart Island to build a village for the homeless, but spectral flies and maggots who call the island home might have other ideas in 2000’s Island of the Dead on this week’s B-Movie Enema: The Series!
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.
Continue reading “Xtro (1983)” →
Geoff and Nurse D head to Lake Havasu for this week’s episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series to watch the Hoff in Terror at London Bridge!
Evil hypnotists and creepy ventriloquist dolls are the order of the day for this week’s episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series as Geoff and Nurse Disembaudee watch 1964’s Devil Doll!
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.
Continue reading “Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies (1992)” →
Johnny Longbow shares his recipe for stew with Nurse Disembaudee while Geoff watches and discusses this classic 70s monster movie – Track of the Moon Beast!
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.
Continue reading “10 to Midnight (1983)” →
Gather ’round, kiddies. This week’s B-Movie Enema is going to tell you a tale about urban primitives and their desire to find transcendence via pain and all sorts of fucked up shit. Oh, and also, Dee Snider is here.
Yes, this week, we’re scouring the dusty shelves of the horror section at the video store to talk about 1998’s Strangeland, written by and starring Dee Snider. Snider rose to prominence in the 80s with his band Twisted Sister. He was a hard glam rocker who dressed in a gender-bending way. I’d go so far as to say it was a little gender-bending and a little pro wrestling in style, but it was purely 80s through and through. It was Twisted Sister’s third album, Stay Hungry, that featured two very popular singles, “We’re Not Going to Take It” and “I Wanna Rock”. “We’re Not Going to Take It” is one of those 80s anthems that still gets a lot of airplay and use in movies to this day.
Snider, along with a few other artists of the time, became a favorite target of the Parents Music Resource Center who wanted to bring a warning system to music albums and singles in the pearl-clutching hope that children would not be turned into murderers or something when they listen to “Darling Nikki” or something. Snider was joined by the likes of Frank Zappa and John Denver to speak out against censorship in music. This did lead to the creation of the Explicit Content label we saw on just about every cool ass album of the 90s.
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