Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for taking the time to join us as we spend another Thursday evening probing the mysteries of cult cinema with a megamind of exploitation knowledge, The Podcast from the After Movie Diner.
Why don't you start telling us about your show?
The Podcast from the After Movie Diner
Well the Diner started life as a blog back in 2010 and then somewhere in 2011 we started a podcast. I have an eclectic and passionate interest in all film so while others might focus on one thing or another, we can always guarantee there's at least one show or a handful of shows we have done that everyone will like.
Our main podcast combines comedy, music and film discussion and then about a year and a half ago we started up the Dr. Action and The Kick Ass Kid Commentaries show which is my friend and I riffing on 80s and 90s action films but with affection and silly voices, it's sort of like Hollywood Babble-On meets MST3K.
Wartooth Arena
I know I'm jumping ahead, but do you have a favourite exploitation film?
The Podcast from the After Movie Diner
I have a whole list of favourites from all genres. Hard to pick just one... I did get a list together of a selection of them... would you like to hear about that?
As I have just completed a month covering them, some of the best, boldest, bloodiest and most badass and brilliant Blaxploitation films I can recommend are:
Shaft (1971) – an obvious one maybe but it has a hard hitting, quick witted, one liner heavy script that reads like a Humphrey Bogart private eye noir from the 40s but plays out like a new form of urban, action cinema that would define the era.
Slaughter (1972) – ex-footballer Jim Brown plays a James Bond style lady slayin’ ass whooper that owes a debt to the spy movies of the 60s but has all the nudity and gun fights one expects from the decade.
Three The Hard Way (1974) – Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, Jim Brown and the late great Jim Kelly go up against white supremacists wearing all the damn fine threads they can find and warring with all the way out weaponry they can get their hands on.
Coffy (1973) – Pam Grier’s defining moment. Strong, sexy, sassy and vicious, Grier brings all the exploitation elements of her greatest women-in-prison-in-the-Philippines films but mixes it with the sort of hard-nosed revenge thrillers that would pepper the 70s and 80s. This is a whole year before Death Wish.
Some of my favourite, less obvious, exploitation movies of this era are:
Vanishing Point (1971) – For as much as it is an existential, bleak look at America in a post 60s funk it also contains drugs, nudity, awesome car chases, violence, surreal scenes, a kick ass soundtrack and an enigmatic lead performance, all of which are staples of exploitation and would inform films like Mad Max and The Blues Brothers
Race With The Devil (1975) – When devil worshippers and Winnebago’s collide! This is a great look at the middle class, white family’s paranoia of small town, rural America with some great horror, car chases, a snake and an awesome ending.
Profondo Rosso (1975) – Argento’s masterful giallo movie that not only would influence the thrillers of De Palma but the entire Slasher genre of the 80s.
Rabid (1977) – Cronenberg’s slice of vampiric, zombie body horror.
The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue (1974) - A fantastic, underrated, gory, violent, weird and atmospheric zombie film that takes place in the beautiful countryside of the lake district in England. The opening scene, for no apparent reason, features a naked, large breasted lady on a town street. The film continues in its gloriously dubbed, grubby, Eurohorror way with plenty of suspense and synth soundtrack, ending with a third act full of pleasingly gory dead folk.
and lastly, whenever I am asked about exploitation or b-movies I always recommend these two, fairly obscure, films (despite their coverage in the great documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed), They Call Her Cleopatra Wong and The One Armed Executioner, which are two awesome Philippines kung fu classics, inventive, weird, wonderful, hilarious, kick ass and with soundtracks that slap you about the face and make you sit up and take notice.
There is even a sequence in Cleopatra Wong featuring a bunch of
bearded nuns with machine guns. Definitely worth tracking down. A great double dvd disc exists out there with them both in.
Wartooth Arena Thank you for the serious schooling. I see several I'm going to check out. Machete Maidens is on my list for soon to be watched.
Back in the day of drive-in theaters and grindhouse cinemas, a movie producer wanted to be able to make a film quick and easy in order to turn a fast buck. They used gimmicks like sex, violence, gore, racism, and religion to fill the seats. Looking back, we call those throwaway movies exploitation films, and filmmakers churned them out for about a decade. In order to keep the audience coming back, producers had to gradually ramp up the sensationalism. Going back through the history books, what are some of the forgotten movies that ramped up the gimmicks? The ones that brought the next big wave of knockoffs?
