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Template:Redirect6 Exploitation films is a loosely defined term to describe a genre of films that typically sacrifice the traditional notions of artistic merit for a more sensationalistic display, often featuring excessive sex, violence, and gore. Such films have existed since the earliest days of moviemaking, but they were popularized in the 1970s with the general relaxing of cinematic taboos in the U.S. and Europe.

The word "exploitation" itself is an old show business term for publicizing shows and motion pictures. "Exploitation films" are those whose success relied not on the quality of their content, but on the ability of audiences to be drawn in by the advertising of the film (for example, a common device used by the more notorious exploitation films is to advertise the banning of a film in a certain country). Ephraim Katz, author of The Film Encyclopedia, has defined exploitation as:

Films made with little or no attention to quality or artistic merit but with an eye to a quick profit, usually via high-pressure sales and promotion techniques emphasizing some sensational aspect of the product

The genre's influence on contemporary cinema can be found in such films as Kill Bill and Grindhouse, both by director Quentin Tarantino (who is a self-declared lover of exploitation cinema). The same could be said about Rob Zombie's debut film House of 1000 Corpses, and its sequel The Devil's Rejects. Since the 1990s, this genre has also received attention from academic circles, where it is sometimes called paracinema.

Grindhouse cinema

A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly showed exploitation films, or is a term to describe the genre of films that played in such theatres (which are also known as "exploitation films"). Grind-houses were known for non-stop programs of B movies, usually consisting of a double feature where two films were shown back to back. Many of these inner-city theatres formerly featured burlesque shows which featured "bump and grind" dancing, leading to the term "grind-house." Beginning in the late 1960s and especially during the 1970s, the subject matter of exploitation films shown in these theaters often included explicit sex, violence, bizarre or perverse plot points, and other taboo content. Many grind-houses were exclusively pornographic.

By the 1980s, home video threatened to render the grind-house obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theaters had vanished from Los Angeles's Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard, New York City's Times Square and San Francisco's Market Street. By the mid-1990s, these particular theaters had completely disappeared from the United States.

In April of 2007, a movie simply called Grindhouse is due to be released. The movie will be a double feature, featuring two movies directed by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. The films will contain elements that were found in exploitation films in the Grindhouse theaters.

Subgenres

Exploitation films may adopt the subject matters and stylings of other film genres, particularly horror films and documentary films. The subgenres of exploitation films are categorized by which characteristics they utilize. Thematically, exploitation films can also be influenced by other so-called exploitative media, like pulp magazines.

Classic exploitation

File:Reefer (color) 01.JPG
A screenshot from the colorized version of Reefer Madness.

Classic Exploitation films, the earliest form of exploitation films, are films that were pitched as sensationalist exposés of some drug or sex-related scandal in the 1930s and 1940s. These were sensationalist fare at the time, and were made independently of the major Hollywood studios to avoid the restrictions of the Production Code and providing a revenue source for independent theaters. Today, however, they are valued by aficionados for their nostalgic and ironic value. Perhaps the most famous example of these is the cautionary tale Reefer Madness, a sensationalized and notoriously inaccurate attempt to demonize marijuana for Prohibition-era America.

A particularly important type of exploitation film of this era was the "sex hygiene" exploitation film, a remnant from the social or mental hygiene movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These films featured white-coated "doctors" describing the how-tos of sex education to the fascinated and naive audience. Often the film would be attended by another "doctor" in a white coat selling sex-hygiene booklets in the lobby after the film screening. Usually the producers would make significantly more money from the sales of the booklets than from the tickets to see the film. This type of film was also known as a "road show," because it was shown from town to town and was promoted in advance like a circus or carnival. One of the most famous of these was Mom and Dad, which featured actual birth footage, making it the closest thing to pornography legally available in late 1940s America.

Black exploitation

Main article: Blaxploitation

Black exploitation, or "blaxploitation" films, are made with black actors, ostensibly for black audiences, and about stereotypically African American themes such as slum life, drugs, and prostitution. Examples from the 1970s, when Blaxploitation was introduced, include Shaft, Superfly, Coffy, and Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.

