That's Exploitation!

by Patrick Bromley

At a time when things are dark, I'm finding solace in the weird shit.

If you've visited our site any time during the last few years -- in particular during the month of June -- you probably already know that I love exploitation movies. Starting in 2013, we even began devoting an entire month to watch and celebrating them. #Junesploitation was born. Next to Scary Movie Month, it's probably my favorite time of year, created because selfishly even if no one participated I would still get to watch action and horror and kung fu movies for 30 days.

In a recent email exchange with Cait Cannon (hi, Cait!), we were talking a little about exploitation and she asked if it was something I had always been into. Truth be told, I had never really given it much thought until she asked. I've mentioned before that 2007's Grindhouse was a turning point for me because a) it actually codified a certain kind of movie of which I had an awareness but not a concrete understanding and b) the experience of seeing it in a theater (many times) was one of the best I've ever had, so I immediately went down the rabbit hole in the hopes of recapturing that feeling. But I also know that I haven't only loved exploitation movies for the last decade, because I grew up loving a certain kind of schlocky horror and action movie and was obsessed with Troma and would make it a point to watch USA Up All Night every weekend, sometimes crying quietly to myself when I fell asleep and missed the 2am feature (something young people today don't understand, what with their DVRs and their instant streaming and their time shifting and their iPods and their Timberlands and their Hypercolor and their funky bunch). I have always been drawn to exploitation movies. I just didn't know that's what they were.

During the last few weeks of 2016 and the first week or so of the new year, I've watched almost exclusively exploitation movies -- minus the occasional awards screener or movie I'm reviewing, it's been nothing but drive-in classics and grindhouse nasties. Some of the reason for this, I think, is because I'm having a bit of a rough go of it these days and want to escape into films that don't ask much of me, but rather give of themselves to offer all the stuff that's fun about movies: fast cars and sleazy sex and revenge and violence and a bunch of cool shit. Exploitation reduces cinema to its basest elements -- the elements it can quite literally exploit -- and delivers an experience of purity, of visceral thrills. Pretentious as it may sounds, there is something more honest about exploitation than most other movies.

But I think there's more to it than that, and it's something I've talked about in conversations with both Doug and Erika in recent weeks. I think I may have gotten to a point where I've seen enough movies that it takes a different kind of experience to give me a thrill. I've watched a handful of awards-bait titles and totally competent indies of late and haven't been moved in the slightest. This is not the fault of the movies; this is entirely on me. I'm a tougher sell now. Doug likened it to a person who has had so much sex that now he or she needs to be tied up or choked to finish. It's a dirty metaphor and not completely applicable to me (I have never had sex), but the comparison is apt: I can watch a sweet, gentle movie about young love that's well-directed and well-acted and feel mostly indifference, but the next night will see 1983's Julie Darling, a violent and deranged thriller in which a teenage girl visualizes herself in bed with her own father, and be blown away by it. Julie Darling gets me excited about cinema in a way that other movies don't. This might say something more about me than it does about cinema.

Many of these movies are not great. They seldom need to be. All they need to do is entertain, and the majority of them are unashamed to be entertaining. They'll offer a crazy performance or an outrageous idea of a cool, transgressive visual and it's enough to get me through the rougher patches. A movie like House at the Edge of the Park is totally repellent, but the insanity of David Hess and his never-ending death scene make it a must-see. Superchick is pretty dull, but lands in a place that helps compensate for the brainlessly episodic '70s storytelling that precedes it. Then there's something like Stephanie Rothman's Terminal Island, which is genuinely terrific throughout. It's the kind of gem that makes it worth working through a dozen other half-successful -- or entirely unsuccessful -- exploitation movies. It's the kind of movie I'll keep searching for as I continue to go further and further down the rabbit hole of exploitation. In the meantime, here are a few of the highlights of the last few weeks:

The Beach Girls (1982, dir. Bud Townsend)

