Tag: vinegar syndrome

The Beastmaster (1982)

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Welcome to a new B-Movie Enema!

This week, we’re traveling to the kingdom of Aruk for this 80s classic from Don Coscarelli. Now, the origin of The Beastmaster actually goes back to 1959. Andre Norton wrote the novel The Beast Master about a Navajo war veteran set in a futuristic and sci-fi setting. When writers Coscarelli and Paul Pepperman adapted the novel, Norton was unhappy. We’re going to come back around to Norton in just a moment, but Coscarelli would eventually sign on as director for the film and Pepperman then took the role of Producer alongside Lebanese producer Sylvio Tabet. Tabet was a producer on movies like Fade to Black and Evilspeak. Later, he was a producer on The Cotton Club and Dead Ringers. So he was not an unknown at the time.

Interestingly, the only film Tabet directed was 1991’s Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time.

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Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (1984)

Published on by Geoff Arbuckle4 Comments

You’ve got monster!

Welcome back to B-Movie Enema. We’re headed to the wilderness of Arkansas this week. I’m going to review a sequel to a very popular cult hit from the early 70s, Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues. Both 1972’s The Legend of Boggy Creek and Boggy Creek II were directed by Charles B. Pierce. Pierce is an interesting character. He was born in Hammond, Indiana. Hammond is best known for being a sort of suburb of Chicago and the hometown of author Jean Shepherd who used it as the template for Hohman, Indiana in the holiday classic A Christmas Story.

Pierce based his movies on the legend of the Fouke Monster who is said to reside in the wooded area and the creek marshes around Fouke, Arkansas. The Fouke Monster is just the Texarkana version of Bigfoot or the Sasquatch. It supposedly attacked the home of a couple in May of 1971. Pierce, fascinated by the tales told about the monster from that story, made a docudrama about the event which was The Legend of Boggy Creek.

While the movie was a massive hit, Pierce has always admitted that he doesn’t necessarily believe in the legend of the creature, but is far more interested and fascinated by the folklore and tales the people told about the monster.

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Ninja in the Claws of the C.I.A. (1981)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and welcome back to me going through my backlog of movies that I’ve either picked up from conventions or, as is the case with this month, bought from Vinegar Syndrome.

I think we might have something of a special little movie this week. We’re going to be looking at John Liu writing and directing himself into Ninja in the Claws of the C.I.A. which was originally known as Sah shou ying as well as simply Claws of the C.I.A. and there’s even a version called Made in China. I really don’t know what I want to reveal to the people who haven’t seen this movie, so… I think we’ll just start by talking about John Liu.

When I went googling for John Liu, something really awesome happened. All I was getting were links, articles, and information on John Liu, Democratic member of the New York State Senate. Now, my brain is utterly shattered and broken in terms of being able to work properly. So I think it’s safe for you to bet that I was thinking that guy and the lead of this movie were the same dude. Then, I began thinking about him bringing legislation to the New York Senate floor by way of kicking motherfuckers’ asses. Like, he steps up to the podium, asks for time from the President of the New York Senate, and then after casually removing his tie, he just walks over to some Republican he beefs with and they just kung fu fight.

I wish that was what really happens in state senates and congresses across the country.

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Amazon Jail 2 (1987)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema and the continuation of the Amazon Jail saga with Conrado Sanchez’s Amazon Jail 2!

This month, we’ve got a set of releases from Vinegar Syndrome in 2023. We looked at the first film of the Amazon Jail duology last week. We finish that up this week and move on to some more fun next week. We’re going to be able to get right into the movie very quickly because these movies are wildly obscure so there’s not much of note I can really dive into in the background.

I will follow up on what I discussed for a short bit last week and say this comes from the later days of the Mouth of Garbage exploitation movement in Brazil. That began in the 70s out of Sao Paulo and tackled sex comedies for the most part as well as horror and action films. By this time, a regime change in Brazil led to the loosening of censorship in cinema so porno films began to be produced by the time Amazon Jail 2 was released.

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Amazon Jail (1985)

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Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema!

You know what? I’m kind of excited this week. Why? We’re going to look at some old favorites in terms of a distributor and subgenres. First up, we have a return from Vinegar Syndrome. What a heck of a boutique distributor of physical media. If you have a desire to see obscure horror and thrillers, sexploitation films, or general exploitation from other countries, there’s no one better.

I’ve got a ton of their releases. I’m not one of those types who gets everything from them, but I have a fair amount of their releases. Let’s be honest… They are a wonderful pipeline for content on this blog. So, when they put out some kooky releases in 2023, I had to jump on board with the entire intent to feature it here in February 2024.

