Exploitation film

An exploitation film is any film which tries to succeed financially by exploiting a current trend, a niche genre, or a lurid subject matter.

Subjects which these films exploit include, but are not limited to, sex, violence, and romance. Exploitation films are generally low-quality "B movies." Even so, they sometimes attract critical attention and cult followings. Some of these films, such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), set trends and become historically important.

History

Exploitation films may feature suggestive or explicit sex, sensational violence, drug use, nudity, freaks, gore, the bizarre, destruction, rebellion, and mayhem. Such films were first seen in their modern form in the early 1920s, but they were popularized in the 60s and 70s with the general relaxing of censorship and cinematic taboos in the U.S. and Europe. The Motion Picture Association of America (and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America before it) cooperated with censorship boards and grassroots organizations in the hope of preserving the image of a "clean" Hollywood, but the distributors of exploitation film operated outside of this circuit and often welcomed controversy as a form of free promotion. Their producers used sensational elements to attract audiences lost to television. Since the 1990s, this genre has also received attention in academic circles, where it is sometimes called paracinema.

"Exploitation" is very loosely defined, and has more to do with the viewer's perception of the film than with the film's actual content. Titillating material and artistic content often coexist, as demonstrated by the fact that art films that failed to pass the Hays Code were often shown in the same grindhouses as exploitation films. Exploitation films share the fearlessness of acclaimed transgressive European directors such as Derek Jarman, Luis Buñuel, and Jean-Luc Godard in handling "disreputable" content. Many films recognized as classics contain levels of sex, violence, and shock typically associated with exploitation films; examples are Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Tod Browning's Freaks, and Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou contains elements of the modern splatter film. It has been suggested that if Carnival of Souls had been made in Europe, it would be considered an art film, while if Eyes Without a Face had been made in the U.S., it would have been categorized as a low-budget horror film. The audiences of art and exploitation film are both considered to have tastes that reject the mainstream Hollywood offerings.

Exploitation films have often exploited news events in the short-term public consciousness that a major film studio may avoid because of the time required to produce a major film. Child Bride (1938), for example, tackled the issue of older men marrying very young women in the Ozarks. Other issues, such as drug use in films like Reefer Madness (1936), attracted audiences that major film studios would usually avoid in order to keep their respectable, mainstream reputations. With enough incentive, however, major studios might become involved, as Warner Bros. did in their 1969 anti-LSD, anti-counterculture film The Big Cube. The film Sex Madness (1938) portrayed the dangers of venereal disease from premarital sex. Mom and Dad, a 1945 film about pregnancy and childbirth, was promoted in lurid terms. She Shoulda Said No! (1949) combined the themes of drug use and promiscuous sex. In the early days of film, when exploitation films relied on such sensational subjects as these, they had to present them from a very conservative moral viewpoint to avoid censorship, as movies then were not considered to enjoy First Amendment protection.

Several war films were made about the Winter War in Finland, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War before the major studios showed interest. When Orson Welles' radio production of The War of the Worlds from The Mercury Theatre on the Air for Halloween in 1938 shocked many Americans and made news, Universal Pictures edited their serial Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars into a short feature called Mars Attacks the World for release in November of that year.

Some Poverty Row low-budget B movies often exploit major studio projects. Their rapid production schedule allows them to take advantage of publicity attached to major studio films. For example, Edward L. Alperson produced William Cameron Menzies' film Invaders from Mars to beat Paramount Pictures' production of director George Pal's The War of the Worlds to the cinemas, and Pal's The Time Machine was beaten to the cinemas by Edgar G. Ulmer's film Beyond the Time Barrier. As a result, many major studios, producers, and stars keep their projects secret.

Grindhouses and drive-ins

Grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly showed exploitation films. It is thought to stem from the defunct burlesque theaters on 42nd Street, New York, where "bump n' grind" dancing and striptease used to be on the bill. In the 1960s these theaters were put to new use as venues for exploitation films, a trend which continued strongly throughout the 1970s in New York City and other urban centers, mainly in North America, but began a long decline during the 1980s with the advent of home video.

As the drive-in movie theater began to decline in the 1960s and 1970s, theater owners began to look for ways to bring in patrons. One solution was to book exploitation films. Some producers from the 1950s to the 1980s made films directly for the drive-in market, and the commodity product needed for a weekly change led to another theory about the origin of the word: that the producers would "grind" films out. Many of them were violent action films which some called "drive-in" films.