The end of the 60s through to the beginning of the 80s is an exciting, fertile and experimental time in American cinema, which is why I think it still fascinates today. You have the movie brats, like Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma etc. some who come out of the exploitation stable of Roger Corman to then create bleaker, slower, more thoughtful and European style, movies that still have one foot in the crime cinema of the 40s and 50s. It’s the perfect melting pot that is, all at once, informed by the past, the present and looks to the future.
However, what we think of now as exploitation, grindhouse or b-movies of the decade, like the Blaxploitation movement, for example, or Roger Corman’s Philippines era, are actually, very often, telling the populist, crowd pleasing, action heavy stories that would directly inform the blockbuster action boom of the 80s. While, of course, traditional and spaghetti westerns and war films of the 50s and 60s would also influence the Rambos and John McClanes of the 80s, they wouldn’t be who they are in tone and spectacle without the Death Wishes, Shafts, Slaughters and Coffys of the world.
In terms of which movies were the forgotten ones that ramped up the gimmicks, any of the ones I mentioned in my list could easily fit that. There were little sub genres springing up all the time that had their imitators or knock offs. The zombie genre that Romero started with Night of the Living Dead, the Cannibal genre with films like The Mountain of the Cannibal God, Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox and then you'd have the rape/revenge films like I Spit on your Grave, Last House on the Left and others
You tended to get a classic or semi classic first film (like Night of the living dead) and then the genre would runaway with itself and become crazier, more graphic and have different off shoots.
Wartooth Arena
To fill the seats, exploitation films needed to flirt with our darker nature. Posters at drive-ins and downtown theatres were one of the main ways these films seduced us. How about a little background on the role the poster played in the exploitation genre?
The Podcast from the After Movie Diner
Art surrounding movie advertising, in general, was SO MUCH better 20 years ago and prior. If I may have a slight rant, poster art for modern movies is unadulterated crap biscuits. Bland, badly photoshopped tediousness that needs a good kick up the brown eye with a jagged metal boot.
For as long as there was cinema, up until computers, the posters were these awesome works of art. Just like one of the joys of exploitation movies is that, due to low budgets, everything was done, dangerously for real or hilariously weirdly using cheap back projection, wonky miniatures or superimposing, one of the joys of the posters were they were hand painted, bold, lively, exciting affairs that when put up against regular A-list pictures were either completely comparable or much much better. The poster art, if done right, could level the playing field between A and B films.
Of course this brings up the whole problem with that and the reason why the art work was so important for getting bums on seats and that is ‘promising something you can’t deliver on’. For every one of the great, genuinely awesome and artistic, kick ass exploitation films, there are ten slow, boring, weird films that seemingly don’t match the hype depicted on the poster. Writing, word play and font graphics became really important and eye-catching too, much like voice overs on trailers. The whole marketing of these low budget wonders became a genius, clever and, even, admirable art form of its own.
Take the great line from the Coffy poster "She’s the GODMOTHER of them all… The baddest One-Chick Hit-Squad that ever hit town!" Absolute classic sleaze marketing. Love it
Wartooth Arena
On your facebook page, I saw a trailer for a blacksploitation movie called “Slaughter” with Jim Brown. I was shocked to hear the word nigger in the actual theatrical trailer. Are there any other trailers from the exploitation era that might surprise a contemporary audience? Like · 2 · about an hour ago
The Podcast from the After Movie Diner
Compared to almost any of the awful, generic trailers we get today, most exploitation era trailers would shock the uninitiated. A lot of the trailers for the Italian and American revenge thrillers, cannibal films or zombie horrors, for example, tend to be very graphic and nothing like what we get today. Of course these were only intended to screen in the Grindhouses and it wouldn’t be as if you were sitting in a shiny “safe” multiplex like today but even so, a lot of them show so much in the trailers you wonder why you’d then go see the films at all.
I found the trailer online for that famous schlockfest Make Them Die Slowly AKA Cannibal Ferox which is 4mins long, features the word ‘bitch’, nudity, the beating of women and tons of bloodletting. There’s even a warning at the beginning! It’s horrendously graphic just for a trailer.
Marketing was king with these movies, if you ever get the time look at the marketing of the movie Snuff. The director, changed the name to Snuff, did a tagline "A film that could only be made in South America, where life is CHEAP!", tacked on a fake snuff ending and organised protests to picket the premiere of his own movie and a cheap crappy exploitation movie went on to make him very rich.
