Exploitation as a Movement

The concluding chapter of ‘The Style of Sleaze’ enters into a discourse about how the term ‘exploitation’ has entered into the pubic and critical discourse to reference a myriad of different motion pictures, some of them major Hollywood productions. In conclusion, the book argues that exploitation cinema deserves further exploration – especially given how little has been explored, academically, as regards the cinema of this type that has emerged from other countries and which warrants similar investigation.

Cannibalising Tradition: Romero’s Zombies and a Blood Feast

For this chapter, ‘Blood Feast’ and George Romero’s ‘Night of the Living Dead’ are discussed as the genesis of the new wave of American horror cinema. Whilst the two are very different films, in terms of certain stylistic attributes, for instance their use of the close-up, they have more in common than previous studies have alluded. Five key tropes of the exploitation-horror film are also introduced and discussed.

The Body is Everything: Sexploitation Spectacle

With a close focus on the hardcore blockbuster ‘The Devil in Miss Jones’, this chapter discusses how the sexploitation film evolved, stylistically, into a form that challenged audiences and critics to – briefly – question where or not these might be even radical art cinema. The style of the sexploitation film is argued to have hit a new peak with this particular motion picture which defined the genre for its era but ultimately also indicated that it might have nowhere else to go other than glossier reproductions of the sex spectacle itself.

Not Quite Hollywood

How to define an exploitation film – and what separates the exploitation cinema produced in America during the timeline of this book from that of the B-movie. The chapter also explores the aesthetic and thematic approaches of exploitation cinema in the post-classical era. The chapter concludes upon what makes American exploitation cinema unique.

Slash and Burn: The Exploitation-Horror film in Transition

This concluding chapter about exploitation-horror cinema focuses on how the form evolved in the 1970s before concluding when the advent of more ‘gruesome’ special effects wizardry prepared the wider genre from a period of change at the end of the decade. I ascertain that George Romero’s film ‘Martin’ was the prelude to this factor – with ‘Halloween’ predicting a new market for stylish productions that could compete against Hollywood’s biggest and best. As with hardcore sex films, horror films would develop into a VHS staple in the 1980s – arguably the true lineage of the gritty, confrontational horror of such classics as ‘The Last House on the Left’.

Sex, Violence and Urban escape: Blaxploitation Tropes and Tales

Initially building on the work of Cornel West, whose quote introduces this chapter, the blaxploitation form is discussed in terms of its characters and its difference from Hollywood cinema and African-American representations therein. The Hollywood film ‘Shaft’ is introduced and spoken about – with the chapter arguing about its status as part of the ‘blaxploitation’ pantheon.

Blaxploitation Cinema: Race and Rebellion

Per the title, this chapter is an introduction to the notorious and controversial blaxploitation cinema that became famous in the early 1970s. However, unlike previous studies in this form, this chapter chooses not to become too entangled in arguments about race-representation (although it does acknowledge some of the debates around these motion pictures) but rather to maintain that the form had stylistic similarities to both the exploitation-horror film and the key sexploitation motion pictures of the era.

Sex Morality Plays: Character in Adult Cinema

This chapter discusses the use of complex characterisation in sexploitation cinema – arguing that the character motivation and narrative causality is often more conservative than many might assume. A comparison is also made to the concurrent evolution of the sexual dynamics that begin to creep into Hollywood cinema via such notable motion pictures as ‘Last Tango in Paris’. This chapter argues that often the ‘underground’ sex films of the period featured more interesting and radical female portrayals.

Introduction

What is an exploitation film? This may seem like an obvious question with an equally obvious answer. The term itself perhaps conjures up the carny marketing of old, low-budget movies – typically generic – offering gory or sexy thrills. A beautiful bound woman having her tongue pulled out in the West German production ...

Exploitation-Horror Cinema

An introduction to what the book defines as exploitation-horror – tracing the term back to Robin Wood and discussing how the style of this demarcation might be seen to hold similar aesthetic and thematic pretensions to that of the post-classical sexploitation movement. Historic appreciation of the key films is introduced alongside how some of the films were received at their time of release.