Dead & Buried (1981)

Let’s talk about a classy movie!

Dead & Buried is a 1981 flick that takes a different approach to zombies.  It is written by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett who is best known for writing the classic sci-fi/horror flick Alien.  That’s a fact that the poster really wants to sell this movie on – “The creators of ALIEN… bring a new terror to Earth.”

Dan O’Bannon also made Return of the Living Dead which is pretty much a zombie movie hall of fame entry from the mid 80s.  It’s fair to even say that O’Bannon’s work on that movie, matched with the Godzilla movies, and Roger Corman, helped create my love of B-Movies and, thus, well…

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.

The Hearse (1980)

This week’s B-Movie Enema comes from the dawn of the glorious decade known as the 1980s.  It’s the focus of every soft rock radio station’s weekend format.  It’s the predominating style of music on all mainstream movies’ soundtrack albums.  It’s the decade I visit the most by far.

And because The Hearse is a 1980 horror movie, famed movie critic Roger Ebert called it an idiot plot movie.  It’s his saying for a movie in which all the characters in the plot have to be idiots.  Now, I’m not saying that Roger Ebert is a snob and grossly underestimates the average horror movie, but most horror movie fans like this movie.  Probably because they are idiots and they really like idiot plots. 

Malibu High (1979)

Hooray!  I’m gonna watch more exploitation from the 70s!  This makes me very happy.  And why shouldn’t I feel that way?  Look at the poster to the left for this week’s feature, Malibu High.  Look at the comely lady sunbathing toplessly with that smile that almost says, “Look what I got myself into this time…  I’m such a fun gal!”

And what did she get herself into?  Well, it looks like a bunch of various types of guys in the background are looking on.  Because they are drawn in caricature while she is drawn in photo realism, I’m guessing these guys are gonna be a bunch of rapscallions that will be either scolding our luscious leading lady Kim (played by Jill Lansing), or they will be chasing after her like sex-crazed juveniles hoping she’ll spend a night with them in the ol’ sack.

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.