Garbage In: Loving Exploitation Cinema

            Picture it: A little person in red flannel with a limp running an underground house of ill-repute posing as a landlord for a rundown flat. Abductions of teenage girls played by actresses in their 30’s, a toy shop dealing heroin, impromptu performances of off-pitch cabaret, and disemboweled – err, fluffed – teddy bears ensue… Such are the dubious experiences of The Sinful Dwarf (1973), a curiously depraved little picture also known as The Abducted Bride in the United States and Dvaergen in its home country of Denmark. The film is but one trippy example of an entire genre of film that spans the globe: Exploitation.

            Many have never heard of exploitation, or perhaps the closest they’ve come to it is seeing the Tarantino-Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse (2007) that paid homage to the rugged, scratchy prints of yesteryear that played in double-billed loops at drive-ins and theatres in the scuzzier side of town throughout the 1970’s and early 1980’s. Simply put, exploitation casts a wide net over many other genres but often finds itself limited to an audience that seems doomed to having to explain themselves to their friends and family over and again as to why they love these films so darned much.

            Exploitation is not a polite or decent realm of filmmaking in the least. These are the films that teenagers sneak off to watch while their parents are out or asleep. Usually the image conjured up when the term ‘grindhouse’ is said is that of figure in a trench coat and shifty eyes ducking into a worn down theatre with sticky floors and musty seats. The truth is, the majority of modern Hollywood fair, from The Hunger Games (2011) to the Harry Potter series, has its roots in the seedy tropes of exploitation.

Film, in the classical sense, has been just as artistic a medium as paint and canvas, music, or the written word. Society reveres master directors such as Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, and Stanley Kubrick as artists. Films from these greats are usually labeled art cinema today, but for the majority of the 20^th Century, they were the respectable and highly-anticipated output of the Cineplex.

These features showcased high-minded ideas and deliberate art direction. Often they conformed to guidelines set by censorship organizations, such as the Hays Code, MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), or the BBFC (British Board of Film Censors). If they pushed the envelope, and films such as Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1932) certainly did, it was done subversively.

The easiest way to describe exploitation is to say that it is the exact opposite. It isn’t about art. It has no sense of propriety whatsoever. That might be the kind way to explain it, since many would use the terms sleazy, dirty, or at the very least low-budget and B-movie. Certainly there have been times where art film and exploitation have crossed paths. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) obviously comes to mind, and another glaring piece underground skullduggery – Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! (1975) which combined explicit adult entertainment with exaggerated high-theatre hysterics in a classic gothic haunted house.

Exploitation itself takes its name from its very intent: to exploit for financial gain. One of the threads that ties together the many subgenres of this niche of filmmaking is the need to make a buck. Often times the exploited themes would be sexuality, violence of all kinds, or ripped-from-the-headlines current events such as drugs, prostitution, or even social justice issues. Necessarily, many of these films were marketed for adults (though they definitely played to teenagers rebellious and daring enough to sneak in).

The wide variety of topics available to be exploited resulted in grindhouse cinema becoming perhaps the most diverse genre of film in history. Much like Metal in the music world, exploitation has literally hundreds of derivative subgenres, each subject denoted by a mash-up title such as sexploitation, blaxsploitation, nunsploitation, or even ozsploitation – which is simply the entirety of exploitation films from Australia such as Mad Max (1979) or Turkey Shoot (1982). One of the reasons for such a large canon is perhaps that the genre has been around for quite a long time.

In point of fact, the genre itself has proliferated conceivably since the advent of cinema. From one-reel nudie shorts shown at carnivals and travelling shows at the turn of the 20^th Century, to the mega-hit television show The Walking Dead, exploitation (also called paracinema) has nearly always been with us since the medium was invented. Though the films come in all kinds, there is one thing that is has always stayed the same: the lurid, wide-eyed gleefulness of the less-than proper subject matter.

Two ingredients in particular have been necessary to fulfill a proper exploitation flick: sex and violence. Sex easily came first, being easier to justify in so-called ‘educational’ films that were trucked from town to town in the name of moral superiority. Titles such as Reefer Madness (1938) and Mom and Dad (1945) showcased fornication and drug use under the guise of ‘spreading awareness’. Violence emerged early in the form of horror films that dealt with the grotesqueries of World War I such as the hollowed eyes of Lon Chaney Sr. in The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and later Universal monster pictures like Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931).

