Tag: science fiction

Phantasm: OblIVion (1998)

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Here we go again with another installment of Phantasm Sequels Month here at B-Movie Enema.

We’re up to the fourth entry that goes by a few titles – Phantasm IV: Oblivion, Phantasm: Oblivion, or, my personal favorite, Phantasm: OblIVion. Yeah, stylize that shit! Anyway, believe it or not, after the last two entries getting budgets of something around $3 million, Oblivion would only get about $650,000. However, I should also state there is more to it than just a severely slashed budget.

You see, this movie actually began life as something else. It actually began as this epic script by Roger Avary. If that name rings a bell, that’s because he’s Quentin Tarantino’s writing partner on 1994’s Pulp Fiction. They won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for that movie. Avary is a self-professed Phantasm superfan. He wrote a sequel to Phantasm III that would have seen a major post-apocalyptic world that continued on from that previous entry and would have even brought Bruce Campbell on as a co-star – or so the story goes.

Fundraising for that project fell through.

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Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994)

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Welcome back to Phantasm Sequels Month here at B-Movie Enema!

Phantasm II, to put it mildly, didn’t perform as well as hoped. Sure, it brought in a little more than double its budget. That’s not bad, but it was hard to necessarily say Universal was all that happy. Goddammit, they wanted a franchise like those Jasons and Freddys.

However, Universal still had a little bit of a hold on the franchise. It would go on to distribute the next film, and this week’s featured entry, Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead on VHS. Things get a little sideways here though. Phantasm III played a very limited, couple week run in movie havens Baton Rouge, Louisiana and St. Louis, Missouri. That may feel like places out in the middle of no-frickin’-where for a movie to get a limited, two-week release, and you’d be right.

It also saw Phantasm III become the highest grossing movie of that two-week run in both markets.

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Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold (1995)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle2 Comments

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema. Also, I guess welcome back to Fred Olen Ray who we most recently had here making some real dumb jokes for the right-wing crowd in Sniper: Special Ops. But I guess we’re back to something a little more palatable with his parody Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold.

So, yeah, this is a parody of the classic Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. However… We’ve been in this neighborhood before. Remember back in 2020, we took a look at the Roger Corman-produced Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader. It was the first time Corman made a 3D movie no less. That movie was somewhat entertaining, but you could also tell, at least to a certain extent, that the movie was somewhat tame.

Wikipedia says that this movie has “much nudity”.

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Hercules (1983)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle3 Comments

Here’s the first of two more movies I’ve wanted to cover on B-Movie Enema for quite some time – 1983’s Hercules. This is Luigi Cozzi’s update of the 50s and 60s tradition of the Italian sword and sandal movies that ran from 1958 to 1965. You might think that, oh, there were only five or six or so Hercules movies released in that time frame. NO! there were a total of NINETEEN Italian Hercules films starring a handful of various American stars with bodybuilder Steve Reeves being among them.

Yeah, the Italians loved them some Hercules. It kind of makes sense. These movies were almost like comic book style movies. You have a beefy hero, scantily clad (and absolutely gorgeous) women, and high action and adventure. It basically offered something for everyone. They were badly dubbed when brought over here and they were kind of goofy. After all, a few of them would be lampooned on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Still, they were popular enough to continue to be made with multiple movies released each year.

Hercules, the movie character and Italian cinema was so well tied together, I’m honestly shocked that it took 18 years between the last of the Italian produced Hercules movies to this one released by… OH BOY… Yup, this is a Cannon Films flick.

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Alien from L.A. (1988)

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From Bill Rebane last week to Albert Pyun this week.

Welcome to another B-Movie Enema article – the 328th if we’re counting, and… I do. This week, we’re going back to good ol’ Cannon Films to peel back some layers on a peculiar little sci-fi film from the late 80s – Alien from L.A. Now, why is it peculiar? Well, it’s because it doesn’t take itself very seriously. It’s almost a comedy in how our lead character, Wanda Saknussem (what kind of name is that?!?), acts with a nasally, dorky voice. But it’s played by the mega-hot Kathy Ireland, so isn’t that funny?!?

But, more to the point, it’s, yes, an ALIEN from Los Angeles that Ireland is playing, but not in the sense you’d think. No, she doesn’t go to outer space or accidentally stow away on a spaceship or anything like that. She actually gets into the center of the Earth and finds an underground civilization that isn’t too far off from what we have up here. It’s more like when you call someone who immigrates from another country an alien. So, yeah, it is a little different than we normally see, but it kind of makes it a much more interesting and subtle Cannon movie.

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Beyond Atlantis (1973)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema. How do you follow up a titty movie starring Daleks? No, not the Cinema Snob. I already did that last month. No, you do a family movie.

Because of course that’s what you do.

This week, I’m looking at the 1973 Filipino-American sci-fi/horror(?) flick Beyond Atlantis. Yeah… This is apparently a family-oriented sorta-horror movie. Considering it’s made in 1973 and the poster has a mostly naked woman riding a giant seashell and being carried around by bug-eyed black dudes… I have concerns. For one, I saw a trailer that has one of the bug-eyed guys (who was not a black dude, but a white dude in body paint – uh oh) slapping the barely covered blonde chick shouting that she WILL MATE. Then Sid Haig is shooting people left and right. There’s murder action happening.

This is what a family movie was in 1973.

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