Tag: vinegar syndrome

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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Vice Academy Part 3 (1991)

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Welcome back to yet another B-Movie Enema and yet another entry in the Vice Academy saga!

When Vinegar Syndrome released a box set of Vice Academy movies, they only released the first half. I think we all assumed there would be a second volume with the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries but we’ve not heard anything yet as of this article’s creation. The good news, though, is that the entire series is on Tubi so… I guess all we’re waiting on is for Vinegar Syndrome to get their shit together to clean them up nicer than shit? I dunno.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago as I was setting up Vice Academy Part 2, writer, director, and producer Rick Sloane, for the most part, is really best known for these movies and his two Hobgoblins movies. That said, I think it might be accurate to say he was a student of B-movies as a kid. He seemed to really be into the Roger Corman type stuff as he became deeply inspired by Hollywood Boulevard, a movie produced by Corman, directed by Joe Dante, and featured right here on this blog! But because he was so inspired by that, when he started working on his very first feature, Blood Theater, he was able to convince Hollywood Boulevard star (and Corman alum) Mary Woronov to headline that first movie. He did this at the age of 21.

In a lot of ways, I really do have a great deal of, for a lack of a better word, sympathy for Sloane. His movies have been bashed throughout his career. However, I do wonder if that even bothers him. You see, the guy clearly loves his B-movies. He may be closer to a Jim Wynorski type where he likes to interject sex and comedy into his movies. These aren’t the type of movies that will go over well with critics, but these Vice Academy movies WILL go over well on USA Up All Night where they became hits in the 90s thanks to Rhonda Shear bringing a lot of teenage fellas to the TV on Friday and Saturday nights before they had cars.

But enough of that… Let’s get into Vice Academy Part 3 where our lovely cops to stop and frisk some female inmates on the run!

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Vice Academy Part 2 (1990)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema, my dear Enemaniacs! This week, we’re going to get back to a series I started back in summer of 2020 when I looked at the first of SIX Vice Academy movies. We had some fun times with the lovely ladies of the academy as they certainly put the bust in busting bad guys. Considering it’s been almost three years since doing that movie, and this month is all about catching up with some old friends in sequels to movies I’ve covered before, it was high time I go back to the Rick Sloane series. So, here we are with Vice Academy Part 2 released the very next year after the first movie’s release.

I know I talked a little bit about Rick Sloane in the first Vice Academy movie, but I kind of want to swing back around to him for this second movie. There really are only three things Sloane has done stuff with in his life. Of course, maybe his longest running gig was cranking out these six Vice Academy flicks. His next most recognizable thing were two Hobgoblins movies. I talked last time about how that was mercilessly riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000 in one of my all time favorite episodes of that series. Since then, alumni of MST3K riffed it again at a life Rifftrax event that was also pretty great.

Interestingly, while Sloane did make other movies here or there, he has a major passion for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He grew up during the explosion of that film becoming the all time kin… er, queen(?) of cult flicks. When he was still fairly young, he worked with 20th Century Fox to help promote The Rocky Horror Picture Show while also producing some silly grindhouse-style shorts cut like trailers. He showed those during a Rocky Horror convention in Southern California. That also coincided with the promotional push for the sequel, Shock Treatment.

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Memorial Valley Massacre (1989)

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Happy Memorial Day weekend, my Enemaniacs in the USA!

This week’s B-Movie Enema is going to take a look at a pretty obscure one that got a little bit of a boost from a fairly recent Blu Ray remastering at Vinegar Syndrome – Memorial Valley Massacre. This is a bit of a weird one for multiple reasons. But let me know if you’ve heard this one before… I first saw this a few times on everyone’s favorite Roku channel, Bizarre TV. That’s not the only time the word “bizarre” might come to mind in this article.

This movie is mostly known for kind of squirting out of the cinematic butthole that supplied video stores and cable with content. And when I say it’s known for that, it’s a pretty unknown movie that blended into the landscape of video store shelves and late night cable TV fodder. Some people who saw the names in the cast like William Smith or our great B-movie daddy in the sky, Cameron Mitchell, and those names might have been juuuust good enough to get people watch or rent it, but they would have likely been quickly turned off by it because it’s a horror film.

But… let’s back up to some of the most bizarre stuff about Memorial Valley Massacre.

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Demonoid (1981)

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What is it that they always say – “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop?”

Yeah, that probably best sums up this week’s new B-Movie Enema review. We’re making a run for the border, and, no, it’s not for Taco Bell… unless you want me to have explosive diarrhea. Well, maybe you do, but I don’t want that for myself. No, it’s for Alfredo Zacarías and his supernatural thriller, Demonoid!

You know what’s great about that? This is the second time we featured a movie written and directed by Zacarías. Oh yeah, I covered him way back in 2018 with his nature-gone-wild epic, The Bees. Even though the reviews of this movie isn’t exactly kind, calling Demonoid a “tedious possession movie” and what have you, I know what I saw in The Bees. I could argue that one was also sort of tedious in how it was made, but goddammit if it wasn’t fucking bonkers at times too. That gives me a tad bit of hope that I could get something decent here in Demonoid.

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Lurkers (1988)

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What do you think? More Roberta Findlay? Sure! Why not?

Welcome to this week’s new B-Movie Enema review. I’m Geoff Arbuckle, and this is 1988’s Lurkers. Now, if you think back to 2019, I took a look at Findlay’s Prime Evil. That movie was okay for the most part. However, what I think everyone could agree on is how freakin’ awesome the devil creature that shows up is. The year before Lurkers and Prime Evil, Findlay also did Blood Sisters. That one was a little less than interesting but not without some fun.

The far more interesting elements of those movies, of course, is Roberta Findlay. I’ve mentioned about how Findlay worked with her husband, Michael, on films, but it wasn’t a great relationship. That said, she worked with him while they were separated. She did porn and horror… That’s about it. But that’s perfectly fine too. Most of her movies weren’t particularly high budget, but she often worked as both director and cinematographer on her films. The number of credits as either role on a film is fairly impressive considering she really only had a roughly 25 year career. My point is she kept busy making movies.

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Hellmaster (1992)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema, my dearest of dear Enemaniacs!

These last few weeks have kind of turned into an adjunct Greatest Hits album for the blog. I covered a classic from the days gone by of Bizarre TV, a sleazy revenge flick, a sleazy women in prison film, and here we go again, but, this time, with a twist. I’m going waaaaay back to the early days of not just this site, but for B-Movie Enema: The Series, my hosting show you can find at here on the site, or on YouTube, or on Vimeo.

Let’s talk a litlte bit about John Saxon, star of 1992’s Hellmaster.

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