Subgenres

Exploitation films may adopt the subject matter and styling of regular film genres, particularly horror films and documentary films, and their themes are sometimes influenced by other so-called exploitative media, such as pulp magazines. They often blur the distinctions between genres by containing elements of two or more genres at a time. Their subgenres are identifiable by the characteristics they use. For example, Doris Wishman's Let Me Die A Woman contains elements of both shock documentary and sexploitation.

1930s and 1940s cautionary films

Although they featured lurid subject matter, exploitation films of the 1930s and 1940s evaded the strict censorship and scrutiny of the era by claiming to be educational. They were generally cautionary tales about the alleged dangers of premarital sexual intercourse and the use of recreational drugs. Examples include Marihuana (1936), Reefer Madness (1938), Sex Madness (1938), Mom and Dad (1945), and She Shoulda Said No! (1949). An exploitation film about homosexuality, Children of Loneliness (1937), is now believed lost.

Poster for a blaxploitation film

Biker films

Main article: Outlaw biker film

See also: List of biker films

In 1953 The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, was the first film about a motorcycle gang. A string of low-budget juvenile delinquent films centered around hot-rods and motorcycles followed in the 1950s. The success of American International Pictures' The Wild Angels in 1966 ignited a more robust trend that continued into the early 1970s. Other biker films include Motorpsycho (1965), Hells Angels on Wheels (1967), The Born Losers (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Satan's Sadists (1969), Roger Corman's Naked Angels (1969), Nam's Angels (1970), and C.C. and Company (1970).

Blaxploitation

Main article: Blaxploitation

Black exploitation films, or "blaxploitation" films, are made with black actors, ostensibly for black audiences, often in a stereotypically African American urban milieu. A prominent theme was African Americans overcoming hostile authority ("The Man") through cunning and violence. The first example of this subgenre was Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, and others are Black Caesar, Black Devil Doll, Blacula, Black Shampoo, Boss Nigger, Coffy, Coonskin, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Dolemite, Foxy Brown, Hell Up in Harlem, The Mack, Mandingo, Shaft, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Sugar Hill, Super Fly, The Thing with Two Heads, Truck Turner, Willie Dynamite and Cleopatra Jones. The 1973 Bond film Live and Let Die uses blaxploitation themes, and Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown and Scott Sanders' Black Dynamite are modern homages to this genre.

Cannibal films

Main article: Cannibal film

A cannibal film

Cannibal films are graphic, gory movies from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, primarily made by Italian and Spanish moviemakers. They focus on cannibalism by tribes deep in the South American or Asian rainforests. This cannibalism is usually perpetrated against Westerners that the tribes held prisoner. As with mondo films, the main draw of cannibal films was the promise of exotic locales and graphic gore involving living creatures. The best-known film of this genre is the controversial 1980 Cannibal Holocaust, in which six animals are killed. Others include Cannibal Ferox, Eaten Alive!, The Mountain of the Cannibal God, Last Cannibal World, and the first film of the genre, The Man From Deep River. Famous directors in this genre include Umberto Lenzi, Ruggero Deodato, Jesús Franco, and Joe D'Amato.

Canuxploitation

Canuxploitation films are Canadian-made exploitation films about Canadian life and culture. The term is believed to have come from the fall 1999 article "Canuxploitation! Goin' Down the Road with the Cannibal Girls that Ate Black Christmas. Your Complete Guide to the Canadian B-Movie", which appeared in Broken Pencil magazine. With the funding of the Canadian Film Development Corporation in the 1970s, Canadian film distributors could produce their own versions of exploitation films imported from other countries. The genre brought forth directors like David Cronenberg, William Fruet, Ivan Reitman, and Bob Clark. Notable examples of the genre include The Mask, Cannibal Girls, Deathdream, Deranged, Corpse Eaters, Black Christmas, Shivers, Cathy's Curse, I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses, Funeral Home, Terror Train, The Changeling, My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night, Happy Birthday to Me, Visiting Hours, Porky's, Highpoint, Humongous, Deadly Eyes, Videodrome, Spasms, Def-Con 4, City in Panic, Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, Pin, Things, Blood and Donuts, Cube, Ginger Snaps, Decoys, Gutterballs, Pontypool, and Hobo with a Shotgun.