There were so many teenage sex comedies released in the early '80s. I've long carried the belief that Bob Clark's Porky's was the movie that started the trend, but the movies had already been playing drive-ins since days of the "cheerleader" comedies of the 1970s. But Porky's was released in 1982, which was really the flagship year of the subgenre's mainstream popularity: in addition to Porky's there was Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Last American Virgin, Spring Fever, Homework and, of course, The Beach Girls were all released that year. How I had never seen The Beach Girls until now is a shame I will have to carry for the rest of my (admittedly numbered) days. It is gloriously stupid in every single way, violating every standard of gender and racial sensitivity we possess nowadays. It has giant floating bags of weed and campfire sing-a-longs and fucking pirates and pizza men and lots and lots of sex and/or sex-adjacent humor. This is the kind of movie where if there aren't 100 kicking-in-the-balls jokes, it feels like there are 100 kicking-in-the-balls jokes. Also, Ducky v. Ginger really should have replaced the age-old Betty v. Veronica debate that's been taking place in pop culture since the 1960s. The Beach Girls is the sort of idiot fun I enjoy way too much sometimes.

The Police Connection (1973, dir. Bert I. Gordon)

Exploitation icon and "giant monster" movie enthusiast Bert I. Gordon (Food of the Gods, Empire of the Ants) directed this oddball police procedural starring weird Chuck Conners as a guy who is disgusted by the direction society is taking (like an early iteration of Michael Douglas in Falling Down) and takes out his frustrations by blowing up anyone who wrongs him. Equally weird Neville Brand (Eaten Alive) plays the sexual deviant who could possibly identify him to the cop working the case, played by Vince Edwards (Space Raiders). A lot of this one feels like a TV movie only sleazier or more violent, but there's just enough of that '70s grit and some genuine oddness to make it its own thing. Even if I didn't enjoy the whole thing -- which I did -- the movie would be worth it just for the final two minutes.

The Unholy Rollers (1972, dir. Vernon Zimmerman)

Claudia Jennings. Nothing more needs to be said. She was a force of nature, whose every movie is worth seeing just because she is in it (most of the ones I've seen so far -- and I think I've seen most of her filmography at this point -- are really cool, which helps). That she died in a car accident at age 29 isn't just a tragedy of a life cut short, but of an exploitation icon who had so much more to give. This one exists mostly to cash in on the popularity of roller derby, but Jennings gives it the spark that she brings to everything and creates a character who doesn't give a fuck. The movie is a celebration of not giving a fuck.

Alice Goodbody (1974, dir. Tom Scheuer)

I'm not especially a fan of sexploitation movies, but here we are with the second sexploitation title on this list. I also was not aware of Colleen Brennan, who later became a famous adult film star but who here (acting under the name Sharon Kelly) is charmingly daffy was a diner waitress who is offered the chance to be an extra in a historical epic, Julius Caesar, Crowd Pleaser, by sleazy Myron Mittleman (Daniel Kauffman). As Alice continues to climb the ranks of Hollywood -- sleeping with members of the cast and crew and each time getting a bigger and bigger part -- she is also the victim of a series of accidents on set, each one pushing back the production and giving her more time to bed another crew member. Yes, it's gross, but it's also very clearly a satire of the Hollywood casting couch and done in such a strangely sweet, sex-positive way that it doesn't feel nearly as sleazy as it actually is. That's due in large part to Colleen Brennan's winning performance and in part due to the period: post free-love, progressive in terms of women's rights. Alice isn't really being taken advantage of because she's more than a willing participant -- she's the one who's really in control. I love that the film makes every new partner a weird deviant or an egomaniac or a whatever. The major laughs come at the expense of men. The movie also has a genuinely great punchline.

I'll be checking in from time to time to talk about what crazy shit I've been watching of late, and of course recommendations of your favorite or most outrageous exploitation movies are always welcome (better yet, send them right to me and I'll make sure I write them up. Bribery!). The stuff other movies wouldn't dare do. That's the stuff that makes cinema exciting. That's exploitation.

I Stream, You Stream Vol. 14

by Patrick Bromley

Get down and dirty for the New Year!

