Tag: science fiction

Howard the Duck (1986)

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Oh boy, Enemaniacs… This week and next is gonna be a doozy at B-Movie Enema.

Near the end of 1973, the 19th issue of Marvel Comics’ anthology series Adventure into Fear, writer Steve Gerber introduced a new character that was a parody of what were once referred to as cartoon funny animals (what we would call anthropomorphic animals today). This character was cynical. He chomped cigars and was a bit ill-tempered. A little over a decade later, for some reason, largely unknown producer George Lucas… Wait… Let me double-check that. Oh… I meant to type “one of the most powerful producers, George Lucas.” My bad.

Sorry about that. But anyway, for whatever reason, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood thought his follow-up to ending the phenomenon that was the Star Wars Trilogy should be a movie based on this character whose popularity might not exactly be as widespread outside the comic spinner racks. The movie proved to be one of the greatest missteps in film history. The movie was 1986’s Howard the Duck, directed by Willard Huyck and co-written by Gloria Katz.

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Frankenstein Unbound (1990)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

A new review from B-Movie Enema is bounding your way!

2025 was the year of Frankenstein. Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel of a scientist who plays God and cobbles together a living thing from dead flesh finally saw the light of day. That del Toro adaptation was well-cast with Oscar Isaac playing Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi doing amazing work as the Creature. It was gorgeously shot and designed. Seeing two perspectives to tell the full story was amazing. It was solidly in my Top 10 list for last year. I’m not alone in this praise. It was nominated for many Academy Awards.

Let’s also not forget that releasing to theaters today is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s reimagining of the themes of loneliness and monstrous love in Mary Shelley’s seminal work, The Bride! So, yeah, Dr. Frankenstein and his creation(s) are all over the place right now. Plus, speaking of awards, while I’m sure del Toro’s Frankenstein will be picking up at least two or three awards come next weekend, the Queen of this year’s awards season, Jessie Buckley, is celebrating her crowning achievement with another solid performance as the titular Bride. If you’re a monster kid like me, you’re eating well at the trough of Shelley’s work and the present-day adaptations.

However, it was the success of last year’s Frankenstein that got me thinking I should do something for Shelley’s creature – especially as Gyllenhaal’s feminist monster movie is hitting screens. Obviously, I’m not so sure about Guillermo’s masterpiece being what should be covered at a site like this, and I literally just watched The Bride! last night. So I needed to look elsewhere. I landed on the movie that had an eye-popping (no pun intended) box art at the video store. 1990’s Frankenstein Unbound isn’t just what we’re going to be talking about in this review, but it also serves as the final film in which the great Roger Corman was ever credited as director.

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Firebird 2015 AD (1981)

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On your marks… Get set… B-Movie Enema!

Alright, it’s 1981… Due to some circumstances that I am positive we didn’t help, the United States entered into a period known as the 1979 oil crisis. What this meant was that we were having some issues procuring oil for our gas-guzzling cars. Now, I know this because I had a couple in the course of my lifetime, but cars in the United States were either guzzling gas due to being MASSIVE and very long, or if you weren’t cool like me, you might have had a car that was just thirsting for gasoline because it was a sportier car or a Hemi. Really, all throughout the 70s, there were periods in which gas stations didn’t have gas, or there were long lines for people to put just a couple of gallons into their cars to be able to make it to work, or they went without.

Now, what would happen in the decades that followed (minus a couple of short periods of instability) was falling gas prices thanks to what would be known as the 1980s oil glut. No foolin’, prices would fall by about 65-70% in just a few years. However, in between the crisis and glut, pop culture decided to use the energy problems as the basis of some stories. Famously, the whole concept behind why there was a millions-of-years-long war between the Autobots and Decepticons on The Transformers was over energy, thanks to the real-world energy crises over the prior decade. That is also our starting point for the movie I’m reviewing this week, 1981’s Firebird 2015 AD.

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Bride of the Monster (1955)

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It only took 510 B-Movie Enema reviews to finally arrive at the King of the B-Movie Films, Edward D. Wood, Jr.

This week, we’re going to review 1955’s Bride of the Monster. Before we do that… The story of Ed Wood is kind of interesting. For the most part, we know the major story beats of his life. Wood wanted to make movies. He made bad movies. He struck up a friendship with down-and-out Bela Lugosi and gave him work for the last few years of the Hungarian’s life. He liked to wear women’s clothing.

It’s a little more than that, honestly. Wood really WAS heavily into the performing arts and pulp fiction. Lugosi was an early idol of his. The story you heard in Tim Burton’s wonderful 1994 film, Ed Wood, about how the filmmaker was dressed as a girl by his mother when he was a child, was true. She did want a daughter, and for several years, little Eddie was her sole child, so she would dress him up in girls’ clothing as something of a coping mechanism. According to his second wife, Kathy O’Hara, that was the origin point for his continued crossdressing for the rest of his life and his particular affinity to feel angora against his skin.

