Schlock Sleaze & Cheesy Bs

By Ian Watson

"Kiss Taste Goodbye..."
Grindhouses and drive-ins may be lost to nostalgia and legend, but the b-string and basement budget pictures that played them have endured. With their bad acting, drooping mikes and constant mix of day/night shots, you wouldn't call them well-made but there's a strange appeal to their raw, unrestrained shenanigans. Welcome to the golden age of Exploitation Cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian Watson
• Release date: Dec 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301189014

Ian Watson

"Ian Watson" is the pseudonym of Melvin Bay, Michael Bay's dude piston, who ran away rather than be known as "Megan's Milkman."

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Schlock Sleaze & Cheesy Bs

By

Ian Watson

Copyright Ian Watson 2012

Published At Smashwords

***

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Book List

By the same author and available at Smashwords:

Movies That Witness Madness

The Least Action Heroes

Introduction

Some ideas, such as searching for subtext in exploitation films, are so stupid they could only make sense to an academic. Here’s a quote from a scholarly piece discussing subtext in that well-known allegory for slavery, William Crain’s Blacula:

"Blacula’s position in contemporary Los Angeles is put in opposition to the assimilated blackness of Dr Thomas and Tina. For Tina especially, getting closer to Mamuwalde is getting closer to her own African roots, symbolized by her being the transmogrification of Luva’s spirit. But it is not just the history of African slavery that haunts Blacula – there are also echoes….of the Watts riots a few years previous."

If we’re reading this guy correctly – he lost us at assimilated blackness – then Blacula, with its rubber bats, hook-handed mortician and casual homophobia, is really a movie about culture, history and race problems.

Bullshit.

Blacula is an exploitation movie.

Exploitation was intended for us rubes because, so help us Lord Jesus, we like watching sex, violence and monsters that stalk comely starlets. They weren’t meant to be pored over by tweed-wearing reptiles who know big words (what does ‘transmogrification’ mean, anyway?) and constantly hunt for hidden meanings.

If you want meaning, read The Bible.

If you want entertainment, watch Blacula.

Or, if you’d prefer to make your living divining messages from films that only you with your expert vision and expensive education can sense, you might consider a career as a learned snake-oil salesman, commonly called an academic.

Given the level of academic consideration afforded exploitation films, you’d think something like I Spit On Your Grave deserved to be enshrined alongside the works of Hemingway, Faulkner and Poe. Alluding to female empowerment, Grand Guignol and the Roman Coliseum is all very well, but how do you relate to it while watching a fella get his pecker cut off?

Exploitation is tits and ass and ultraviolence, promoted with gusto by showmen that, in any other field, would likely be sued for misrepresentation. It is an independently produced, often (but not always) poorly-made film with a lurid subject matter whose sensationalist advertising has one goal: putting rubes in seats.

Some of these movies were shot guerrilla-style on weekends by amateurs who cast their friends and neighbours, paid their extras in beer and hocked their possessions to buy film stock. B-string and basement budget pictures, writes Joe R Lansdale in The Drive-In. A lot of them made with little more than a Kodak, some spit and a prayer. They were cranked out not for academic consideration but to make a profit, and if anyone enjoyed them, so much the better for the balance sheets.

With the abolition of the Hays production code and relaxation of social attitudes in the mid-1960s, exploitation fare flourished in America’s grindhouses and drive-ins until the late 70s/early 80s, when their revenues declined in the face of