American Muscle (2014, dir. Ravi Dhar) I have retreated into almost nothing but exploitation films during the last few weeks of the year, maybe to wash out the taste of all the awards bait films I've had to watch in the last month or so or maybe because they skip out on all the bullshit and aim right for the pleasure centers of my brain. They're helping to keep my happy, so I'm not going to fight it. With that in mind, I'm recommending mostly exploitation this week, including this modern-day attempt at an old-school grindhouse revenge flick that is described by on Netflix reviewer as a movie that "feels like a bunch of bouncers and strippers got together and decided to make a movie." I do not disagree with this assessment. This is an ugly, stupid, violent and sexist film that's maybe too concerned with being cool, but which also manages to get to the heart of true exploitation. Plus, you get to see Trent Haaga as a low-level hood, Todd Farmer as the main villain and Robyn Sydney at her most to-die-for. The great Travis Stevens is a producer on this, which is what drew me to it in the first place. (Watch on Netflix)

Terminal Island (1973, dir. Stephanie Rothman) Directed by one of the few great female exploitation directors of the Golden Age, Terminal Island is a legitimately rad prison movie in which a bunch of cons are dumped onto an island (including a young Tom Selleck, playing An Innocent Man) and battle one another for supremacy. Everything about this movie kicks ass, from the performances to the violence to the scene in which a woman seduces one of her enemies and proceeds to smear honey all over his crotch and butt before releasing a bunch of bees on him. It's awesome, like this movie. (Watch on Exploitation.tv)

God Told Me To (1975, dir. Larry Cohen) I only saw this movie a year or so ago thanks to Elric Kane convincing Blue Underground owner Bill Lustig to put it out on Blu-ray. It's probably Larry Cohen's weirdest movie, but also maybe his best. It's about a New York cop investigating a series of murders committed by seemingly random people (including Andy Kaufman in a small role) who all mutter the same phrase after committing these heinous acts. Where it goes from there I won't even begin to explain, because one of the incredible things about this movie is where it ends up versus where it starts. Like most Larry Cohen films, there's no predicting this one. (Watch on Shudder)

Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988, dir. Donald Jackson, R.J. Kizer) I wrote a whole piece about this movie a couple of years back, and while it's no They Live, it's still the second best movie his Rowdiness Roddy Piper (RIP) ever made. It's a crazy movie that knows it's crazy, presenting an original vision of the apocalyptic future and Roddy Piper mugging like crazy. This was the movie I wanted to see on USA Up All Night more than any other growing up and it took me three tries (I fell asleep before it aired the first two times, and I cannot begin to describe the heartbreak I felt upon waking up and realizing I missed it) before I finally caught up with it. I actually think it gets better with age. It's super entertaining. (Watch on Hulu)

Neon Maniacs (1986, dir. Joseph Mangine) I have been wanting to get Code Red's Blu-ray of this one for a long time but haven't yet (belated Christmas gift, anyone? fthismoviepodcast@gmail.com), so for now I'll settle for watching it on Shout Factory TV -- which, unlike these other platforms, requires no subscription and can be watched totally for free. This is basically an '80s slasher movie but with weird monsters doing the slashing; the fact that it never got a sequel is baffling, because the monsters are cool enough to inspire their own franchise. (Watch on Shout Factory TV)

Black Dragon's Revenge (1975, dir. Tommy Loo Chung) Watching Death Machines this week (which everyone should totally see) led me to Ron Van Clief, the original Black Dynamite and a super cool action star who is also not a great actor. This sequel to his breakout hit The Black Dragon is in shockingly poor taste, as he and a friend are hired by a wealthy businessman to investigate the actual death of the actual Bruce Lee (at one point they hold up actual autopsy photos). But, of course, that's one of the things I love about these exploitation movies -- they either don't know or don't care where the line is and just go ahead and do whatever the fuck they want. Amazon Prime Video has a spotty track record when it comes to the transfers on some of these off-the-radar titles, but Black Dragon's Revenge looks terrific. This is one of my favorite film discoveries of the year, so I'm happy to have gotten it in just under the wire. Here's to more exploitation in 2017! (Watch on Amazon Prime Video)

A Movie I'm Thankful For: Shogun Assassin

by Patrick Bromley

For the first entry in this week-long series, I'm giving thanks for blades, blood, babies in carts and babies on my lap.

