JamesG
04-17-2014, 10:03 AM
30 Great Exploitation Films You Probably Haven’t Seen
by Scott Mason
4/14/14
All movies are exploitation movies, if you really think about it. Each one seeks to elicit interest from viewers, attempts to exploit something in them that will cause them to take time out of their busy schedules and consume whatever visual story has been conceived by the filmmakers.
However, generally when people call something an “exploitation movie”, the implication is that the producers are cynically trying to entice audiences with the promise of sex, blood, and sheer tastelessness. Such assumptions aren’t entirely groundless, and more than one movie mogul (Roger Corman, for example) has made a living playing to the public’s baser instincts.
But that doesn’t mean that the final product can’t be a blast to watch, or can’t be as respectable, in it’s own way, as any A-list picture.
At the very least, many exploitation films, whether objectively good or bad, provide a kind of entertainment that is direct, unvarnished, and specifically calculated to please.
The list you are about to read gives a rough outline of exploitation movies that might be lesser-known in many cases, but are no less worth the investment of time it takes to watch them for people who like their fun visceral and uncompromising.
Turkey Shoot (1982)
aka Escape 2000, Blood Camp Thatcher
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/80d905f2-d6a4-4883-916c-024236188475_zpsab1a6397.jpg
This Australian title is one of the greatest exploitation films ever made, if for no other reason that it has a man driving a dune buggy with a front loader, accompanied by his half-man/half-ape pro-wrestler friend.
In a dystopian future, political dissidents are sent to a prison camp where the warden allows them to be hunted for sport by wealthy degenerates, which also makes Turkey Shoot the greatest remake of The Most Dangerous Game ever.
Violent and action-packed, as well as decidedly bizarre, anyone who enjoys the sublime weirdness of unselfconscious trash should rush to see this as quickly as possible.
Lone Wolf and Cub (1972-74)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/61339faa-2d4a-4c2a-a10c-4dd534a79047_zpsd41f9105.jpg
This is a series of six films, but they’re all portions of the same story, so we are going to treat them like they’re one movie.
Based on the long-running manga series by Kazuo Koike, the story concerns Ogami Itto, a former samurai and executioner for the Shogun who roams the countryside pushing his toddler ahead of him in a bamboo stroller rigged with traps and weapons, hiring out his expertise as a swordsman to whoever can pay him five-hundred gold pieces.
He has sworn to kill the Yagyu, a clan of assassins who murdered his wife and trashed his reputation in order to curry favor with the Shogunate.
The first in the series, Sword of Vengeance, is the slowest, because most superhero origin stories tend to drag.
Things really take off with Baby Cart At The River Styx, a thrilling and funny orgy of limbs and geysering blood that was clearly a major influence on Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1. He later sampled a portion of the audio track from the English-language dub, Shogun Assassin, in Vol. 2.
The rest of the series maintains the same bloody and bizarre tone, all of it terrifically shot and accompanied by a funky-ass fusion jazz score. The basic story has been reworked many times in other films, a recent example being Tom Hanks’ Road to Perdition.
Pieces (1982)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/b5122061-ce24-480f-82b9-bf59b4e2ac0b_zps82cc9591.jpg
Any movie that opens with a little kid murdering his abusive mom with an axe and cutting her up with a saw is definitely not messing around, and yet with the obvious level of onscreen brutality throughout, Pieces still comes off as goofball fun, an entry in the hyper-productive slasher sweepstakes of the ’80′s that is engrossing, silly, and very bloody.
Of Spanish origin, it plays a lot like an Italian giallo with overt American slasher film overtones (the killer favors a chainsaw he keeps borrowing from an always-furious groundskeeper), and won’t disappoint fans of vintage gore through its frequent display of hacked limbs and mutilated bodies.
Also worth mentioning are two of the most WTF scenes in slasher movie history: a martial arts instructor jumps out of nowhere to do a series of kung fu moves for no reason whatsoever, blaming his behavior on some “bad chop suey”.
Also, a nonsensical ending where (spoiler alert) a man has his testicles ripped off by a reanimated corpse (his agonized expression is literally the last shot of the movie).
