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    Schlock Sleaze & Cheesy Bs
    Schlock Sleaze & Cheesy Bs
    Schlock Sleaze & Cheesy Bs
    Ebook51 pages44 minutes

    Schlock Sleaze & Cheesy Bs

    By Ian Watson

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    About this ebook

    "Kiss Taste Goodbye..."
    Grindhouses and drive-ins may be lost to nostalgia and legend, but the b-string and basement budget pictures that played them have endured. With their bad acting, drooping mikes and constant mix of day/night shots, you wouldn't call them well-made but there's a strange appeal to their raw, unrestrained shenanigans. Welcome to the golden age of Exploitation Cinema.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIan Watson
    Release dateDec 11, 2012
    ISBN9781301189014
    Schlock Sleaze & Cheesy Bs
    Author

    Ian Watson

    Ian Watson is the author of the #1 bestseller Midnight Movie Madness, a 400+ page guide to such bizarre, campy and endearing classics as Reefer Madness, Attack of the 50ft Woman and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.

    Read more from Ian Watson

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      Book preview

      Schlock Sleaze & Cheesy Bs - Ian Watson

      Schlock Sleaze & Cheesy Bs

      By

      Ian Watson

      Copyright Ian Watson 2012

      Published At Smashwords

      ***

      License Notes

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this eBook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Book List

      By the same author and available at Smashwords:

      Movies That Witness Madness

      The Least Action Heroes

      Introduction

      Some ideas, such as searching for subtext in exploitation films, are so stupid they could only make sense to an academic. Here’s a quote from a scholarly piece discussing subtext in that well-known allegory for slavery, William Crain’s Blacula:

      "Blacula’s position in contemporary Los Angeles is put in opposition to the assimilated blackness of Dr Thomas and Tina. For Tina especially, getting closer to Mamuwalde is getting closer to her own African roots, symbolized by her being the transmogrification of Luva’s spirit. But it is not just the history of African slavery that haunts Blacula – there are also echoes….of the Watts riots a few years previous."

      If we’re reading this guy correctly – he lost us at assimilated blackness – then Blacula, with its rubber bats, hook-handed mortician and casual homophobia, is really a movie about culture, history and race problems.

      Bullshit.

      Blacula is an exploitation movie.

      Exploitation was intended for us rubes because, so help us Lord Jesus, we like watching sex, violence and monsters that stalk comely starlets. They weren’t meant to be pored over by tweed-wearing reptiles who know big words (what does ‘transmogrification’ mean, anyway?) and constantly hunt for hidden meanings.

      If you want meaning, read The Bible.

      If you want entertainment, watch Blacula.

      Or, if you’d prefer to make your living divining messages from films that only you with your expert vision and expensive education can sense, you might consider a career as a learned snake-oil salesman, commonly called an academic.

      Given the level of academic consideration afforded exploitation films, you’d think something like I Spit On Your Grave deserved to be enshrined alongside the works of Hemingway, Faulkner and Poe. Alluding to female empowerment, Grand Guignol and the Roman Coliseum is all very well, but how do you relate to it while watching a fella get his pecker cut off?

      Exploitation is tits and ass and ultraviolence, promoted with gusto by showmen that, in any other field, would likely be sued for misrepresentation. It is an independently produced, often (but not always) poorly-made film with a lurid subject matter whose sensationalist advertising has one goal: putting rubes in seats.

      Some of these movies were shot guerrilla-style on weekends by amateurs who cast their friends and neighbours, paid their extras in beer and hocked their possessions to buy film stock. B-string and basement budget pictures, writes Joe R Lansdale in The Drive-In. A lot of them made with little more than a Kodak, some spit and a prayer. They were cranked out not for academic consideration but to make a profit, and if anyone enjoyed them, so much the better for the balance sheets.

      With the abolition of the Hays production code and relaxation of social attitudes in the mid-1960s, exploitation fare flourished in America’s grindhouses and drive-ins until the late 70s/early 80s, when their revenues declined in the face of

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