Exploitation film

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An exploitation film is a film that tries to succeed financially by exploiting current trends, niche genres, or lurid content. Exploitation films are generally low-quality "B movies",^[1] though some set trends, attract critical attention, become historically important, and even gain a cult following.^[2]

History

Exploitation films often include themes such as suggestive or explicit sex, sensational violence, drug use, nudity, gore, destruction, rebellion, mayhem, and the bizarre. Such films were first seen in their modern form in the early 1920s,

The Motion Picture Association of America (and its predecessor, the MPPDA) 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 system and often welcomed controversy as a form of free promotion.[3] 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.^[7]

"Exploitation" is loosely defined and arguably has as much to do with the viewer's perception of the film as 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 include 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^{[by whom?]} 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.^[8]

Exploitation films have often exploited news events in the short-term public consciousness that a

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. These theatres were most popular throughout the 1970s and early 1980s in New York City and other urban centers, mainly in North America, but began a long decline during the mid-1980s with the advent of home video.^[10]

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 lower cost 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"-out films. Many of them were violent action films that 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

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 (1936), Sex Madness (1938), Child Bride (1938), Mom and Dad (1945) and She Shoulda Said No! (1949). An exploitation film about homosexuality, Children of Loneliness (1937), is now believed lost.^[11]

Biker films

In 1953

Black exploitation films, or "blaxploitation" films, are made with black actors, ostensibly for black audiences, often in a stereotypically black American urban milieu. A prominent theme was black Americans overcoming hostile authority ("

The Green Inferno (2013) is a modern homage to the genre.

Canuxploitation

"Canuxploitation" is a neologism that was coined in 1999 by the magazine

The phenomenon emerged in 1974, when the government of Canada introduced new regulations to jumpstart the then-underdeveloped Canadian film industry, increasing the Capital Cost Allowance tax credit from 60 per cent to 100 per cent.^[16] While some important and noteworthy films were made under the program, including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Lies My Father Told Me,^[15] and some film directors who cut their teeth in the "tax shelter" era emerged as among Canada's most important and influential filmmakers of the era, including David Cronenberg, William Fruet, Ivan Reitman and Bob Clark, the new regulations also had an entirely unforeseen side effect: a sudden rush of low-budget horror and genre films, intended as pure tax shelters since they were designed not to turn a conventional profit.^[16] Many of the films, in fact, were made by American filmmakers, whose projects had been rejected by the Hollywood studio system as not commercially viable, giving rise to the Hollywood North phenomenon.^[16] Variety dubbed the genre "maple syrup porno".^[17]

Notable examples of the genre include

The Changeling, Death Ship, My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night, Happy Birthday to Me, Scanners, Ghostkeeper, Visiting Hours, Highpoint, Humongous, Deadly Eyes, Class of 1984, Videodrome, Curtains, American Nightmare, Self Defense, Spasms and Def-Con 4

.

The period officially ended in 1982, when the Capital Cost Allowance was reduced to 50 per cent, although films that had entered production under the program continued to be released for another few years afterward.[16] However, at least one Canadian film blog extends the "Canuxploitation" term to refer to any Canadian horror, thriller or science fiction film made up to the present day.^[18]

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), Mad Max (1979), Safari 3000 (1982), Dead End Drive-In (1986) and Black Moon Rising (1986). Quentin Tarantino directed a tribute to the genre, Death Proof (2007).

Chanbara films

Main article:

Chanbara

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^{[clarification needed]} 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.

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 featured on the covers of the pulp novels by which these movies were inspired. The progenitor of this genre was The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Other examples of Giallo films include Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Deep Red, The Cat o' Nine Tails, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Case of the Scorpion's Tail, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Black Belly of the Tarantula, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Blood and Black Lace, Phenomena, Opera and Tenebrae. Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava are the best-known directors of this genre.

The 2013 Argentinian film Sonno Profondo is a modern tribute to the 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^[19]

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.^[20] Such films have often come from Italy, which has been quick to latch on to trends like Westerns, James Bond movies, and zombie films.^[19] 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.^[21] 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 from releasing The Day the Earth Stopped to video stores in advance of the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still to theaters.^[22]

The term mockbuster was used as early as the 1950s (when

Creature From The Black Lagoon).^{[citation needed]} The term did not 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.^{[citation needed}

]

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, Africa Addio (aka Africa Blood and Guts and Farewell Africa), Goodbye Uncle Tom and Faces of Death.^{[citation needed]}

Monster movies

Main article: Monster movie

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.^[23] 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.^[24] Night of the Lepus, Frogs, and Godzilla vs. Hedorah 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, 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.^[25][26]

The Sci-Fi Channel (now known as

portmanteaus of the two species; examples include Sharktopus and Dinoshark

.