Wood served in the United States Marine Corps from 1942 to 1946, where he faced considerable combat against the Japanese. He had his teeth knocked out by a Japanese soldier, and he’d pop his false teeth out for a big toothless grin to make Kathy laugh. A story told in the 1994 Burton film by Johnny Depp’s Wood about how he was terrified of being wounded and then discovered he was wearing women’s underwear by the field doctors was true. It sounds like something for a joke, but it was true. You gotta love it.

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Syngenor (1990)

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What up, my lovely fuckfaces, it’s a brand new review here at B-Movie Enema!

So, check it out… A few months back, I covered 1980’s Scared to Death. In that movie, not only did a lady dress up like Sarah Jane Smith from the Classic Doctor Who serial The Hand of Fear, but it also featured an underground creature living beneath Los Angeles, running amok, and killin’ people left and right. The creature in that movie was genetically created by a science dude. However, the doctor who created the creature apparently died before he could kill the adult creature. The name of that creature is also the namesake for this week’s movie we’re going to review – Syngenor.

By the way, I think Syngenor was a mashup of the words SYNthetesized GENetic ORganism. But that’s not necessarily important at the moment. What is important is how this 1990 sequel was conceived and created. The original film’s production team is not involved. That said, Scared to Death director William Malone had a chance to make this movie, but he opted out to make the 1985 sci-fi creature flick appropriately titled Creature. It was producer Jack F. Murphy who led the charge of making the sequel after seeing the original and being mighty impressed by the monster. However, as is the case with a lot of movie sequels of the era, the original’s scarcity when it came to being seen by audiences led to Murphy keeping the monster, keeping the concept of a genetically created creature, but separating the film’s plot from the original to make it its own thing.

I guess you could say it’s somewhat similar to the Xtro movies, except those movies kept the original director and still tossed out any semblance of an actual narrative trilogy.

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Death Warmed Up (1984)

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It’s time for another shambling review here at B-Movie Enema!

We don’t cover New Zealand enough around here, if I’m being honest. The islands that make up the southern hemisphere nation have made quite a splash in film over the last 40+ years. While it’s unfair to tie New Zealand’s film legacy to Australia’s, it might be fair to say that after the rise of Australian cinema in the 70s, New Zealand was able to follow suit and offer its own blend of plots, concepts, and quirks to film audiences.

What’s kind of interesting, this site has been full of Kiwi products over the last year and a half. In March of last year, I looked at Peter Jackson’s adult take on The Muppet Show, 1989’s Meet the Feebles. The wonderful 1985 science fiction drama, The Quiet Earth, came to the site in the form of a review in July. Then, in August of last year, the 70th episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series hopped in our Battletruck to watch Warlords of the 21st Century. All three of those movies have their own qualities that are fun, thought-provoking, or just outright weird. Now, it’s time to discuss another Kiwi film of note – David Blyth’s 1984 sci-fi zombie flick, Death Warmed Up.

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Carnosaur 2 (1995)

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It’s time to go back to the Jurassic Era for another dino-rific review at B-Movie Enema!

1993’s Carnosaur was a massive hit. Okay, well, maybe not as big as Jurassic Park, but still, it was a significant hit for Roger Corman’s New Horizons production company. To say that it was riding the coattails of JP is not even facetious. It had to have. Both were based on books and featured dinosaurs. One was getting a ton of attention because that Spielberg guy was directing it. Sure, it was riding coattails, but it worked. The movie made a modest amount of money at the box office and was popular on VHS and cable television.

So, two years later, New Horizons was at it again with Carnosaur 2, which is the movie we’re going to be talking about this week. Because the sequel was greenlit while the first was in production, John Carl Buechler, the effects artist who made the dinosaurs in the first film, could save what he made and take care of it while they got the script and pre-production stuff off the ground. Michael Palmer wrote a script and took a lot of inspiration from Corman acolyte James Cameron’s Aliens plot. Corman tapped director Louis Morneau, who, if we’re being honest here, is mostly known for making sequels and pretty bad movies like The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting, Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead, and the terrible Bats.

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Scared to Death (1980)

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AAAAAAHHHHHHH!

Wow, guys. I am really Scared to Death this week. Welcome to a new review here at B-Movie Enema.

If you would, think back to December of last year. I reviewed the movie The Deadly Spawn. That little 1983 sci-fi horror flick was quite fun. By absolute accident, the following week, I covered Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor. What I didn’t realize at the time I scheduled those two reviews to be done, months ahead of being published, was that they were from the same series. The Deadly Spawn was the original. Metamorphosis is a sort of sequel. Well, this year, while not scheduled back-to-back, I have scheduled two more films that are related to each other – 1980’s Scared to Death and the 1990 sequel Syngenor.

This time, they are much closer in connection.

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