Carsploitation

Carsploitation films feature scenes of cars racing and crashing, featuring the sports cars, muscle cars, and car wrecks that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s. They were produced mainly in the United States and Australia. The quintessential film of this genre is Vanishing Point (1971). Others include Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), Death Race 2000 (1975), Race with the Devil (1975), Cannonball (1976), Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (1977), Mad Max (1979), The Blues Brothers (1980), Dead End Drive-In (1986) and The Hitcher (1986). Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof (2007) is a modern tribute to this genre (containing some references to Vanishing Point), as well as to slasher films and the films of Russ Meyer.

Chambara films

Main article: Chambara

In the 1970s, a revisionist, non-traditional style of samurai film achieved some popularity in Japan. It became known as chambara, an onomatopoeia describing the clash of swords. Its origins can be traced as far back as Akira Kurosawa, whose films feature moral grayness and exaggerated violence, but the genre is mostly associated with 1970s samurai manga by Kazuo Koike, on whose work many later films would be based. Chambara features few of the stoic, formal sensibilities of earlier jidaigeki films – the new chambara featured revenge-driven antihero protagonists, nudity, sex scenes, swordplay, and blood. Well-known chambara films include Hanzo the Razor, Lady Snowblood, Lone Wolf and Cub, and Sex & Fury.

Modern Japanese films such as Azumi and anime such as Shigurui continue the chambara tradition, and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill series is a prominent American tribute to the genre, as is Ninja Assassin. Other films, such as The Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police, combine elements of chambara with body horror.

Giallo films

Main article: Giallo

Giallo films are Italian-made slasher films that focus on cruel murders and the subsequent search for the killers. They are named for the Italian word for yellow, giallo, the background color of the pulp novels these movies were inspired by. The progenitor of this genre was La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much). Other examples of Giallo films include 4 mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet), Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), Il gatto a nove code (The Cat o' Nine Tails), L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage), La coda dello scorpione (The Case of the Scorpion's Tail), La tarantola dal ventre nero (Black Belly of the Tarantula), Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh (The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, or Blade of the Ripper), Sei donne per l'assassino (Blood and Black Lace) and Tenebrae. Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Mario Bava are the best-known directors of this genre.

Mockbusters

Main article: Mockbuster

In Italy, when you bring a script to a producer, the first question he asks is not "what is your film like?" but "what film is your film like?" That's the way it is, we can only make Zombie 2, never Zombie 1.

Luigi Cozzi

Mockbusters, sometimes called "remakesploitation films", are copycat movies that try to cash in on the advertising of heavily promoted films from major studios. Production company the Asylum, which prefers to call them "tie-ins", is a prominent producer of these films. Such films have often come from Italy, which has been quick to latch on to trends like Westerns, James Bond movies, and zombie films. They have long been a staple of directors such as Jim Wynorski (The Bare Wench Project, and the Cliffhanger imitation Sub Zero), who make movies for the direct-to-video market. Such films are beginning to attract attention from major Hollywood studios, who served the Asylum with a cease and desist order to try to prevent them the release The Day the Earth Stopped to video stores in advance of the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still to theaters.

The term mockbuster was used as early as the 1950s (when The Monster of Piedras Blancas was a clear derivative of Creature From The Black Lagoon). The term didn't become popular until the 1970s, with Starcrash and the Turkish Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam and Süpermen dönüyor. The latter two used scenes from Star Wars and unauthorized excerpts from John Williams' score.

Mondo films

Main article: Mondo film

Mondo films, often called shockumentaries, are quasi-documentary films about sensationalized topics like exotic customs from around the world or gruesome death footage. The goal of mondo films, as of shock exploitation, is to shock the audience by dealing with taboo subject matter. The first mondo film is Mondo Cane (A Dog's World). Others include Shocking Asia and Africa Blood and Guts.

Monster movies

These "nature-run-amok" films focus on an animal or group of animals, far larger and more aggressive than usual for their species, terrorizing humans while another group of humans tries to fight back. This genre began in the 1950s, when concern over nuclear weapons testing made movies about giant monsters popular. These were typically either giant prehistoric creatures awakened by atomic explosions or ordinary animals mutated by radiation. Among them were Godzilla, Them!, and Tarantula. The trend was revived in the 1970s as awareness of pollution increased and corporate greed and military irresponsibility were blamed for destruction of the environment. Night of the Lepus, Frogs, and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster are examples. After Steven Spielberg's 1975 film Jaws, a number of very similar films (sometimes regarded as outright rip-offs) were produced in the hope of cashing in on its success. Examples are Alligator, Cujo, Day of the Animals, Great White, Grizzly, Humanoids from the Deep, Monster Shark, Orca, The Pack, Piranha, Prophecy, Razorback, Blood Feast (Night of 1,000 Cats), Tentacles, and Tintorera. Roger Corman was a major producer of these films in both decades. The genre has experienced a revival in recent years, as films like Mulberry Street and Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter reflected concerns about global warming and overpopulation.