Nazisploitation

Main article: Nazi exploitation

Nazi exploitation films, also called "Nazisploitation" films, or "il sadiconazista", focus on

art films such as Pier Paolo Pasolini's infamous Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and Liliana Cavani's Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter

).

Inglourious Basterds (2009) and The Devil's Rock (2011) are modern homages to the subgenre.

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.^[27]

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.^[9] 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.^[9]

Ozploitation

Main article: Ozploitation

The term "Ozploitation" refers broadly to Australian horror, erotic or crime films of the 1970s and 1980s. Changes to Australia's film classification system 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 titillating their audiences. A documentary about the genre was Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!.^[28] Such films deal with 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. The films typically have rural or outback settings, depicting the Australian landscape and environment as an almost spiritually malign force that alienates white Australians, frustrating their personal ambitions and activities, and their attempts to subdue it.

Notable examples include Mad Max, Alvin Purple, Patrick and Turkey Shoot.

Rape and revenge films

Main article:

Rape and 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

The Last House on the Left, was an uncredited remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, recast as a horror film featuring extreme violence.^[32] Deliverance, in which the rape is perpetrated on a man, has been credited as the originator of the genre.^[33] 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.^[34]

Redsploitation

Main article: Native Americans in film

The redsploitation genre concerns Native American characters almost always played by white actors, usually exacting their revenge on their white tormentors.

Sexploitation films resemble

Lesbian sex scenes of the 1970s have been studied in the context of the political and social implications of lesbianism and women's sexuality, something that remains a concern of feminist film criticism. Some critics have said that lesbian sex on screen is an expression of chauvinism and male power as the images are portrayed for male pleasure.[38] 

The casting of pornstars and hardcore actresses in sexploitation films is not uncommon. The films sometimes contain

Slasher films

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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, though Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974) is usually considered to have started the genre while John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) was responsible for cementing the genre in the public eye. Halloween is also responsible for establishing additional tropes which would go on to define the genre in years to come. The masked villain, a central group of weak teenagers with one strong hero or heroine, the protagonists being isolated or stranded in precarious locations or situations, and either the protagonists or antagonists (or possibly both) experiencing warped family lives or values were all tropes largely founded in Halloween. John Carpenter was inspired by Bob Clark's Black Christmas.^[39]

The genre continued into and peaked in the 1980s with well-known films like Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Many 1980s slasher films used the basic format of Halloween, for example My Bloody Valentine (1981), Prom Night (1980), The Funhouse (1981), Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) and Sleepaway Camp (1983), many of which also used elements from Black Christmas.^{[citation needed]}

Spacesploitation

A subtype featuring space, science fiction and horror in film.^[40][41] Despite ambitious literary works that depicted space travel as a component of more complex plots set in elaborately constructed civilizations (such as the Frank Herbert’s Dune series and the works of Isaac Asimov), for much of the 20th century space travel has been mostly featured in cheap "B films" that often had in their core a simplistic plot typical of another exploitation subgenre, such as slasher or zombie films. Spacesploration films feature a scientifically inaccurate and inconsistent depiction of space travel and are usually set in traversing spaceships and deserted planets, partially due to the films’ limited resources.^[42] Such films include From the Earth to the Moon, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Planet of the Vampires, The Black Hole and Saturn 3. During one of the peaks of space travel films, the 1979 James Bond film Moonraker featured outlandishly unrealistic scenes of space warfare, despite otherwise focusing on real contemporary (i.e. Cold War) intelligence agencies.^[43]

Spaghetti Westerns

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; Day of Anger; Face to Face; Duck, You Sucker!; A Fistful of Dollars and Once Upon a Time in the West. Quentin Tarantino directed two tributes to the genre, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight.

