Narcos in Jesús María: Dystopian empowerment in the amateur exploitation film Corazón cubano/Cuban Heart (2014)

This article analyses the film Corazón cubano/Cuban Heart (Liyuen Valdés 2014), a story about drug traffickers in the Jesús María neighbourhood of Havana, circulated only through the Paquete Semanal (Weekly Package). Examining the creators’ symbolic identification with the figure of the narco, this article explores Corazón as an example of amateur, alternative and informal media within the Paquete and its relationship with exploitation, cult and trash cinema. It argues that Corazón’s appropriation of narconarratives through reparteros (the inhabitants of Havana’s peripheric and poorest neighbourhoods) is linked to the relationship between reparteros, rap and reggaeton and points to the filmmakers’ will to combine social criticism and entertainment. Corazón also reproduces controversial practices and discourses like ‘necroempowerment’ (Valencia) or ‘fascinating violence’ (Valencia and Sepúlveda), developing dystopian empowerment by appropriating the narco as a ‘cultural persona’ (Edberg).

Growing Pains: Breasts, Blood and Fangs

This chapter features a new take on vampires, werewolves and other contrived souls, especially in relation to tortured coming-of-age stories that address social pressure and childhood traumas. After a short encounter with Woolf in the company of a vampire, this chapter commences with a return to Stephanie Rothman’s psychedelic exploitation film The Velvet Vampire (1971) and Katherine Bigelow’s vampire western Near Dark (1987). The vampire as connected to the confusing experiences of coming of age is picked up Moth Diaries (Mary Harron 2011) and in a less explicit but no less horrific way in Sarah Plays a Werewolf (Katharina Wyss 2017). The promise of the myth of eternal life and beauty, and the legacy of Elisabeth Bathory is revised in The Countess (July Delpie 2009) and acquires a particular twist in contemporary Japan in Helter Skelter (Mika Ninagawa 2012). Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001) takes the genre to its ontological extremes. This chapter will also turn to Butler’s re-imagination of the vampire in her novel Fledgling (2005) and the imagination of alternative relations between the human and nonhuman and looks at the new ethics of the vampire in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014).

Third Reel

This chapter assesses how, in Shivers (1975), David Cronenberg uses image and sound as discrete channels to extend narrative space and alter the significance of the visual information with the context provided by the aural. By coupling visual pleasure to aural infodump, Cronenberg not only smooths the audience's experience of a passage of pure exposition, but also qualifies their enjoyment in a way that produces a comic shudder. The chapter then considers exploitation cinema and exploitation film spectatorship. The film's association of a desiring female subject with fear raises the question of whether one is watching a misogynist film. The chapter also reflects on Cronenberg's Canadian liberalism. Moreover, it looks at the most significant evaluations of Shivers.

‘This Was Never Meant to be a Game’: Rollerball’s Reception then and Now

This chapter focuses on Rollerball's reception, the immediate critical reaction and box office performance and more recent critical commentary. It studies how the publicity efforts of the film's distributor, United Artists (UA), helped to pump prime controversy over the film's violence. In the United States, at least, this overshadowed Norman Jewison's desire to make a picture critiquing corporate power and rising violence in sport, contributed to its poor critical reception as an exploitation film, and even fuelled short-lived speculation that Rollerball might become a real sport. The chapter then looks at the film's cultural influence, concluding with some brief remarks on Rollerball's place in the broader body of murder game films. This is a broad cinematic output that spans reality TV parodies, Italian exploitation cinema and B-movies, mainstream science fiction, and YA dystopian films.

Mondo Macabro as Trashy/Cult Film Archive: The Case of Classic Indonesian Exploitation Cinema

Film archiving and local exploitation films, let alone the trashy film archive, are marginal in the discourses of film journalism, scholarship, policies, and criticism in Indonesia (Imanjaya, 2009c; Imanjaya, 2012a; Imanjaya, 2014). However, this paper will demonstrate the importance of Indonesian exploitation cinema, alternative film archives, and exploitation film preservation. It will focus on the output of Mondo Macabro, a transnational DVD label that consistently preserves world trashy films, including Indonesian films produced from the 1970s to the 1990s. By focusing on its DVD paratexts, that is, its DVD covers, special features, and online promotional materials, and applying the Chaperone archiving model also applied by Criterion Collection, this paper will also argue that Mondo Macabro gives trashy or cult films a new lease on life, and more importantly, treats them as collector’s items.

Residential School Gothic and Red Power: Genre Friction in Rhymes for Young Ghouls

Rhymes for Young Ghouls is a hyper-stylized film, extremely conscious of the way narrative conventions are organized into genres. In telling a story about a Mi'kmaw girl's leadership of a revenge plot, the film juxtaposes the genres—and the very different models of time-space—of the Gothic novel and the Red Power-era exploitation film. I read this jolting combination as a critical intervention into what I call Residential School Gothic, a dominant discourse on the historical wrong of Indian residential schooling which has emerged in Canada over the past two decades. The film's immanent critique of this public narrative template for telling stories about residential school exposes some of the crucial ways in which Residential School Gothic serves to reconfirm a settler common sense about liberal progress.

Weekend and Cannibal Holocaust: Art, Ballyhoo and Remediation

This chapter starts with an assessment of Jean-Luc Godard’s auteur status, before focusing on Weekend, a film frequently overlooked in discussions of extreme art cinema. By drawing attention to the film’s depiction of cannibalism, rape and real animal slaughter, the chapter highlights the similarities it shares with other extreme texts, repositioning it within the boarder extreme art film tradition outlined throughout the book. To find out whether this reputation impacts the commercial identity of the film, the chapter moves on to explore the paratextuality of the film. Ultimately concluding that the film’s distributors (Artificial Eye) offer a hybridised object that flirts with extremity, the chapter then examines Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. Noting similarities between the films, the chapter provides a detailed analysis of Shameless Screen Entertainment collectors’ edition DVD. Showing how the paratextual material re-constructs the film’s history, the analysis argues that Cannibal Holocaust’s remediation moves it away from an exploitation film ghetto by employing traditionally highbrow marketing techniques. By complicating existing ideas regarding the commercial function of extremity, the chapter illustrates the extent to which home entertainment objects obscure long-standing taste distinctions.