With all the darkness in the world lately, we here at F This Movie! thought it might be nice to spend the week of Thanksgiving talking about specific movies we are thankful for (and yes, I know that is grammatically incorrect but I decided that "Movies for Which We are Thankful" sounded douchey). It was a suggestion from Adam Riske, who wanted to revive a column we did back in 2010, just a few months after the site launched. I liked the idea so much that I asked all of our contributors to submit a piece, meaning we will be running these all week long. We'll get back to our regularly scheduled content next week. For now, let's give thanks.

I had a hard time choosing a movie to talk about for this series, partly because I have so many movies I'm thankful for and partly because I've already spent the last six years talking about a number of them. I landed on1980's Shogun Assassin for a number of reasons.

I've been working my way through Criterion's new box set of the original Lone Wolf and Cub movies, the series from which the Shogun Assassin films were culled. The Lone Wolf movies are great, combining the kind of epic period drama Kurosawa became famous for with the visceral thrills and bloodshed of a Shaw Brothers movie. As I went through the films, though, I kept thinking back to something I heard when I attended the Grindhouse Film Festival at Chicago's Music Box Theatre this past #Junesploitation. Festival programmer Dan Halstead held a secret 35mm screening of Shogun Assassin to close the fest out and introduced it as "the greatest movie ever made." I'm not going to say he's right, but I do think he's on to something.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Lone Wolf and Cub movies were a series of six films made in Japan in the early 1970s, based on a popular manga series and starring Tomisaburo Wakayama as Ogami Ittō, former executioner for the shogun who is framed, disgraced and forced to walk the path of a rogue assassin, and Tomikawa Akihiro as Daigoro, his infant son who he carries with him in a cart. Robert Houston -- a former actor best known for playing young Bobby in the original The Hills Have Eyes -- bought the rights to Kenji Misumi's films from Toho and edited the first two movies, Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance and Lord Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx, into a single blood-soaked epic, dubbing the dialogue into English, dropping in narration from the infant Daigoro and adding a new synthesizer score courtesy of Mark Lindsay from Paul Revere and the Raiders.

Everything about this sounds terrible on paper -- a bastardization of art that has been dumbed down for American audiences who refuse to read subtitles. And some of those things are true. Still, Shogun Assassin manages to be something most movies aren't: completely fucking awesome. It is the ultimate "remix" film, a kind of postmodern exercise that picks and chooses what it wants to retain, disregarding the rest and coming up with something that, while composed mostly of existing work, manages to create a totally different movie experience.

Shogun Assassin hacks the first two Lone Wolf and Cub films (mostly the second) down to its barest essentials, resulting in what is basically an 85-minute fight scene as Ogami encounters new adversaries every few minutes, battles them and slices them up into piles of limbs and geysers of blood. By abandoning most of the plot, Shogun just kind of drifts along from moment to moment; the editing has a dreamy, non-linear quality that is improved, not weakened, by the new voiceover from seven-year old Girban Evans, whose delivery has a flat, wistful quality reminiscent of Linda Manz in Days of Heaven. It becomes a kind of anti-narrative, the skeleton of a highlight reel with just enough bones to hold in a soul. While the Lone Wolf movies make the case that father and son are condemning themselves to Hell, it does so over the course of several films. I would argue that Shogun Assassin does a better job of making that point in just one movie, probably because the editing and amazing synth score give the whole thing a much darker feeling of constant dread.

At the most basic level, I'm thankful for Shogun Assassin because it kicks ass. I am not a violent person in the slightest, but I have been drawn to violent movies my entire life. I hate real-life violence. I love movie violence, particularly when it is exaggerated and cartoonishly bloody and as far removed from real violence as it can be. I don't know if I love horror movies and action movies because of this predisposition towards cinematic violence or if I enjoy cinematic violence because it is such a function of horror and action movies; whatever the case, Shogun Assassin is like a ballet of bloodshed that pushes my very specific buttons. While this has been a year in which I've gotten way more into martial arts movies (thank you, #Junesploitation), I've been a fan of Shogun Assassin for several years, probably for this very reason. I think it was a movie I discovered in the wake of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, a movie (or movies) that borrows a whole lot from Misumi. It's not really a traditional martial arts movie, anyway, in that the characters generally don't engage in hand-to-hand combat nor that actors display the feats of athleticism we've come to associate with the genre. It's a swordfighting movie, a revenge movie, a samurai movie told in the language and the aesthetics of a horror film.