The Sentinel (1977)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/f62eacdb-dce4-46cf-8ade-3b275001269e_zpsd3d1bc76.jpg
Director Michael Winner, mostly known for the Death Wish films, helmed this 1977 horror melodrama about an actress/model who moves into an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, only to find it populated by a strange blind priest (John Carradine) and a bunch of scary weirdos (a cat-loving Burgess Meredith and an openly masturbating Beverly D’ Angelo among them).
The look and pacing of the film is a lot like made-for-TV movies of the same period, punctuated by bizarre R-rated moments—the aforementioned exhibitionism of Ms. D’ Angelo; a creepy orgy between a scrawny old man, two chubby prostitutes, and some cake; a gory stabbing; and most famously, a finale in which the denizens of Hell, played by actors with real physical deformities, attempt to overwhelm the beleaguered heroine.
An interesting artifact of its time.
Keep an eye out for a pre-stardom Jeff Goldblum as a fashion photographer, Christopher Walken as a police detective, the late Jerry Orbach and a young Tom Berenger.
A part of me wonders if Stanley Kubrick wasn’t in some way marginally influenced by this film—it has many visual and music cues in common with The Shining.
The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/6e545e75-132a-4f2f-a776-0048ffe217f0_zps15765b31.jpg
Considered by many to be one of the very first “nudie cuties”, a genre of softcore porn focusing mostly on naked frolicking women, 1959′s The Immoral Mr. Teas was also the first big financial success for the legendary Russ Meyer.
Dispensing with the pretense of being a nudist documentary or nature film common to earlier sexploitation movies (a convention the film parodies throughout), the simple story follows dental equipment delivery man Teas as he spends a great deal of his time ogling large-breasted women in revealing clothes, peeping on nude sunbathing women while on a fishing trip, getting thrown out of a strip club, and having elaborate sex fantasies.
Innocuous and harmless entertainment, and an amusing landmark in the history of erotic cinema.
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/cd969abd-cd8a-41d1-b655-f9cca2540d6c_zpse9f162b5.jpg
Probably one of the most notorious examples of Nazi exploitation, Ilsa comes off a bit schizophrenic. On the one hand, the filmmakers wish to titillate audiences with sex scenes featuring voluptuous star Dyanne Thorne as the evil camp Kommandant; while on the other, they appear to want to sincerely horrify the viewer with bloody and graphic depictions of Nazi tortures and medical experiments conducted at the death camps.
Kommandant Ilsa wishes to prove to her superiors that women can withstand more pain than men, a case she tries to make by subjecting her female prisoners to monstrous procedures involving such things as maggots, an electrified dildo, and scalding tanks of water, inspiring scenes that would be right at home in a Saw or Hostel movie.
The end result is much more of a horror film than an erotic thriller, with a scene towards the end that is as ghastly and appalling as anything else produced in the ’70′s. If it weren’t so campy it would by close to unwatchable.
Ms. 45 (1981)
aka Angel of Vengeance
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/32bec044-1566-4ac4-82fb-b51ef5be8786_zpsa1821b47.jpg
A fresh and stylish take on the rape/revenge genre that draws its inspiration from Death Wish, Ms. 45 is the story of a mute seamstress (Zoe Tamerlis) in Manhattan’s garment district who is raped twice in the same day by completely separate attackers.
She bludgeons the second assailant to death with an iron, dismembering the body and surreptitiously tossing the parts in the trash. She later stalks the city with his .45 pistol, blowing away offensive jerks and any man who so much as looks at her the wrong way.
Lurid subject matter aside, the film is well-made and pretty tastefully done, with decent performances and a memorable ending at a Halloween party. Woven through the narrative are thoughtful commentaries on the challenges faced by women living in a culture where sexual harassment and male insensitivity are taken as givens, as they certainly were in early ’80′s America.
Directed by Abel Ferarra, who directed Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel a decade later.
Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice (1972)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/d2594c87-0404-457e-8591-331894e541d0_zps9f9cd182.jpg
Some people insist that Japanese culture is nuts, and would probably hold up a film such as this as Exhibit A. The Razor is a badass samurai cop who fights corruption while inflicting masochistic tortures on himself and occasionally interrogating female suspects with his famously huge penis, which he trains by screwing bags of rice and hitting it with a stick.
Very politically incorrect, this film might be considered offensive if it weren’t impossible to take seriously (the jazzy, orchestral cop-movie score is a brilliant touch).
Hanzo is played by Shintaro Katsu, best known as the star of the long-running Zatoichi series of films, and was made by his company Katsu Productions, which also produced the somewhat similar Lone Wolf and Cub series, starring his older brother Tomisaburo Wakayama.
Sword of Justice is the first of a trilogy that includes The Snare and Who’s Got the Gold.
Contamination (1980)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/bee0a3de-3f36-4fb6-9f11-4d1db79afef3_zps20f3f0db.jpg
Yet another example of the shameless ripoff genre of exploitation, this Italian Alien imitation takes a central image from Ridley Scott’s film and runs with it. It’s as if the producers said, “You know that movie that made a ton of money, the one with the big worm exploding out of a guy’s chest? Let’s make a movie that has a hundred times that, plus coffee.”
Eggs from Mars arrive in New York on a ship loaded with Columbian coffee beans, and when they spray goop on people, their torsos explode in a bloody blast of guts.
This ridiculous concept serves as nothing more than an excuse for gratuitious, cheap-looking gore, and as such, it works very well. One of the best shots shows a lab rat exploding in slow-motion in a cage. Great nonsense ideal for fans of good-bad cinema.
Humanoids from the Deep (1980)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/2fe3d6e1-bf3b-4ca8-bb31-96a1a0f83820_zps98ee066b.jpg
Roger Corman sure loved him some rapey monsters back in the early ’80′s (just watch Galaxy of Terror if you have any doubts), and that’s what he sought to deliver in this tale of mutated humanoid salmon who prey on women along the shores of a tiny California fishing village.
The rape scenes are thankfully brief and not overly graphic, but director Barbara Peters wasn’t interested in having them at all: she claimed that Corman had the scenes shot and cut into the final film to up the exploitation factor.
Even so, what you end up with is an interesting take on the classic ’50′s monster movie formula, chock full of gore, slimy fish-men, and Doug McClure.
Maniac (1934)
aka Sex Maniac
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/6ec70acd-d268-4004-9bdc-c8bda840af5d_zps0412e863.jpg
People unfamiliar with pre-Hayes Code films tend to think of movies from the first half of the Twentieth Century as being innocent and fairly coy in the way they presented controversial material. Maniac (also known as Sex Maniac) should dispel any such notions.
An actor in the employ of a mad scientist murders his boss and adopts his identity in order to avoid scrutiny. In the course of the story, much of which is lifted from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat, he accidentally injects a patient with amphetamines—causing him to turn into a bug-eyed, frothing sex fiend—and gouges out a cat’s eye.
The topless prostitutes and clothes-shredding girlfights come off pretty shocking considering the time the film was made, and some of the performances are so hilariously over-the-top they defy description.
Short, strange, and truly one-of-a-kind.
Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes (1974)
aka Jive Turkey
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/a5e57770-01e7-46cb-b01f-a69fd35d5718_zps9eea3c65.jpg
With a title like that, this could only be a movie from the mid-’70′s. Set (very unconvincingly) in 1956, the story concerns a kingpin of the Harlem numbers racket dealing with competition from the Mob and pressure from the Feds.
Thematically similar to films such as Superfly and Black Caesar in its portrayal of African-American social climbing through the judicious pursuit of crime, Jive Turkey is an extremely low-budget, but interesting, addition to the blaxploitation genre.
While it struggles against production values that resemble those of Dolemite, it seems to be making an honest attempt to tell a period story about race and success in America, and adds a reasonable dose of ’70′s blood and a crazy killer transvestite to help spice things up.
Maniac (1980)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/0ab6e33b-fa65-47f4-b839-4bf7865eb5b3_zps88bb23fd.jpg
While it received some very negative critical responses during its initial run, Maniac is a fascinating, if grueling, attempt at a slasher film with much deeper character development for the villain (played by Joe Spinell, who also co-wrote the script).