Sex exploitation

Main article: Sexploitation

Sex exploitation, or sexploitation films, are similar to softcore pornography, in that the film serves largely as a vehicle for showing scenes involving nude or semi-nude women. While many films contain avid sex scenes, sexploitation shows these scenes more graphically than mainstream films, often overextending the sequences or showing full frontal nudity. Russ Meyer's body of work is probably the best known example; the movie Showgirls and the films of Andy Sidaris are examples of recent sexploitation.

Shock exploitation

Shock exploitation films (shock films), are films containing content designed to be particularly shocking to the audience. These type of exploitation films focus content traditionally thought to be particularly taboo for presentation in film, such as extremely realistic graphic violence, graphic rape depictions, simulated zoophilia and depictions of incest. Examples of shock films include Last House on the Left, Fight For Your Life, Run and Kill, Bald Headed Betty, Last House on Dead End Street, Hostel, Vase de Noces, Baise-Moi, Thriller: A Cruel Picture, Haute Tension, I Spit On Your Grave, Tromeo and Juliet, and Assault on Precinct 13. Popular film critic Roger Ebert has gone on record saying that the film I Spit On Your Grave is "sick, reprehensible and contemptible". Sometimes these films purport to be the retelling of a true story, such as the Japanese film Concrete (also known as Schoolgirl in Cement), which dealt with the Junko Furuta murder. The sub-sub-genre of simulated "snuff" films might also belong here, such as the infamous second installment of the Guinea Pig films; 血肉の花 (Chi-niku no hana - also known as Flower of Flesh and Blood), also from Japan.

Biker films

1953's The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, was perhaps the first of this subgenre that usually focuses on motorcycle gangs with plenty of sex and violence. But most of the films were made in the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s. Other biker films includes The Wild Angels (1966), Hell's Angels on Wheels (1967), Satan's Sadists (1969) and C.C. and Company (1970).

Cannibal films

Main article: Cannibal film

Cannibal films, otherwise known as the cannibal genre, are a collection of graphic, gory movies made in the early 1970s on into the late 1980s, primarily by Italian moviemakers. These movies mainly focused on torture and cannibalism by Stone-Age tribes deep in the South American or Asian rain forests, usually perpetrated against Westerners that the tribes hold prisoner. Similar to Mondo films, the main draw of cannibal films was the promise of exotic locales and graphic gore.

Cannibal films were very popular exploitation features in the 1970s and 80s, after Umberto Lenzi made Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio, the first film to depict on screen cannibalism, in 1972. In 1977, Ruggero Deodato made Last Cannibal World, inspiring several other film makers to follow suit in a period known as the cannibal boom. This period would also see the most notorious film of the subgenre, Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (an acknowledged influence on The Blair Witch Project), in 1980. After 1981, however, the cannibal boom had ended, and cannibal films were few and far in between. The fad concluded in 1988 with Mondo film director Antonio Climati's Natura Contro (also known as Cannibal Holocaust II).

Chambara films

Main article: Jidaigeki

In the 1970s, a brand of revisionist, non-traditional samurai film rose to some popularity in Japan, following the popularity of exploitive samurai manga by Kazuo Koike, on whose work many later films would be based. Films such as Lone Wolf and Cub, Lady Snowblood and Hanzo the Razor had few of the stoic, formal sensibilities of earlier jidaigeki films such as those by Akira Kurosawa -- the new chambara featured revenge-driven antihero protagonists, gratuitous nudity, steamy sex scenes, gruesome swordplay and gallons of blood, often spurted from wounds as if from a firehose. Many of these films were subsequently released internationally -- sometimes in truncated form, as with Shogun Assassin, an edit that combined the first two Lone Wolf and Cub films.

Famous names at this time included Sonny Chiba, Shintaro Katsu and Meiko Kaji. Kaji, star of the Lady Snowblood films, would further contribute to Japan's exploitation output by starring in the Female Convict Scorpion series, that country's answer to the women in prison genre.