The sci-fi B-movies of the 1950’s, such as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), It Conquered the World (1956), and The Blob (1958) exploited the public fears of technology and the repercussions of nuclear power. The turmoil of the 1960’s yielded grittier pictures that made good use of the new MPAA ratings system and sported true adult content for the first time in films like Blood Feast (1963) – often considered the first true American gore film – and The Undertaker and His Pals (1966). But it wasn’t until the 70’s that exploitation as we commonly think of it really began to hit its stride.

If we are to accept the oft-stated belief that art imitates life, then we can be reasonably sure of the 1970’s being a time of cultural disillusionment. Especially in the United States, where economic recession combined with rapid inflation existed alongside a country coping with a long and failed military conflict and the revelation of corruption at the highest levels of government. The art films of the time are darker and heavier, but the true explosion of paracinema begins here.

Taking a cue from many of the prison dramas of the 40’s and 50’s, Roger Corman with his brand new production company New World Pictures released several Women-in-Prison pictures to wild success. The biggest of these were director Jack Hill’s bawdy, good-time hits The Big Doll House (1971) – which brought the world ebony bombshell Pam Grier – and its sequel The Big Bird Cage (1972). Watching these films today is impossibly great fun and it’s not hard to see why they have achieved cult status. Tough babes in scant clothing busting out of a jungle prison with machine guns and beating men at their own game? What’s not to like? There’s something for everyone.

Grindhouse favorites proliferated everywhere and funding could come from anywhere. Tobe Hooper’s infamous The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was bankrolled by a company that turned out to be a front for organized crime and when John Carpenter made Halloween (1978) he did it with barely $300,000 scraped together on a bet producer Irwin Yablans made with financier Malek Akkad. The shoe-string budget was simply part of the deal with exploitation. Spend a little, make a lot.

As with any money-making venture, selling the product is a major piece of the puzzle. Often times the content of the films barely matched the lurid brilliance of the posters, taglines, and trailers released to promote the low-budget trash to the masses. Imagine yourself on New York’s famous 42^nd Street. The year is 1982 and you are strolling in to an afternoon matinee of something called Dr. Butcher, MD (Medical Deviate). Over in Italy, where it was made, it was titled Zombie Holocaust. You see a poster for an upcoming euro-import attraction titled Pieces. On it is a silhouetted figure with a chainsaw, and below that the image of a naked, dead girl apparently stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. The tagline reads, “You don’t have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw Massacre!” and at the bottom, “Pieces – it’s exactly what you think it is”.

Most marketing campaigns for exploitation films hard-sold the lewd, crude, and nude aspects of their productions, often far over-hyping what the audience got to see. With director Juan Piquer Simón’s Pieces (aka Mil gritos tiene la noche) [1982], the American release struck brilliance by neither over nor underselling the product. It’s exactly what you think it is. Nevertheless, the taboo nature of forbidden pleasures has always been the hook to bring audiences into the theatre. Even today movies are sold to the public with lines like “The biggest action movie of the year!” so this is simply nothing new.

Exploitation movies became mainstream fair with the unprecedented success of one particular aquatic nightmare: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). Prior to that, any film about a rampaging carnivorous creature was relegated directly to B-movie status. Jaws was so massively popular that the term blockbuster was coined to describe its box-office crushing numbers. Shortly thereafter the Great White was followed by dozens of exploitation films masquerading as respectable art. Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979), and Spielberg’s own Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) are just a few of the flood of mainstream thrills, chills, and spills that soldiered on to this very day in the form of Transformers (2007), Twilight (2008), and even The Lord of the Rings series.

So the next time you catch your friend or family member watching something like Cannibal Holocaust (1980) or Friday the 13^th (1980), before you jump to the usual, “Why do you like that stuff? Garbage in, garbage out…” remember that your favorite movie is Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) in which a bunch of very good looking and scantily clad men and women fight off a cursed, undead horde on the high seas. Or The Avengers (2012), which revolves around a group of freaks led by a man made powerful by a sci-fi super soldier serum who fight off an alien invasion.

The point is, you like that stuff too. Happy viewing!