The Sci-Fi Channel (now known as SyFy) has produced large numbers of such films tending to center around giant and/or hybrid mutations whose titles are sensationalized portmanteaus of the two species, examples include Sharktopus and Dinoshark.

Nazisploitation

Main article: Nazi exploitation

File:Ilsa she wolf of ss poster 02.jpg

A nazisploitation film

Nazi exploitation films, also called "nazisploitation" films, or "il sadiconazista", focus on Nazis torturing prisoners in death camps and brothels during World War II. The tortures are often sexual, and the prisoners, who are often female, are nude. The progenitor of this subgenre was Love Camp 7 (1969). The archetype of the genre, which established its popularity and its typical themes, was Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974), about the buxom, nymphomaniacal dominatrix Ilsa torturing prisoners in a Stalag. Others include Fräulein Devil (Captive Women 4, or Elsa: Fraulein SS, or Fraulein Kitty), La Bestia in Calore (SS Hell Camp, or SS Experiment Part 2, or The Beast in Heat, or Horrifying Experiments of the S.S. Last Days), L'ultima orgia del III Reich (Gestapo's Last Orgy, or Last Orgy of The Third Reich, or Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler), Salon Kitty and SS Experiment Camp. Many nazisploitation films were influenced by art films such as Pier Paolo Pasolini's famous Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom) and Liliana Cavani's Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter) .

Nudist films

Main article: Nudity in film

Nudist films originated in the 1930s as films that skirted the Hays Code restrictions on nudity by purportedly depicting the naturist lifestyle. They existed through the late 1950s, when the New York State Court of Appeals ruled in the case of Excelsior Pictures vs. New York Board of Regents that onscreen nudity is not obscene. This opened the door to more open depictions of nudity, starting with Russ Meyer's 1959 The Immoral Mr. Teas, which has been credited as the first film to place its exploitation elements unapologetically at the forefront instead of pretending to carry a moral or educational message. This development paved the way for the more explicit exploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s and made the nudist genre obsolete—ironically, since the nudist film Garden of Eden was the subject of the court case. After this, the nudist genre split into subgenres such as the "nudie-cutie", which featured nudity but no touching, and the "roughie", which included nudity and violent, antisocial behavior.

Nudist films were marked by self-contradictory qualities. They presented themselves as educational films, but exploited their subject matter by focusing mainly on the nudist camps' most beautiful female residents, while denying the existence of such exploitation. They depicted a lifestyle unbound by the restrictions of clothing, yet this depiction was restricted by the requirement that genitals should not be shown. Still, there was a subversive element to them, as the nudist camps inherently rejected modern society and its values regarding the human body. These films frequently involve a criticism of the class system, equating body shame with the upper class, and nudism with social equality. One scene in The Unashamed makes a point about the artificiality of clothing and its related values through a mocking portrayal of a group of nude artists who paint fully clothed subjects.

Ozploitation

Main article: Ozploitation

The term "Ozploitation" refers broadly to Australian horror, erotic or crime films of the 1970s and 1980s. Reforms to Australia's film classification systems in 1971 led to the production of a number of such low-budget, privately funded films, assisted by tax exemptions and targeting export markets. Often an internationally recognised actor (but of waning notability) would be hired to play a lead role. Laconic characters and desert scenes feature in many Ozploitation films, but the term has been used for a variety of Australian films of the era that relied on shocking or titilating their audiences. Among the better-known Ozploitation films are Mad Max, Alvin Purple, Patrick and Turkey Shoot. A documentary about the genre was Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!. Such films address themes concerning Australian society, particularly in respect of masculinity (especially the ocker male), male attitudes towards women, attitudes towards and treatment of Indigenous Australians, violence, alcohol, and environmental exploitation and destruction. They typically have rural or outback settings, presenting the Australian landscape and environment as an almost spiritually malign force that alienates white Australians and frustrates both their personal ambitions and activities and their attempts to subdue it.