A lonely, demented loser in New York City murders women and scalps them, using his bloody trophies as decoration for the mannequins that keep him company in his apartment.
Infamous for three very violent scenes (the detailed scalping of one victim, special makeup effects legend Tom Savini having his head blown apart with a double-barreled shotgun, and star Spinell getting his head torn from his body during a nightmare/hallucination), Maniac is a milestone in gore cinema, every bit as disturbing and graphic as work being produced by George Romero or Lucio Fulci around the same time.
The Food of the Gods (1976)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/1e654e05-1933-4f71-91d5-ebb480dfc759_zps8264d949.jpg
Nature-gone-mad movies were kind of a thing back in the ’70′s (best exemplified by Jaws, most hilariously represented by Grizzly and this movie), and chronic giant-thing auteur Bert I.
Gordon (The Amazing Colossal Man, Empire of the Ants) chose to very loosely adapt H.G. Wells’ novel into an epic of overgrown chickens, wasps, and rats launching an assault on a rural community.
Generally great for laughs (the rooster attack in a barn is unbelievable), the ending might draw the ire of any PETA members watching, as it appears the filmmakers felt it necessary to shoot and drown dozens of real rats in order to simulate a massive battle between the monster rodents and the movie’s human stars.
Flesh Gordon (1974)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/c629ebed-a7d1-473b-97d9-408f9f2e4cdf_zps540b864b.jpg
Everyone’s familiar with the phenomenon of porn parodies (Edward Penishands, anyone?), but few come with the kind of production values of this softcore saga from 1974.
Emperor Wang the Perverted from the planet Porno fires an orgy-inducing sex ray at the Earth, forcing Flesh Gordon, Dr. Jerkoff and Dale Ardor to take off in a penis-shaped rocket ship to try and stop him.
The film does a good job of sticking close to the tone of the Flash Gordon serials, and incorporating an impressive array of B-picture special effects, including a stop-motion Penisaurus and Great God Porno (voiced by then-unknown Craig T. Nelson).
Hardcore sex scenes included in the original edit had to be cut for legal reasons and were never reinserted (sorry, couldn’t help it).
by Scott Mason
4/14/14
All movies are exploitation movies, if you really think about it. Each one seeks to elicit interest from viewers, attempts to exploit something in them that will cause them to take time out of their busy schedules and consume whatever visual story has been conceived by the filmmakers.
However, generally when people call something an “exploitation movie”, the implication is that the producers are cynically trying to entice audiences with the promise of sex, blood, and sheer tastelessness. Such assumptions aren’t entirely groundless, and more than one movie mogul (Roger Corman, for example) has made a living playing to the public’s baser instincts.
But that doesn’t mean that the final product can’t be a blast to watch, or can’t be as respectable, in it’s own way, as any A-list picture.
At the very least, many exploitation films, whether objectively good or bad, provide a kind of entertainment that is direct, unvarnished, and specifically calculated to please.
The list you are about to read gives a rough outline of exploitation movies that might be lesser-known in many cases, but are no less worth the investment of time it takes to watch them for people who like their fun visceral and uncompromising.
Turkey Shoot (1982)
aka Escape 2000, Blood Camp Thatcher
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/80d905f2-d6a4-4883-916c-024236188475_zpsab1a6397.jpg
This Australian title is one of the greatest exploitation films ever made, if for no other reason that it has a man driving a dune buggy with a front loader, accompanied by his half-man/half-ape pro-wrestler friend.
In a dystopian future, political dissidents are sent to a prison camp where the warden allows them to be hunted for sport by wealthy degenerates, which also makes Turkey Shoot the greatest remake of The Most Dangerous Game ever.
Violent and action-packed, as well as decidedly bizarre, anyone who enjoys the sublime weirdness of unselfconscious trash should rush to see this as quickly as possible.
Lone Wolf and Cub (1972-74)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/61339faa-2d4a-4c2a-a10c-4dd534a79047_zpsd41f9105.jpg
This is a series of six films, but they’re all portions of the same story, so we are going to treat them like they’re one movie.
