Tag: thriller

Ravagers (1979)

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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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B-Movie Enema: The Series Episode #66 – Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned

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In 1980, Toei Animation and Marvel Productions were at the end of an agreement deal to cross-adapt each other’s properties. That resulted in Shogun Warriors, a Japanese tokusatsu Spider-Man series, and this animated adaptation of The Tomb of Dracula – Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned.

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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Summer Camp Nightmare (1987)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle1 Comment

Every so often, your humble author and narrator here at B-Movie Enema looks at the calendar, considers what movies I have to cover, and chooses something to review that is timely.

O-okay… Sure, a movie from 37 years ago is hardly “timely” by the strictest of definitions, but stick with me here for a second. Here, in the northern hemisphere of this insignificant ball of rock in space we call Earth, it’s May 31st and we are on the doorstep of warm weather and long days. Looking at some pickups from last year’s HorrorHound Weekend, I saw a movie that sounds far more familiar than it really is to me – Summer Camp Nightmare.

It’s a movie with a title that, if uttered, you’d think you could immediately respond with, “Of course! That’s a movie I remember being on cable all the time. I’m pretty sure I saw it all the time on the video store shelves. And, yes! It sure does seem like a movie that would have come out in 1987!”

However, there is NOTHING about the description of this movie that rings a bell with me.

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Black Snake (1973)

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Welcome to the penultimate week of Russ Meyer Month II here at B-Movie Enema! We move from the 60s Russ Meyer sex comedies and romps to his 70s bigger budgeted and slightly more interesting films. This week, I’m reviewing 1973’s flop Black Snake.

This one is an interesting entry in Meyer’s filmography. I labeled it a flop. It was. Meyer was not unaccustomed to making a movie that wouldn’t perform well. Sure, maybe not all of his 60s films scored well with critics, but almost none of them were outright flops. As the 70s dawned, though, Meyer’s films would change. This would mostly be due to 20th Century Fox calling on Meyer to make actual studio-backed films. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was the first and it was a hit – despite critics not really appreciating it. The next film for Fox was assigned to him after the original director had to back out. That film would be an adaptation of the book The Seven Minutes. Meyer’s friend, Roger Ebert, would write that the latter was not well-suited to Meyer’s affection toward eroticism. After all, it was a drama about law and freedom of speech. While the central thing in the movie did evolve around an erotic novel a teenager bought, it’s not really Meyer’s realm, even if the studio felt it was right for him based on the movies he made in the past and how he championed the abolishment of censorship.

The Seven Minutes was, by far, Meyer’s most expensive movie and it didn’t do well. In the end, it just didn’t work out. He would only complete one of the three films he was contracted to make for Fox after Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. The end was maybe on the horizon anyway. Black Snake would be his next movie and the first of the final five films he would ever make. While his next three would recoup some of his past magic, this film would prove to be a massive disappointment and bomb.

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Motorpsycho (1965)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle2 Comments

Welcome to B-Movie Enema. This week, we enter week #2 of Russ Meyer Month II. Admittedly, last week was a rough one, and not a very good way to get things started. It wasn’t very good. It was hardly sexy. It was 70 minutes of exceptionally loose structure and too much plot for what we need from Meyer.

I have a great deal more faith in this week’s selection. The year is 1965. I would argue this was maybe the most important year in Meyer’s career. In the first half of the year, his 1964 German co-production Fanny Hill made its way stateside. The movie’s success was likely boosted by 1964’s Lorna which proved to be so controversial that it grossed roughly a million bucks on a $37,000 budget. Shortly after Fanny Hill was released, Mudhoney made it to theaters. That is a great little flick.

Later, in the late summer of 1965, Meyer’s most influential film, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was unleashed to the world. It would inspire movies featuring bad ass women. It would act as a muse to the music industry for decades. Released one week later, but just before making Faster, Pussycat!, Meyer made another movie that would feature a roving gang of nogoodniks. That’s what we’re focusing on this week. This week’s movie, and the best title of all the films getting the review treatment this month by a wide margin, is Motorpsycho!

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