Rape and revenge films

Main article: Rape and revenge film

A rape / revenge film

This genre contains films in which a person is raped, left for dead, recovers and then exacts a graphic, gory revenge against the rapists. The most famous example is I Spit on Your Grave (also called Day of the Woman). It is not unusual for the main character in these films to be a successful, independent city woman, who is attacked by a man from the country. The genre has drawn praise from feminists such as Carol J. Clover, whose 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film examines the implications of its reversals of cinema's traditional gender roles. This type of film can be seen as an offshoot of the vigilante film, with the victim's transformation into avenger as the key scene. Author Jacinda Read and others believe that rape–revenge should be categorized as a narrative structure rather than a true subgenre, because its plot can be found in films of many different genres, such as thrillers (Ms. 45), dramas (Lipstick), westerns (Hannie Caulder), and art films (Memento). One instance of the genre, The Last House on the Left (1972), was an uncredited remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, recast as a horror film featuring extreme violence. Deliverance, in which the rape is perpetrated on a man, has been credited as the originator of the genre. Clover, who restricts her definition of the genre to movies in which a woman is raped and gains her own revenge, praises rape–revenge exploitation films for the way in which their protagonists fight their abuse directly, rather than preserve the status quo by depending on an unresponsive legal system as in rape–revenge movies from major studios, such as The Accused (1988).

Redsploitation

The Redsploitation genre concerns Native American characters, usually exacting their revenge on their white tormentors. Examples are Billy Jack, The Ransom, The Thunder Warrior Trilogy, The Manitou, Prophecy, Savaged and Scalps.

Sexploitation

Main article: Sexploitation film

Sexploitation films resemble softcore pornography. Films in this genre are an excuse for showing scenes involving nude or semi-nude women. Many movies contain vivid sex scenes, but sexploitations are more graphic than mainstream films. Extending the sequences or showing full frontal nudity are typical genre techniques. Russ Meyer's films, such as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Supervixens, are well-known examples. Other well-known sexploitation films include the Emmanuelle series, Showgirls, and Caligula. Caligula is unusual among exploitation films for its high budget and eminent actors (Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud, Peter O'Toole and Helen Mirren).

Slasher films

Main article: Slasher film

Slasher films focus on a psychopath stalking and violently killing a sequence of victims. Victims are often teenagers or young adults. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) is often credited with creating the basic premise of the genre, but John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is usually considered to have started the genre. That film's masked villain, group of weak teenagers with one strong, female hero, isolated or stranded in precarious locations or situations, and either the protagonists or antagonists experiencing warped family lives or values became slasher film tropes.

The genre continued into and peaked in the 1980s with well-known films like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Antropophagus, Black Christmas (1974), Child's Play (1988), and The Driller Killer. Many 1980s films used the basic format of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween, for example Friday the 13th (1980), My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night (1980), The Funhouse, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Sleepaway Camp, and The Toolbox Murders, many of which also used elements from the 1974 slasher, Black Christmas.

The genre experienced a mainstream revival in the 1990s with the success of Scream, which both mocked and paid homage to traditional slasher conventions. Slasher films often prove popular and spawn sequels, prequels and remakes that continue to the present day. Adam Green's Hatchet and Ryan Nicholson's Gutterballs bill themselves as throwbacks to the slasher films of the 1980s.

Spacesploitation

A subtype featuring space, science fiction and horror in film.

Spaghetti westerns

Main article: Spaghetti western

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a well-known spaghetti western

Spaghetti westerns are Italian-made westerns that emerged in the mid-1960s. They were more violent and amoral than typical Hollywood westerns. These films also often eschewed the conventions of Hollywood studio Westerns, which were primarily for consumption by conservative, mainstream American audiences.

Examples of the genre include Death Rides a Horse, Django, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Navajo Joe, The Grand Duel, The Great Silence, For a Few Dollars More, The Big Gundown, Duck, You Sucker!, and A Fistful of Dollars. Quentin Tarantino directed a tribute to the genre, Django Unchained.

Splatter films

Main article: Splatter film

A splatter film, or gore film, is a horror film that focuses on graphic portrayals of gore and violence. It began as a distinct genre in the 1960s with the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman, whose most famous films include Blood Feast (1963), Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), Color Me Blood Red (1965), The Gruesome Twosome (1967) and The Wizard of Gore (1970).