All these exploitation guys were doing what Hollywood does now (trying to get that big opening and con peoples money out of them before the movie gets seen by too broad an audience) years ago. You want to see true innovation in movie making and marketing, you look to the B Movie guys
Wartooth Arena
Gradually the exploitation era of the 1970s evolved into the Blockbuster era of the 1980s. What films that get classified in the exploitation genre foreshadowed the coming change? What was the public’s response?
The Podcast from the After Movie Diner
What happened, really, is Steven Spielberg. With Duel and then Jaws he took what would normally be exploitation tropes and made them big business. What’s funny, particularly about Jaws is the fact that it had so many B Movie imitators when it itself WAS a B Movie imitator. The other film would be something like First Blood. Another film which could quite easily be an exploitation film but instead ushers in the most lucrative era of action films cinema has ever enjoyed.
As for how people reacted and why it happened I don’t know completely. Like I said, I think American A movies had become bleak, thoughtful and artistic and the exploitation/grindhouse films were the crowd pleasers - the action movies, the monster movies, crime thrillers etc. and I think Spielberg, Lucas, Stallone etc. tapped into the idea of “well why can’t we make some crowd pleasers?” and I am not sure a real audience cared back then about budgets or stars so much as they would just a few years later in the middle of the 80s.
Wartooth Arena
Before we get to the big question of the night, I have one on sub genres. I have seen a lot of 70s flicks where groups of disturbed children kill groups of adults. The other night I watched The Devil Times Five. Are there any of these where the adults kill some of the little bastards?
The Podcast from the After Movie Diner
There is The Brood, the David Cronenburg movie... but, doing a search online brought up this movie: Beware Children At Play from 1989 which is a Troma movie (so expect very low budget sleaze) and apparently that ends with all the townsfolk killing demonic children left and right. of course, in the original cut of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Peter guns down two zombie children...
Wartooth Arena
I can get behind that... and if anyone cares to see it, many Troma films are FREE!
We’re seeing remakes of Craven’s exploitation classics The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes as well as other exploitation favorites like I Spit on Your Grave. These are amped up versions, but in this age of media glorification of real life horrors, these movies don’t hold the shock they used to, so what do you think fuels this resurgence?
The Podcast from the After Movie Diner
I am cynical and believe this whole remake craze is solely down to laziness, creative bankruptcy and money. I don’t think the producers of the remakes or the people at the studios have seen half of the original films their movies are based on and I think they are doing it in a vein attempt at name recognition and maybe a little shock value.
While the remakes of Friday 13th, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween etc. all make some sort of sense, for a studio, because they are all popcorn horror rooted in fantasy but it makes little to no sense to remake the violent, grimy, sleazy exploitation films of the 70s because you could never do them justice today and, like you say, they wouldn't have the shock value.
People need to remember that at the time the exploitation craze kicked off America was in turmoil, engaged in an unpopular war, lots of civil rights issues igniting riots and marches and a hippy movement in decline and depression as they felt 'it hadn't worked'
Films like Last House on the Left grew out of that scene organically... you can't just casually remake it like it was just another movie. B Movies and exploitation is very often an organic product of its time...
Wartooth Arena
Yep. Could not agree more.
Wartooth Arena 2: Revenge of the Fucking Bad Ass is a writing contest for stories inspired by exploitation movies. In order to help combatants create the best fiction possible, I’m speaking with experts like yourself to create THE 13 FUCKING COMMANDMENTS OF EXPLOITATION FICTION. I’m trying to isolate the characteristics that would make one mean motherfucker of a story. Other suggestions have been OUT CRAZY THE CRAZIEST, LIVE FOR REVENGE, and ALWAYS SHOCK. The combatants of Wartooth Arena would love to know what you think must be present for exploitation fiction to be as awesome as it can be?
The Podcast from the After Movie Diner
well I was going to be crass and scream BRING OUT THE BOOBS! hahaha but actually, thinking about protagonists, anti-heroes, the classic leading character in these movies I have gone with SPEAK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG GUN
Wartooth Arena
You get two! They both rule!
Thanks so much for joining us. It has been a pleasure. I hope everyone goes over and likes this wonderful page.
The Podcast from the After Movie Diner
Thanks for having me, sorry I went on a bit hahaha