Tag: thriller

And Soon the Darkness (1970)

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Welcome to another installment of B-Movie Enema and the continuation of this month’s women-in-peril theme.

The first week we saw an unbelievable terror for a pair of young women in New York. Last week, we celebrated 450 reviews on B-Movie Enema with a horrific and brutal attack on a New York woman in Connecticut. This week, we go trans-Atlantic to Europe where we follow a pair of ladies from Nottingham, England taking in a cycling holiday in rural France in Robert Fuest’s And Soon the Darkness.

I’m surprisingly well-acquainted with Mr. Fuest’s films. Some of his films I know well because I’ve seen them. Others I know because they are a sequel to a movie or TV show I’m familiar with. Another I’m aware of because it was a favorite of a family member starring someone I’m exceptionally familiar with.

Let’s start with the ones I’ve seen of his. In 1971, one year after the release of this film (and another I’ll be mentioning momentarily), he directed the Vincent Price classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Another year later, he directed the sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Then, in 1975, he directed William Shatner and Ernest Borgnine in the infamous film that had Anton LeVay himself as an adviser, The Devil’s Rain. Arguably, these are the films Fuest is best known for making.

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I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

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Welcome to the 450th review at B-Movie Enema!

It took a while to get here, folks, but here we are. Just over 10 years since starting this blog, I’ve knocked through major milestone after major milestone. But all the while there were a few movies that I hadn’t covered that I knew I would have to in some way or another. So, when it came to this year’s milestone, the 450th, I needed to cover one of those movies. In fact, when I came to the decision to cover the 1978 rape-revenge exploitation classic I Spit on Your Grave, I used that to help shape the entirety of this month’s October theme.

But why is this movie so famous, or infamous? Well, this is maybe one of the greatest examples of how it was received by critics as well as somewhat close-minded or ill-informed audiences when it was released in November 1978. For all my life until I saw the movie for the first time some years ago, I had two things about the movie relayed to me: 1) it was so disliked and balls-to-the-wall rapey that it almost comes across and something “dirty” to want to watch and 2) my older brothers would always talk about one particular scene concerning a girl, a guy, a knife, and a tub… oh, and that guy’s dick.

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A Brilliant Disguise (1994)

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Ah… the 90s. Man, what a decade, right? Fuckin’ grunge music. Fuckin’ video stores. Fuckin’ Arnold Schwarzenegger is kicking ass all over the place. Cheers was followed by Seinfeld. I attended and graduated high school in the first half of that decade where it’s totally fair I peaked in life. I dunno… I’m sure there were other cool things going on.

One other thing that happened in the 90s was this movie that’s about to get the ol’ review treatment here at B-Movie Enema. 1994’s A Brilliant Disguise was a movie I vividly remember seeing in my days as a video store clerk in the mid to late 90s. I think it’s stark white cover with our lead character Michelle’s sunglasses reflecting some stuff, her black scarf, and her ruby red lips that were very easy to stand out on a shelf. It is certainly a movie that seems to be coming in the wake of the breakout 1992 smash hit Basic Instinct.

Erotic thrillers have been around for a bit, definitely if you think about movies like Body Heat, Body Double, Dressed to Kill, Fatal Attraction, and more. The genre, and the style that often spiced things up, were kind of the mature genre that titillated and frightened married couples who didn’t get into slashers but definitely liked looking at someone like Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas and feeling their naughty bits tremble on date night before ultimately going home and falling asleep while trying to pull out the sexy lingerie that’s collected dust for the past several years. But with Basic Instinct, the genre was back, it was a big deal, and a whole bunch of movies started immediately trying to get in on the piles of cash these sexy little murder tales could bring from cable (especially on late-night Cinemax and Showtime), video, and ticket sales. If there is something that I can say is the closest thing to “exploitation” in the 90s, it would be these erotic thrillers.

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The Ward (2010)

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This week, B-Movie Enema has something new for you, my dear Enemaniacs!

Yeah. This week, it’s the first ever movie directed by John Carpenter that gets the review treatment here at the blog. Sure, he’s been mentioned. After all, I’ve done several entries in the Halloween franchise. His longtime producing partner, Debra Hill, got featured here too with Confessions of Sorority Girls which was a part of a whole series of movies she did for cable channel Showtime that was remaking or reinvisioning old-school 50s exploitation films.

But 2010’s The Ward is the first time I’ve actually covered a film directed by Carpenter. This film would not be well-received, nor did it make its money back against its budget. While I’m not sure if it was planned, he would ultimately step out of the director’s chair and focus more on making music before doing some executive producing and consulting on other projects. Most notably, he returned to the Halloween franchise with the trilogy that began with David Gordon Green’s Halloween in 2018.

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Ravagers (1979)

Published on by Geoff ArbuckleLeave a comment

Welcome back to another installment of B-Movie Enema.

This week, we’re going to the late 70s with a bunch of recognizable faces and names for a post-apocalyptic thriller called Ravagers. This is the pre-Mad Max era of post-apocalytic films. Maybe, to a certain extent, this has more of a lineage to something like Planet of the Apes than what most people my age grew up with in terms of the loner in the wasteland fighting off people trying to steal his gas type of dystopian future flick. Honestly, the cover of the movie and the poster/promotional materials showing roughs attacking people in the streets of a city recall a lot of the early 80s, bonkers Italian dystopian films too.

Now, I don’t necessarily want to set myself up for disappointment, but this might just be a diamond in the rough. The copy I have of Ravagers states that this “all but forgotten post-apocalyptic action thriller is waaaay more decent than some of the reviews and its abandoned status would suggest” so I think this might have something to it. It goes on to talk about grand sets and frequent chases and it even comments on the various names that appear in this movie too. Again, sometimes gassing up something like that in this way can lead to disappointment, but I’ve been known to find some real gems when I go to HorrorHound Weekend and I’m kind of hoping this will be one of those times again.

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