The summer my daughter was born, I had a lot of long nights sitting up with her while she adjusted to sleeping outside the comfort of a human body. These can be dark days, and it's not really something people prepare you for when you're expecting a baby. You don't realize how much you miss sleep until you stop getting any of it -- and I say that as someone who doesn't sleep a whole lot to begin with. So to get through this time, she and I would stay up all night watching movies -- specifically Shogun Assassin and its sequels. I'm sure this makes me seem like a bad parent, but keep in mind that she was still at an age where she had no object permanence. She'd forget I existed if she wasn't looking at me, so I can't imagine anything she saw in Shogun Assassin did any lasting damage. At the same time, I like to think that maybe something stuck somewhere in her lizard brain and that she'll someday develop a love for violent martial arts movies that I can somehow take credit for, having imprinted them on her as an infant. It's been four years since that summer and I no longer remember what it was like to feel so tired I thought I would go crazy. What I remember is holding my little Rosie on my lap and watching Tomisaburo Wakayama cut a whole bunch of people the fuck up. It's a happy memory I will always have.

But maybe the biggest reason I'm thankful for Shogun Assassin -- aside from how happy it makes me and how it will always remind me of my baby girl -- is that it's a movie that helps me to redefine the lines of what a movie can be. Shock Waves host (and friend of F This Movie!) Elric Kane often refers to certain kinds of movies as "pure cinema." It has become a running joke on that podcast, but I know exactly what he's talking about. There are movies that aren't necessarily interested in telling a specific story or creating three-dimensional characters. They are images and sound, designed to invoke a direct response from the pleasure centers of our cinephile brains. Shogun Assassin is pure fucking cinema.

It doesn't necessarily subscribe to the conventional standards of what makes a great film in that it doesn't have a traditional writer and director and cast, etc., because Robert Houston took what Kenji Misumi had already done and reoriented it into something better suiting his own sensibilities. And while it may be the exception and not the rule, it is proof that new art can be created from existing art. I don't know that I'll ever decide how I fully feel about our culture of sampling and remixing -- it ultimately doesn't matter, because that's the world we live in now -- but I know that Shogun Assassin makes the case that it is possible to create two great films from the same source. While more traditional schools of thought stick to notions about how film can achieve objective artistic merit, Shogun Assassin reminds us that there aren't any rules about how a movie gets to greatness. What matters is that it's great.

The Lone Wolf and Cub movies are considered high art (I mean, it is in the Criterion Collection), while Shogun Assassin is considered "low" -- an exploitation film that played primarily the grindhouse circuit when it was released in 1980. I'm thankful that I can love them both for different reasons, even when they are ultimately not all that different. One of my very few decent qualities as both a film watcher and a film writer is that I have always been able to appreciate both kinds of movies; my tastes tend to gravitate towards the latter, but I can love Steven Seagal movies and slashers and Troma while still respecting and loving Bergman films with the rest of the cultured elite (they're about girls, right?). It's one of the things that I'm most proud of with F This Movie!, too -- we manage to talk about and foster conversation about all kinds of movies, not just the ones that receive widespread critical acclaim and not just the kinds of cult movies that are the focus of many genre-specific sites. Shogun Assassin is a perfect representation of a film that lives in both worlds. It's the kind of movie I love: stylish and dark and violent and cool. More than any Lone Wolf and Cub movie, this is the one to which I will return most often. And while she's still in the throes of a pretty major obsession with Disney princesses, I know that some day I will go into my daughter's room and find her sharpening a samurai sword, preparing for her very own roaring rampage of revenge. On that day, I'll know I have truly done my job.