Splatter films

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).^{[citation needed]}

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. George A. Romero coined the term "splatter cinema" to describe his film Dawn of the Dead.^{[citation needed]}

Later splatter films, such as Sam Raimi's

Well-known films of this subgenre are Welcome Home Soldier Boys (1972), The No Mercy Man (1973), Rolling Thunder (1977), Cannibal Apocalypse (1980), and Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except (1985).^[49][50] Other films also considered as vetsploitation are Motorpsycho (1965), The Born Losers (1967), its sequel Billy Jack (1971),^[44]: 52 Vigilante Force (1976), The Zebra Force (1976), Born for Hell (1976), The Exterminator (1980), and Don't Answer the Phone! (1980).^{[47][48][50][49]}

Although mostly associated with

Typical vetsploitation films are B-movies, however, some mainstream Hollywood films have been considered as representative of the subgenre, like Taxi Driver (1976),^[50] First Blood (1982),^[51][52] Missing in Action (1984), and even art house films like Americana (1981), or Jacob's Ladder (1990).^[46][47][48]

Women in prison films

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

Victor Halperin's White Zombie was released in 1932 and is often cited as the first zombie film.^{[53][54][55][56]}

Inspired by the zombie of Haitian folklore, the modern zombie emerged in popular culture during the latter half of the twentieth century, with George A. Romero's seminal film Night of the Living Dead (1968).^[57] The film received a sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1978), which was the most commercially successful zombie film at the time. It received another sequel, Day of the Dead (1985), and inspired numerous works such as Zombi 2 (1979) and The Return of the Living Dead (1985). However, zombie films that followed in the 1980s and 1990s were not as commercially successful as Dawn of the Dead in the late 1970s.^[58]

In the 1980s

A zombie revival later began in the Far East during the late 1990s, inspired by the 1996 Japanese zombie video games Resident Evil and The House of the Dead, which led to a wave of low-budget Asian zombie films, such as the Hong Kong zombie comedy film Bio Zombie (1998) and Japanese zombie-action film Versus (2000).^[59] The zombie film revival later went global, as the worldwide success of zombie games such as Resident Evil and The House of the Dead inspired a new wave of Western zombie films in the early 2000s,^[59] including the Resident Evil film series, the British film 28 Days Later (2002) and its sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), House of the Dead (2003), a 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake and the British parody movie Shaun of the Dead (2004).^[60][61][62] The success of these films led to the zombie genre reaching a new peak of commercial success not seen since the 1970s.^[58]

Zombie films created in the 2000s have featured zombies that are more agile, vicious, intelligent, and stronger than the traditional zombie.^[63][64] These new fast running zombies have origins in video games, including Resident Evil's running zombie dogs and particularly The House of the Dead's running human zombies.^[63]

In the late 2010s, zombie films began declining in the Western world.^[65] In Japan, on the other hand, the low-budget Japanese zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead (2017) became a sleeper hit, making box office history by earning over a thousand times its budget.^[66]