Based on the long-running manga series by Kazuo Koike, the story concerns Ogami Itto, a former samurai and executioner for the Shogun who roams the countryside pushing his toddler ahead of him in a bamboo stroller rigged with traps and weapons, hiring out his expertise as a swordsman to whoever can pay him five-hundred gold pieces.
He has sworn to kill the Yagyu, a clan of assassins who murdered his wife and trashed his reputation in order to curry favor with the Shogunate.
The first in the series, Sword of Vengeance, is the slowest, because most superhero origin stories tend to drag.
Things really take off with Baby Cart At The River Styx, a thrilling and funny orgy of limbs and geysering blood that was clearly a major influence on Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1. He later sampled a portion of the audio track from the English-language dub, Shogun Assassin, in Vol. 2.
The rest of the series maintains the same bloody and bizarre tone, all of it terrifically shot and accompanied by a funky-ass fusion jazz score. The basic story has been reworked many times in other films, a recent example being Tom Hanks’ Road to Perdition.
Pieces (1982)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/b5122061-ce24-480f-82b9-bf59b4e2ac0b_zps82cc9591.jpg
Any movie that opens with a little kid murdering his abusive mom with an axe and cutting her up with a saw is definitely not messing around, and yet with the obvious level of onscreen brutality throughout, Pieces still comes off as goofball fun, an entry in the hyper-productive slasher sweepstakes of the ’80′s that is engrossing, silly, and very bloody.
Of Spanish origin, it plays a lot like an Italian giallo with overt American slasher film overtones (the killer favors a chainsaw he keeps borrowing from an always-furious groundskeeper), and won’t disappoint fans of vintage gore through its frequent display of hacked limbs and mutilated bodies.
Also worth mentioning are two of the most WTF scenes in slasher movie history: a martial arts instructor jumps out of nowhere to do a series of kung fu moves for no reason whatsoever, blaming his behavior on some “bad chop suey”.
Also, a nonsensical ending where (spoiler alert) a man has his testicles ripped off by a reanimated corpse (his agonized expression is literally the last shot of the movie).
The Sentinel (1977)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/f62eacdb-dce4-46cf-8ade-3b275001269e_zpsd3d1bc76.jpg
Director Michael Winner, mostly known for the Death Wish films, helmed this 1977 horror melodrama about an actress/model who moves into an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, only to find it populated by a strange blind priest (John Carradine) and a bunch of scary weirdos (a cat-loving Burgess Meredith and an openly masturbating Beverly D’ Angelo among them).
The look and pacing of the film is a lot like made-for-TV movies of the same period, punctuated by bizarre R-rated moments—the aforementioned exhibitionism of Ms. D’ Angelo; a creepy orgy between a scrawny old man, two chubby prostitutes, and some cake; a gory stabbing; and most famously, a finale in which the denizens of Hell, played by actors with real physical deformities, attempt to overwhelm the beleaguered heroine.
An interesting artifact of its time.
Keep an eye out for a pre-stardom Jeff Goldblum as a fashion photographer, Christopher Walken as a police detective, the late Jerry Orbach and a young Tom Berenger.
A part of me wonders if Stanley Kubrick wasn’t in some way marginally influenced by this film—it has many visual and music cues in common with The Shining.
The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/6e545e75-132a-4f2f-a776-0048ffe217f0_zps15765b31.jpg
Considered by many to be one of the very first “nudie cuties”, a genre of softcore porn focusing mostly on naked frolicking women, 1959′s The Immoral Mr. Teas was also the first big financial success for the legendary Russ Meyer.
Dispensing with the pretense of being a nudist documentary or nature film common to earlier sexploitation movies (a convention the film parodies throughout), the simple story follows dental equipment delivery man Teas as he spends a great deal of his time ogling large-breasted women in revealing clothes, peeping on nude sunbathing women while on a fishing trip, getting thrown out of a strip club, and having elaborate sex fantasies.
Innocuous and harmless entertainment, and an amusing landmark in the history of erotic cinema.