The first splatter film to popularize the subgenre was George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), the director's attempt to replicate the atmosphere and gore of EC's horror comics on film. Initially derided by the American press as "appalling", it quickly became a national sensation, playing not just in drive-ins but at midnight showings in indoor theaters across the country. Foreign critics were kinder to the film; British film magazine Sight & Sound included it on its "Ten Best Films of 1968" list. George A. Romero coined the term "splatter cinema" to describe his film Dawn of the Dead.

Later splatter films, such as Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series, Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, and Peter Jackson's Braindead (released as Dead Alive in North America) featured such excessive and unrealistic gore that they crossed the line from horror to comedy.

Women in prison films

Main article: Women in prison film

Women in prison films emerged in the early 1970s and remain a popular subgenre. They usually contain nudity, lesbianism, sexual assault, humiliation, sadism, and rebellion among captive women. Examples are Roger Corman's Women in Cages and The Big Doll House, Bamboo House of Dolls, Jesus Franco's Barbed Wire Dolls, Bruno Mattei's Women's Prison Massacre, Pete Walker's House of Whipcord, Tom DeSimone's Reform School Girls, and Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat.

Minor subgenres

• Britsploitation: exploitation films set in Great Britain, sometimes in homage to the Hammer Horror range of films. Examples are The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) and the Academy Award winning American film An American Werewolf in London (1981).

• Bruceploitation: films profiting from the death of Bruce Lee, with look-alike actors.

• Chopsocky: Martial arts movies made primarily in Hong Kong and Taiwan during the 1960s and 1970s, such as Hand of Death, Master of the Flying Guillotine, Five Deadly Venoms and The Legend of Shaolin.

• Category III films: Hong Kongese films aimed at audiences 18 years or older, named after the age certificates they would receive in Hong Kong. These films are estimated to make up 25% of Hong Kong's film industry, and as in exploitation film itself, every genre of filmmaking is represented. Films made in the west, such as Wild Things and Eyes Wide Shut, often receive the Category III rating. Category III films are grouped into three classes based on censorship criteria: "quasi-pornographic" softcore pornography such as Sex and Zen, "genre films" which present adult-oriented versions of every genre of Hong Kong filmmaking, and "pornoviolence" films such as The Untold Story, which depict sexual violence and are often based on actual police cases. Well-known actors and directors such as Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-fat may be associated with genre films.

• Gothsploitation: A small number of films generally from the year 2000 onwards featuring members of the Alternative or Goth subcultures of the UK, usually London, such as Learning Hebrew:A Gothsploitation Movie showing situations such as drug use, unusual sexual practises and wild parties, often with a heavily intellectual plot.

• Hippie exploitation: 1960s films about the hippie counterculture, showing stereotypical situations such as marijuana and LSD use, sex, and wild psychedelic parties. Further examples are The Love-Ins, Psych-Out, The Trip (1967), and Wild in the Streets.

• Hixploitation: films about the American South, featuring stereotypical hillbilly caricatures, such as Eaten Alive, Hillbillys in a Haunted House, Moonshine Mountain, Poor White Trash 2, Redneck Zombies, and Two Thousand Maniacs!.

• Jewsploitation: films in which Jewish characters exact revenge against stereotypical adversaries, or engage in behavior seen by their communities as bizarre. A recent entry into the exploitation genre, Jewsploitation has themes similar to those of Blaxploitation and action films, often placing Jewish actors in traditionally Aryan roles. The genre originated in 2003 with The Hebrew Hammer, itself a parody of Blaxploitation films.

• Martial arts films: action films that are characterized by extensive fighting scenes employing various types of martial art. Examples include The Street Fighter and Sister Street Fighter series, and the Bruce Lee films The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, and Enter the Dragon.

• Mexican sex comedies film genre: the Mexican sex comedies film genre, generally known as ficheras film, is a genre of sexploitation films that were produced and distributed in Mexico between the middle 1970s and the late 1980s. They were characterized by the language game called “whims,” and their sexual tone was considered “rogue,” though they were not particularly explicit.

• Mexploitation: films about Mexican culture and portrayals of Mexican life, often dealing with crime, drug trafficking, money and sex. Hugo Stiglitz is a famous Mexican actor of this genre, as are Mario and Fernando Almada, brothers who made hundreds of movies on the same theme.