In that release slate for 2023, there was a two-pack that we’re diving into this week and next. We start things off with Amazon Jail from Oswaldo de Oliveira. This was the final film of Brazillian director de Oliveira as he would die five years later at the age of 58 or 59. He worked as a cinematographer, writer, director, and occasionally appeared in some of his films. He comes from Brazil’s “Mouth of Garbage” movement. I feel like I should put quotation marks around or italicize the word movement here, but I trust Vinegar Syndrome’s tastes and film analysis. Apparently, we’re going to be in for a hell of a ride with this subgenre of Brazilian cinema as this is a movement that produced a whole lotta crazy genre films that included horror, action, sex comedies, and pornography.

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The Birds II: Land’s End (1994)

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Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema. We’ve got ourselves one of the all-time most ill-advised sequels for this week’s review. Yup, it’s the 1994 made-for-television shitbomb The Birds II: Land’s End.

If we were to start with the fact that The Birds II was an Alan Smithee film, you’d understand something kind of interesting in terms of the history of this blog. This is the very first time I’ve ever covered a movie directed by the notable Alan Smithee. The Alan Smithee moniker was a famous pseudonym given to movies in which the director refused to take credit. Basically, it’s for troubled productions and movies so bad the director just throws his hands up and disowns it. It wasn’t supposed to be a thing we outsiders were to be aware of. It was only after mainstream attention was brought to the pseudonym in the late 90s did the Directors Guild of America retire the name.

The Birds II was actually directed by Rick Rosenthal. We know Rosenthal for Halloween: Resurrection. However, he made a far superior Halloween sequel when he did Halloween II in 1981. Rosenthal has done stuff all up and down the scale of good and not-so-good. But he’s mostly worked in television and has been nominated twice for Primetime Emmys.

It’s not totally out of bounds to think that a Hitchcock film could have a sequel. Psycho II is quite a good film and Psycho III is notable for being kind of kooky in interesting ways. But, outside the various sequels and other things based on Psycho, no other property of Hitchcock’s garnered a sequel up through the 1980s. So, the thought of making a TV movie sequel for The Birds seemed ill-advised at best and downright sacrilegious at worst. Considering the budget, the quality of actors, the cheapness of how it looked, and Rosenthal needing his name removed and replaced by Alan Smithee, The Birds II: Land’s End takes the cake for having a pretty awful reputation.

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Unmasking the Idol (1986)

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Enema… B-Movie Enema.

That sounded a lot better in my head than it looked on the page. Hmm. Anyway, I’m a huge James Bond fan. When I was little, I remember getting my first looks at the Bond films on TV. At that time, I seem to remember more of the Roger Moore-era movies playing regularly than the Connery films, but I caught up with those older entries by the end of the 80s. It was then that I definitely remember ABC playing the movies on Sunday or Monday nights during the summer. What I didn’t see on TV, I’d rent from the video store.

This was around the same time as Licence to Kill hitting theaters and the first time I saw one of the movies in a theater. It was that summer that I became a huge Bond fan. I never looked back. Starting with GoldenEye in 1995, I started going to see each new Bond film in the theater with my father. I have a single tattoo on my body. It’s of a silhouetted James Bond in the famous gun barrel with his 007 logo under it.

So, when there is a movie like the one I’ll be reviewing this week, Unmasking the Idol, I’m immediately curious about it.

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Dark Tower (1987)

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Welcome to yet another B-Movie Enema review! This week, I’m looking at Dark Tower. Now, before you connect that title to another thing from Stephen King, just know this is a 1987 film that used that same title and set in Spain. Interestingly, though, this movie comes from a pair of directors I’ve talked about before.

The original director was Ken Wiederhorn. Wiederhorn is best known for horror. In particular, he directed Shock Waves in 1977 which features Nazi zombies. Then, in 1981, he did the quite good Eyes of a Stranger with Jennifer Jason Leigh in an early role. The year after this movie’s release, he did Return of the Living Dead II. He originally wanted to be a documentary director, but once he broke in with horror, he says none of the reputable news organizations wanted to work with him. To be fair, it probably has a lot to do with the spectacularly bad Animal House ripoff King Frat which I watched as part of the second season of B-Movie Enema: The Series.

Wiederhorn was replaced during filming. His replacement was Freddie Francis. Francis appeared recently on the site with 1970’s Girly which turned out to be quite a good movie that uses some salaciousness to draw someone in, but then turns out to be a really interesting movie about a messed up family and arrested development. Francis wasn’t the only replacement piece for this movie. Original leading lady Lucy Gutteridge was replaced by Jenny Agutter. Original leading man Roger Daltrey was replaced by Michael Moriarty.

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