Minor subgenres

• Actionploitation: Parody of 70s and 80s action films, usually a high-octane power fantasy that features
  Samurai Cop 2 and Kung Fury
  is restoring actionsploitation to the small screen and big screen.
• Britsploitation: exploitation films set in Great Britain, sometimes in homage to 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 who often took similar names, like Bruce Li and Bruce Le. Examples include Enter Three Dragons and Re-Enter the Dragon. Another example is New Fist of Fury, which starred Jackie Chan before he became known for his "slapstick" fighting style.
• 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" that 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.
• kung fu 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 Legend of Shaolin Temple.
• Christploitation: Exploitation films with overtly Christian themes.^[68] Whereas films such as The Passion of Joan of Arc and The Gospel According to St. Matthew are serious, thoughtful examinations of faith and spirituality, the Christploitation film delivers through condescension and heavy-handed delivery, the purpose of which is to make the non-Christian viewer feel guilty for not converting to Christianity. Christploitation films have existed for many decades, but only recently have achieved wider viewership. Independently produced Mormon-themed films All Faces West (1929) and Corianton (1931) were exploited for their expected appeal to LDS patrons. An early American example, The Lawton Story (1949) (aka Prince of Piece) was given an exploitation release by its producer Kroger Babb. Modern examples include God's Not Dead, the Nicolas Cage remake of Left Behind, Unplanned, and Last Ounce of Courage.
• Deepsploitation:
  Deep Star Six, Leviathan, The Abyss, The Evil Below and Lords of the Deep were released in 1989, and The Rift was released in 1990. While most of these films are low-budget, some are big productions, like The Abyss
  .
• 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^[70] showing situations such as drug use, unusual sexual practises and wild parties, often with a heavily intellectual plot.
• Hicksploitation: an exploitation film subgenre based on stereotypes of the people and culture of the Southern United States. Examples of this subgenre include Child Bride, Deliverance, Two Thousand Maniacs!, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
• 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
  .
• Way of the Dragon, and Enter the Dragon
  .
• playing the dozens
  " in English), and their sexual tone was considered "risque," though they weren't always particularly explicit.
• Mexploitation: films exaggerating Mexican culture and portrayals of Mexican underworld, 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, The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine, 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.
• Queersploitation: A genre of exploitation film that deals with queer or LGBT people.^[72]
• Afro-Caribbean rhythms dancers).^[73]
• Sharksploitation films: a subgenre about sharks. The most popular film in this genre is Jaws, and the subsequent Jaws (franchise) but many other films have been released. The sharksploitation films Sharknado, The Shallows, Bait 3D, The Reef, Shark Night, The Meg, Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus and its sequels, Deep Blue Sea, & Open Water are all examples of recent films in this genre. Sharksploitation films have been accused of spreading misinformation about sharks causing inflated fear of the animal, contributing to the worldwide decline of sharks^[74]
• Stoner film or Stonersploitation: a subgenre that features 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. Other movies in this genre include: Pineapple Express, Knocked Up, The Big Lebowski, Half Baked, Dude, Where's My Car?, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Super Troopers, Booksmart, Get Him to the Greek with stoner slashers such as the Evil Bong series franchise, Pot Zombies, Evil Bong, Halloweed, Hansel & Gretel Get Baked and 4/20 Massacre.
• Swimsploitation: a subgenre of the sports film genre which focuses on water sports. An early example includes Bathing Beauty, the acclaimed documentaries The Endless Summer and Big River Man as well as the cult classic film The Swimmer.
• Loose Screws (1985).^[77] The teen-adjacent sexploitation genre was born out of teensploitation, B-movie director Roger Corman was inspired to make many films about sexy teachers, sexy nurses, and many more. The Stewardesses (1969), Swedish Fly Girls (1971), The Swinging Stewardesses (1971), The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974), Fly Me (1973), Flying Acquaintances (1973), The Naughty Stewardesses (1975), Blazing Stewardesses (1975), Stewardess School (1986), The Bikini Carwash Company (1992) and Party Plane (1991). Lesser known: Computer Beach Party and Hamburger: The Motion Picture.^[78]
• Fratsploitation/Sratsploitation/Greeksploitation: films focusing on the exploits of College life particularly the Greek life of fraternities and sororities centering around sex, drugs and alcohol before a serial killer rampages through the cast ending with the final girl defeating the killer and usually disowning her sorority. Examples include; The House on Sorority Row (1982), Sorority House Massacre (1986), Sorority Row (2009), Sorority Party Massacre (2012), Sorority Murder (2015), Slotherhouse (2023)
• The Wizard of Oz
  .
• 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.^[80] The genre is believed to have originated with the 1970 film Joe.^[81] 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), Trackdown (1976) and Next of Kin (1989). 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.^[82] 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.^[81]
• Zaxploitation: The exploitation films of South Africa.^[83]
• Bantusploitation: The exploitation films of Nigeria (Nollywood), Ghana (Ghallywood) and West Africa.

See also

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

References

Citations

Sources

• Sarkhosh, Keyvan; Menninghaus, Winfried (August 2016). "Enjoying trash films: Underlying features, viewing stances, and experiential response dimensions". Poetics. 57: 40–54.
  doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2016.04.002
  .
• Eric Schaefer (1999). Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959. Duke University Press.
• Sconce, Jeffrey (1995). "'Trashing' the academy: Taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style". Screen. 36 (4): 371–393.
  doi:10.1093/screen/36.4.371
  .
• Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs,
  ISBN 978-0-312-13519-5
  .
• V. Vale and Andrea Juno, RE/Search no. 10:
  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
  ISBN 978-3-033-00960-8
  .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Exploitation films.

• The Grindhouse Cinema Database. International & classic exploitation cinema magazine and encyclopedia.
• "Lights! Camera! Apocalypse!" Archived 13 August 2006 at the Wayback Machine Salon article about Rapture films as Christian exploitation filmmaking.
• Paracinema Magazine at the Wayback Machine (archived 27 November 2020) – Paracinema was a quarterly film magazine dedicated to B-movies, cult classics, indie, horror, science-fiction, exploitation, underground and Asian films from past and present.