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/cd969abd-cd8a-41d1-b655-f9cca2540d6c_zpse9f162b5.jpg
Probably one of the most notorious examples of Nazi exploitation, Ilsa comes off a bit schizophrenic. On the one hand, the filmmakers wish to titillate audiences with sex scenes featuring voluptuous star Dyanne Thorne as the evil camp Kommandant; while on the other, they appear to want to sincerely horrify the viewer with bloody and graphic depictions of Nazi tortures and medical experiments conducted at the death camps.
Kommandant Ilsa wishes to prove to her superiors that women can withstand more pain than men, a case she tries to make by subjecting her female prisoners to monstrous procedures involving such things as maggots, an electrified dildo, and scalding tanks of water, inspiring scenes that would be right at home in a Saw or Hostel movie.
The end result is much more of a horror film than an erotic thriller, with a scene towards the end that is as ghastly and appalling as anything else produced in the ’70′s. If it weren’t so campy it would by close to unwatchable.
Ms. 45 (1981)
aka Angel of Vengeance
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/32bec044-1566-4ac4-82fb-b51ef5be8786_zpsa1821b47.jpg
A fresh and stylish take on the rape/revenge genre that draws its inspiration from Death Wish, Ms. 45 is the story of a mute seamstress (Zoe Tamerlis) in Manhattan’s garment district who is raped twice in the same day by completely separate attackers.
She bludgeons the second assailant to death with an iron, dismembering the body and surreptitiously tossing the parts in the trash. She later stalks the city with his .45 pistol, blowing away offensive jerks and any man who so much as looks at her the wrong way.
Lurid subject matter aside, the film is well-made and pretty tastefully done, with decent performances and a memorable ending at a Halloween party. Woven through the narrative are thoughtful commentaries on the challenges faced by women living in a culture where sexual harassment and male insensitivity are taken as givens, as they certainly were in early ’80′s America.
Directed by Abel Ferarra, who directed Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel a decade later.
Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice (1972)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/d2594c87-0404-457e-8591-331894e541d0_zps9f9cd182.jpg
Some people insist that Japanese culture is nuts, and would probably hold up a film such as this as Exhibit A. The Razor is a badass samurai cop who fights corruption while inflicting masochistic tortures on himself and occasionally interrogating female suspects with his famously huge penis, which he trains by screwing bags of rice and hitting it with a stick.
Very politically incorrect, this film might be considered offensive if it weren’t impossible to take seriously (the jazzy, orchestral cop-movie score is a brilliant touch).
Hanzo is played by Shintaro Katsu, best known as the star of the long-running Zatoichi series of films, and was made by his company Katsu Productions, which also produced the somewhat similar Lone Wolf and Cub series, starring his older brother Tomisaburo Wakayama.
Sword of Justice is the first of a trilogy that includes The Snare and Who’s Got the Gold.
Contamination (1980)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/bee0a3de-3f36-4fb6-9f11-4d1db79afef3_zps20f3f0db.jpg
Yet another example of the shameless ripoff genre of exploitation, this Italian Alien imitation takes a central image from Ridley Scott’s film and runs with it. It’s as if the producers said, “You know that movie that made a ton of money, the one with the big worm exploding out of a guy’s chest? Let’s make a movie that has a hundred times that, plus coffee.”
Eggs from Mars arrive in New York on a ship loaded with Columbian coffee beans, and when they spray goop on people, their torsos explode in a bloody blast of guts.
This ridiculous concept serves as nothing more than an excuse for gratuitious, cheap-looking gore, and as such, it works very well. One of the best shots shows a lab rat exploding in slow-motion in a cage. Great nonsense ideal for fans of good-bad cinema.
Humanoids from the Deep (1980)
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/2fe3d6e1-bf3b-4ca8-bb31-96a1a0f83820_zps98ee066b.jpg
Roger Corman sure loved him some rapey monsters back in the early ’80′s (just watch Galaxy of Terror if you have any doubts), and that’s what he sought to deliver in this tale of mutated humanoid salmon who prey on women along the shores of a tiny California fishing village.
