Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971)

Oh baby, we’re back to some sweet, sweet blaxploitation!

There are few in the sub-genre of blaxploitation that are as highly regarded as Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.  It carries the distinction of being included as part of the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art.  It’s also the first to be labeled as “blaxploitation”.  So if you want to go back to the beginning of the phenomenon, well, you can’t go back further than this.

Rollercoaster (1977)

This week’s B-Movie Enema entry is celebrating its 40th anniversary this very weekend.  It’s Universal Pictures’ Rollercoaster.

Rollercoaster was simply another in the decade-long string of “disaster films” that started at the very dawn of the 1970s with Airport.  It became such a genre in itself that you can almost think of that as being the same thing back then as we see now with superhero movies.  While the 70s were the “golden age” of the disaster flick, the genre still exists to this day.  Movies featuring high drama in the face of incredible tragedy still come out in fairly high numbers.  Anything that stars a relatively large cast that ends with a lot of them dead and a lot of others barely making it through whatever the disaster wrought could basically be labeled as one of these disaster films.

Paradise (1982)

Let’s jump back, for a moment, to 1980.  At the time, a young actress by the name of Brooke Shields was considered both a very pretty girl, and an up and coming actress.  In 1978, Shields starred in a movie called Pretty Baby which covered the taboo topic of child prostitution in the early 20th century.  She was 12 at the time of shooting, and she appeared nude in the film.  If you were 10 to maybe 15 years old at the time, you might have thought that was the tits, but if you were older, you’d probably be some sort of sex weirdo if you found any pleasure in that.

Baby Sister (1983)

Phoebe Cates Month rolls on with our next movie, the 1983 possibly-sultry-but-maybe-not-tv-movie Baby Sister!

After Cates dove into all our fantasies in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (her second film role, and if you can just hold your damn horses for a couple more weeks, we will certainly be discussing the first film role), she was able to continue to work relatively steadily for the next few years.  Later in 1983, she would get another big-time part in the coming of age comedy Private School before returning to TV to deliver this cherry line in the miniseries Lace where she played a sex symbol actress searching for her natural mother.

Shag: The Movie (1989)

It’s a new month and a new opportunity to have a new theme.

Back in December, I covered Alyssa Milano in a way that only a real creep, or possibly that undertaker character Tom Petty played in the “Last Dance with Mary Jane” video, could.  That was a way to look at the body of work of a 90s dream girl who blossomed into a girl who really liked making movies teenage boys liked to watch.  For April, I decided to step back to the 1980s and talk about another brunette vixen that boys love to this day – Phoebe Cates.

Confessions of Sorority Girls (1994)

Alyssa Milano Month continues on B-Movie Enema.  For our third installment, we hop over to Showtime to listen in on some Confessions of Sorority Girls.

This movie is actually also known as Confessions of a Sorority Girl as it was originally released.  If that sounds familiar to some exploitation fans out there, it’s because it was part of a series of made for TV movies produced by Showtime that acted as loose remakes of 1950s movies of the same title.  Now, a producer on this series of remakes and a co-writer of this movie is Debra Hill.  She’s best known for producing several John Carpenter movies.  So this is coming from a certain amount of talent.

Bride of the Gorilla (1951)

Is there anything better than a man in a monkey suit?

Well, probably, but in an old movie, well…  Yeah, I guess there are still things better than a man in a monkey suit.  However!  It’s still pretty great.  As is Lon Chaney, Jr. who was the Wolf Man.  Not to mention this also stars Raymond Burr who not once, but twice faced Godzilla and lived to tell the tale.  He was also Perry Mason.  I love me some Perry Mason.

Top billed, though, is Barbara Payton.  She has a story all her own about being drop dead gorgeous, who could make it in movies with her looks, but also had little real talent.  She died only about 15 years after the release of this movie after her life spiraled out of control and into booze, a horrifically violent relationship, and even prostitution.  She did write a tell-all book about her sorrowful life called I Am Not Ashamed.