• Ninja films: these are a subgenre of martial arts films that center on the historically inaccurate stereotype of the ninja's costume and arsenal of weapons, often including fantasy elements such as ninja magic. Many such movies were produced by splicing stock ninja fight footage with footage from unrelated film projects.

• Nunsploitation: films featuring nuns in dangerous or erotic situations, such as The Devils, Killer Nun, School of the Holy Beast, Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentines, and Nude Nuns with Big Guns.

• Pinku eiga (pink films): Japanese sexploitation films popular throughout the 70s, often featuring softcore sex, rape, torture, BDSM and other unconventional sexual subjects.

• Pornochanchada: Brazilian naïve softcore pornographic films produced mostly in the 1970s.

• Rumberas film: Musical film genre that flourished in the called Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, and whose plots were developed mainly in tropical environments and the cabaret. His main stars were the actresses and dancers known as "Rumberas" (West Indian rhythms dancers).

• Sharksploitation films: a subgenre of film that centers around sharks. The most popular film in this genre is Jaws, but many other films have been released. The sharksploitation film Sharknado is an example of a more recent film in this genre.

• Stoner film or Stonersploitation: a subgenre of films that center around the explicit use of marijuana, typically in a comical and positive light. Cheech & Chong collaborations are a good example. A more recent series in this genre is Harold & Kumar.

• Teensploitation: the exploitation of teenagers by the producers of teen-oriented films, with plots involving drugs, sex, alcohol and crime. The word teensploitation first appeared in a show business publication in 1982 and was included in Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary for the first time in 2004. River's Edge, inspired by the murder of Marcy Renee Conrad, is a highly acclaimed instance, featuring early performances by Crispin Glover and Keanu Reeves and a cameo appearance by Dennis Hopper. The Larry Clark films Bully, Ken Park and Kids are well-known teensploitation films. American International Pictures made films for the teenage market from the 1950s on.

• Turksploitation: Turksploitation is a tongue-in-cheek label given to a great number of unauthorized Turkish film adaptations of best-selling Hollywood movies and television series, produced mainly in the 1970s and 1980s. Filmed on a shoestring budget with often comically simple special effects and no regard for copyright, Turksploitation films substituted exuberant inventiveness and zany plots for technical and acting skill, although noted Turkish actors did feature in some of these productions. Examples of this genre have gained popularity in Turkey, such as Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam ("The Man Who Saved The World"), colloquially "Turkish Star Wars", 1982. Includes footage from Star Wars and reuses the soundtracks of Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Planet of the Apes, Moonraker and Flash Gordon, as well as the theme music of Indiana Jones or Ayşecik ve Sihirli Cüceler Rüyalar Ülkesinde ("Little Ayşe and the Magic Dwarves in the Land of Dreams"), 1971. Based on The Wizard of Oz, it featured child star Zeynep Değirmencioğlu.

• Vigilante films: films in which a person breaks the law to exact justice. These films were rooted in 1970s unease over government corruption, failure in the Vietnam War, and rising crime rates. They reflect the rising political trend of neoconservatism. The genre is believed to have originated with the 1970 film Joe. The classic example is the Death Wish series, starring Charles Bronson. Vigilante films often deal with individuals who cannot find help within the system, such as the Native American protagonist of Billy Jack, or characters in blaxploitation films such as Coffy, or people from small towns who go to larger cities in pursuit of runaway relatives, as in Hardcore (1979) and Trackdown (1976). There are "vigilante cop" movies about policemen who feel thwarted by the legal system, as in the Walking Tall series, Mad Max, and the Dirty Harry series of Clint Eastwood movies. These are not considered to be true vigilante films in the classic sense, because they do not involve ordinary citizens seeking justice for a personal hurt. Similarly, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver does not fit the category, because of its mentally disturbed protagonist. Other examples are Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales, Joel Schumacher's Falling Down, and F. Gary Gray's Law Abiding Citizen.

• ZAxploitation: The exploitation films of South Africa are not as well known as those of, say, the Philippines, Canada or the USA but film-makers like Dirk De Villiers known as a "king of the sexploitation film and b movie", made some uniquely South African flavoured exploitation films including The Virgin Goddess (1974) & Glenda a.k.a. Snake Dancer (1976). Other examples of ZAxploitation include the Blaxsploitation film Death of a Snowman (1978) by Christopher Rowley and more recently, David Winters’s Space Mutiny (1988) and Night Drive (2010) by Justin Head.