The influence of these films can still be seen today, both in Japanese films like the Azumi series and, famously, Kill Bill, whose plot and style pay homage to many of the aforementioned samurai films.

Zombie films

Zombie exploitation films are films which take the concept of a normal zombie movie and change it to include more over-the-top gore and nudity. Though zombie films had existed since the early 1930s, it wasn't until the late 1970s that the exploitation angle was worked into the zombie film. Most zombie exploitation was made by Italian film makers, following the success of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead in its European release under the title Zombi. Around the same time of the release of Dawn of the Dead, Zombi 2, by Lucio Fulci, was in the works. Though the film was written before Dawn of the Dead's release in Europe, the film was renamed to Zombi 2 to share in the success of Romero's film.

Unlike Dawn of the Dead, Zombi 2 incorporated several elongated scenes of nudity and even more quantities of gore, thus the zombie exploitation film was born. Several imitators and spin offs followed (including a Zombi 3 and Zombi 4), bringing the European zombie craze to full steam (Fulci would again contribute with his films City of the Living Dead in 1980 and The Beyond in 1981). In the exploitation viewpoint, one of the more notable of the zombie exploitation films is Marino Girolami's 1980 film Zombi Holocaust, which combined the zombie movie with the cannibal movie.

Mondo films

Main article: Mondo film

Mondo films, often called shockumentaries, are quasi-documentary films that focus on sensationalized topics, such as exotic customs from around the world or gruesome death footage. Similar to shock exploitation, the goal of Mondo films is to be shocking to the audience not only because they deal with taboo subject matter (for instance, foreign sexual customs or varieties of violent behavior in various societies), but because the on-camera action is allegedly real. Though some Mondo films contain certain amounts of educational material, none are completely educational, and most forgo any attempts at education and choose to merely shock its audience. This can be seen not only in the way the films are shot, but also by the fact that some of the most shocking footage has, in actuality, been staged.

The name "Mondo" itself comes from the first commercially successful film of this type, Mondo Cane (in Italian, this means Dog World or World as a Dog, a title meant to imply that the world, as showcased in the film, is a brutal, nasty place). Mondo Cane was followed by a number of sequels and spinoffs, many of which were also produced in Italy. Mondo films continued to be major staples in exploitation film culture through the 60s and into the late 70s, when the style of the films began to change. While at first these films contained similar content of exotic and bizarre customs, in 1978, the film Faces of Death took the focus less from worldly rituals and more on footage of human death. Since then, most of the Mondo films have been similar to death films, which, unlike their predecessors, are mostly comprised of genuine accident, suicide, and execution footage.

Splatter films

Main article: Splatter films

A splatter film or gore film is a type of horror film that deliberately focuses on graphic portrayals of gore and violence. These films, through the use of special effects and excessive blood and guts, tend to display an overt interest in the vulnerability of the human body.

Due to their willingness to portray images society might consider shocking, splatter films share ideological grounds with the transgressive art movement. As a distinct genre, the splatter film began in the 1960s with the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman, who became notorious for such work as Blood Feast (1963), and Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), which was re-made as 2001 Maniacs in (2005) and released by LionsGate Films.

Women in prison films

Main article: Women in prison films

Women in prison films are films that feature women prisoners who are tortured, humiliated, and forced into sexual situations by sadistic wardens and guards. In turn, the prisoners often hold a bloody revolt against their captors. Like sexploitation, the main focus of women in prison films is high sexual content (while remaining softcore) or, like shock exploitation, torture and cruelty.

Other examples

Some exploitation movies cross categories freely. Doris Wishman's Let Me Die A Woman contains both shock documentary and sex exploitation elements.

Directors associated with exploitation film

John Waters

Other important figures in exploitation film

See also

References

  1. Lenzi, Umberto. (Interview). Interviewed by Shriek Show. {{cite interview}}: Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |program= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |subjectlink= ignored (|subject-link= suggested) (help)
  2. Kerekes, David (1996). Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff. Creation Books. ISBN 1-871592-20-8. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

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