The rape scenes are thankfully brief and not overly graphic, but director Barbara Peters wasn’t interested in having them at all: she claimed that Corman had the scenes shot and cut into the final film to up the exploitation factor.
Even so, what you end up with is an interesting take on the classic ’50′s monster movie formula, chock full of gore, slimy fish-men, and Doug McClure.
Maniac (1934)
aka Sex Maniac
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/6ec70acd-d268-4004-9bdc-c8bda840af5d_zps0412e863.jpg
People unfamiliar with pre-Hayes Code films tend to think of movies from the first half of the Twentieth Century as being innocent and fairly coy in the way they presented controversial material. Maniac (also known as Sex Maniac) should dispel any such notions.
An actor in the employ of a mad scientist murders his boss and adopts his identity in order to avoid scrutiny. In the course of the story, much of which is lifted from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat, he accidentally injects a patient with amphetamines—causing him to turn into a bug-eyed, frothing sex fiend—and gouges out a cat’s eye.
The topless prostitutes and clothes-shredding girlfights come off pretty shocking considering the time the film was made, and some of the performances are so hilariously over-the-top they defy description.
Short, strange, and truly one-of-a-kind.
Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes (1974)
aka Jive Turkey
http://i1331.photobucket.com/albums/w594/JamesGrec3/a5e57770-01e7-46cb-b01f-a69fd35d5718_zps9eea3c65.jpg
With a title like that, this could only be a movie from the mid-’70′s. Set (very unconvincingly) in 1956, the story concerns a kingpin of the Harlem numbers racket dealing with competition from the Mob and pressure from the Feds.
Thematically similar to films such as Superfly and Black Caesar in its portrayal of African-American social climbing through the judicious pursuit of crime, Jive Turkey is an extremely low-budget, but interesting, addition to the blaxploitation genre.
While it struggles against production values that resemble those of Dolemite, it seems to be making an honest attempt to tell a period story about race and success in America, and adds a reasonable dose of ’70′s blood and a crazy killer transvestite to help spice things up.
Maniac (1980)
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While it received some very negative critical responses during its initial run, Maniac is a fascinating, if grueling, attempt at a slasher film with much deeper character development for the villain (played by Joe Spinell, who also co-wrote the script).
A lonely, demented loser in New York City murders women and scalps them, using his bloody trophies as decoration for the mannequins that keep him company in his apartment.
Infamous for three very violent scenes (the detailed scalping of one victim, special makeup effects legend Tom Savini having his head blown apart with a double-barreled shotgun, and star Spinell getting his head torn from his body during a nightmare/hallucination), Maniac is a milestone in gore cinema, every bit as disturbing and graphic as work being produced by George Romero or Lucio Fulci around the same time.
The Food of the Gods (1976)
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Nature-gone-mad movies were kind of a thing back in the ’70′s (best exemplified by Jaws, most hilariously represented by Grizzly and this movie), and chronic giant-thing auteur Bert I.
Gordon (The Amazing Colossal Man, Empire of the Ants) chose to very loosely adapt H.G. Wells’ novel into an epic of overgrown chickens, wasps, and rats launching an assault on a rural community.
Generally great for laughs (the rooster attack in a barn is unbelievable), the ending might draw the ire of any PETA members watching, as it appears the filmmakers felt it necessary to shoot and drown dozens of real rats in order to simulate a massive battle between the monster rodents and the movie’s human stars.
Flesh Gordon (1974)
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Everyone’s familiar with the phenomenon of porn parodies (Edward Penishands, anyone?), but few come with the kind of production values of this softcore saga from 1974.
Emperor Wang the Perverted from the planet Porno fires an orgy-inducing sex ray at the Earth, forcing Flesh Gordon, Dr. Jerkoff and Dale Ardor to take off in a penis-shaped rocket ship to try and stop him.
The film does a good job of sticking close to the tone of the Flash Gordon serials, and incorporating an impressive array of B-picture special effects, including a stop-motion Penisaurus and Great God Porno (voiced by then-unknown Craig T. Nelson).
Hardcore sex scenes included in the original edit had to be cut for legal reasons and were never reinserted (sorry, couldn’t help it).