Directors associated with exploitation films

• Alexandre Aja
• Irwin Allen
• Paul W.S. Anderson
• Stephen Apostolof
• Dario Argento
• Mario Bava
• Michael Bay
• William "One Shot" Beaudine
• Uwe Boll
• Darren Lynn Bousman
• Giovanni "Tinto" Brass
• René Cardona Jr.
• John Carpenter
• Larry Cohen
• Rob Cohen
• Roger Corman
• Wes Craven
• David Cronenberg
• Joe D'Amato
• David DeCoteau
• Ruggero Deodato
• Don Dohler
• David E. Durston
• David R. Ellis
• Jason Eisener
• Roland Emmerich
• Dwain Esper
• Joe Eszterhas
• Abel Ferrara
• Michael and Roberta Findlay
• Jess Franco
• Jason Friedberg
• Lucio Fulci
• Samuel Fuller
• William Girdler
• James Glickenhaus
• Yoram Globus
• Menahem Golan
• Stuart Gordon
• James Gunn

• Renny Harlin
• Frank Henenlotter
• Jack Hill
• Godfrey Ho
• Tobe Hooper
• Noboru Iguchi
• Donald G. Jackson
• Lloyd Kaufman
• Harmony Korine
• José Ramón Larraz
• Umberto Lenzi
• Brett Leonard
• Sergio Leone
• Avi Lerner
• Mark L. Lester
• Herschell Gordon Lewis
• Dwight H. Little
• Nick Love
• Patrick Lussier
• William Lustig
• Neil Marshall
• Nico Mastorakis
• Bruno Mattei
• Joseph Merhi
• Radley Metzger
• Russ Meyer
• Takashi Miike
• Andy Milligan
• Duke Mitchell
• Carl Monson
• Neal H. Moritz
• Craig Moss
• Mark Neveldine
• Yoshihiro Nishimura
• Marcus Nispel
• Ron Ormond
• Juan Orol
• Sam Peckinpah
• Melvin Van Peebles

• Albert Pyun
• Sam Raimi
• Fred Olen Ray
• Nicolas Winding Refn
• Robert Rodriguez
• Jean Rollin
• George A. Romero
• Eli Roth
• Ken Russell
• Joseph W. Sarno
• Courtney Fathom Sell
• Aaron Seltzer
• Daryush Shokof
• Lindsay Shonteff
• Andy Sidaris
• Juan Piquer Simón
• Tom Six
• Jack Smith
• Ray Dennis Steckler
• John Stockwell
• Rachel Talalay
• Brian Taylor
• Quentin Tarantino
• Brian Trenchard-Smith
• Paul Verhoeven
• Fred Vogel (August Underground)
• Pete Walker
• James Wan
• John Waters
• Sean Weathers
• Leigh Whannell
• Michael Winner
• Doris Wishman
• John Woo
• Ed Wood
• Jim Wynorski
• Yūdai Yamaguchi
• Rob Zombie

See also

• Aestheticization of violence
• B movie
• Cult film
• Video nasty
• Midnight movie

References

Bibliography

• Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 , Durham, N.C. , Duke University Press, 1999.
• Jeffrey Sconce, "'Trashing' the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style", Screen vol. 36 no. 4, winter 1995, pp. 371–393.
• Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs, Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984, 1994. ISBN 978-0-312-13519-5.
• V. Vale and Andrea Juno, RE/Search no. 10: Incredibly Strange Films. RE/Search Publications, 1986. ISBN 978-0-940642-09-6.
• Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia 5e, 2005. ISBN 978-0-06-074214-0.
• Benedikt Eppenberger, Daniel Stapfer. Maedchen, Machos und Moneten: Die unglaubliche Geschichte des Schweizer Kinounternehmers Erwin C. Dietrich. Mit einem Vorwort von Jess Franco. Verlag Scharfe Stiefel, Zurich, 2006, ISBN 978-3-033-00960-8.

External links

• The Deuce: Grindhouse Cinema Database. Grindhouse / classic exploitation cinema wiki.
• "Lights! Camera! Apocalypse!" Salon article about Rapture films as Christian exploitation filmmaking.
• Paracinema Magazine — Quarterly film magazine dedicated to B-movies, cult classics, indie, horror, science-fiction, exploitation, underground and Asian films from past and present.
• Boulevard Movies — Exploitation films on DVD & Blu-ray.