SYSK’s Summer Movie Playlist: How Exploitation Films Work

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Speaker 3 Hey everyone, Chuck here.

Speaker 3 If you're wondering why you have suddenly 10 new episodes in your feed, it's because we thought we might group things together and try a little playlist here for the summer and see how it went.

Speaker 3 And in this case, we're covering summer movies or movies in general. And I am setting up our semi-recent episode from, oh, I guess it's not that recent.

Speaker 3 It's from April 2011 on exploitation films and how they work. It was a really fun one to do.

Speaker 3 And if you love cinema and you love movies, and if you love exploitation movies, especially, you're going to love this episode. So please enjoy.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Speaker 2 Well, Chuck, the other night, you may have noticed, I know you did because because I watched you watch this. Which is kind of creepy, but not really.

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On the Science Channel.

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Speaker 2 until, I think, the first week of May or something, right?

Speaker 3 Yes, and now they're all running between 10 and 10.30 now, supposedly.

Speaker 2 Okay.

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Speaker 3 which is an awesome and weird show. It is.
And then Sundays, it's just Firefly, which is

Speaker 2 everyone loves Firefly. Yeah, I mean, I actually consider it an honor to be played during Firefly.
Yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 Even though the cast of Firefly has no idea that this is going on because it's pre-recorded. Exactly, Josh.

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We just tacked like 10 minutes onto this episode.

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Speaker 3 Everyone that wants to watch these.

Speaker 2 Agreed. Okay.
Okay. So, are you ready? Uh-huh.
Okay. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant.

Speaker 2 This is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast, and kind of a special edition, frankly. I am a little excited, Chuck.
I'm a little giddy.

Speaker 3 Shut your mouth.

Speaker 2 That's, yeah, okay, sure. All right.

Speaker 2 This is our first ever movie-centric podcast, right?

Speaker 3 Movie-centric for sure, yeah. We've mentioned

Speaker 3 movies, of course, all the time, but this one is like this is all about movies, yeah.

Speaker 2 Um, so this is by popular request to an extent. People want to see, like, um,

Speaker 2 uh,

Speaker 2 they want to hear us talk about movies and just do a movie podcast. So, we decided to focus on exploitation films.
That's right. This is also probably the first podcast that we're going to say.

Speaker 2 If you are a teacher of children in eighth grade or younger, and you're using this as a teaching tool, you might want to go to the one before this or the one after.

Speaker 2 We don't generally try to alienate audiences. We're not attempting to now.
It's just a natural byproduct of the exploitation film.

Speaker 3 Can't talk about exploitation films without talking about some lurid subject matter.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you can't say exploitation without

Speaker 3 ploit. Yeah, they weren't exploiting just people being nice.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 Nice ploitation.

Speaker 2 So, Chuck, I went and saw a movie the other day called I Saw the Devil. It's a Korean movie.
It's It's by the guy who did

Speaker 2 The Tale of Two Sisters, I think. Oh, yeah, you said more violent than Old Boy? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Old Boy is one of the main characters. And I've seen Old Boy.
I've seen

Speaker 2 what's the other one he did, the vampire movie? Yeah. Thirst.
Something I didn't see that. I think it was pretty good.
It was okay. This one is...

Speaker 2 It's the most violent thing I've ever seen in my life. It's the most graphically violent movie I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 2 The only reason I was able to complete is because I'm like, this is a movie.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 But I walked out of it, it's so over the top. It's so gory.
It's clearly an exploitation film.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Alive and well.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but the problem is, really, if you start to look around, John Hughes' films technically are exploitation films. The Breakfast Club is technically an exploitation film.
Yeah,

Speaker 3 there was a big wave of teen exploitation films.

Speaker 2 And we'll get to that. But yeah, you're right.
So one of the broader definitions of exploitation films is basically anything that's really like over the top, that is beyond reality,

Speaker 2 or that maybe focuses on people's fears,

Speaker 2 their sexuality,

Speaker 2 and basically just kind of serves it up in a larger-than-life manner. That's one way of looking at exploitation films.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you're basically, they're exploiting some of the seedier aspects of humanity most times.

Speaker 2 Sure, like murder or sex, like weird sex, that kind of thing. Yeah, exactly.
Sex, weird sex.

Speaker 3 Teenagers rebelling against parents. Sure.

Speaker 2 That kind of thing. Like weird science.
Have you ever been to a party where a couch shot out of the chimney and into the pond? I mean, it's a pretty nice party.

Speaker 2 I don't think it's ever really happened, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 2 So that's the vast definition of exploitation. But you and I are

Speaker 2 kind of qualified to teach a cinema class at like maybe a low-level community college at this point, after the amount of research we've done in this. Sure.
And we found that academically,

Speaker 2 there's a much more distinct

Speaker 2 definition for exploitation, and it's seemingly interchangeable term grindhouse, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, what's the is there a definition, definition?

Speaker 2 It's more like a time frame. Okay.
So from like 1919, when they really first started making movies, to I think 1960, 1959, when the Hayes Act went away,

Speaker 2 that was exploitation. And then after that,

Speaker 2 it became Grindhouse. Okay.

Speaker 2 Gotcha. It's my understanding.
Okay. So let's do this.
All right.

Speaker 3 Well, that's the old joke was that in the awesome documentary American Grindhouse, which documents this era of filmmaking, the old joke, one of the guys says, is that

Speaker 3 exploitation films began five minutes after the camera was invented, the motion picture camera. Because

Speaker 2 the director is like to his girlfriend, hey, would you mind taking your clothes off for the camera? Exactly.

Speaker 3 So it says something about the human condition that you invent the film camera, and the first moving images were often lurid.

Speaker 3 Edison's film, it showed clips of like decapitations and violence and guys fighting

Speaker 3 and naked women as film tests. So it's just that says a lot about people like, all right, now we know how to capture things, so let's capture sex and violence.
Right.

Speaker 2 First. Right.
And

Speaker 2 although that really kind of jibed with public tastes or at least public fascination,

Speaker 2 it didn't jibe with the prevailing standards, the agreed upon standards, right? Right.

Speaker 3 I think you said 1919, but the first exploitation film was 1913.

Speaker 2 Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 Traffic in Souls or While New York Sleeps. Right.

Speaker 3 And that, like you said, exploitation often plays into fears. That played into the fear at the time of the white slave trade

Speaker 3 budget of 57 grand and gross $450,000, which 1913, that's a lot of dough.

Speaker 2 That is a ton of dough.

Speaker 3 And that was Universal Pictures, and they went, hey, I'm kind of on to something here. Right.

Speaker 2 After that was released, the Hayes Code, Will Hayes was the Postmaster General and a Presbyterian elder.

Speaker 2 And he was making $100,000 a year during the Depression. That's unbelievable.
Right?

Speaker 2 He basically said, like, look,

Speaker 2 we need to apply some moral standards to filmmaking. There's decapitation, there's naked breasts,

Speaker 2 there's

Speaker 2 white slavery. Like,

Speaker 2 we need to pure this up. Right.

Speaker 3 Well, actually, there wasn't nudity yet. Like, those early test films, there were, but nudity, we'll get to that later.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 But yes, that's what Hayes tried to do. And like, prohibition didn't exactly quell drinking.

Speaker 3 The Hayes Code actually sort of gave rise to the exploitation movement.

Speaker 2 Yeah. It's just like...
Just like prohibition, just like marijuana prohibition, just like, well, any drug prohibition, anytime you say, say, you can't do this, you can't have something that you want,

Speaker 2 somebody else is going to operate in a black market. A black market's going to spring up.
It's simple economics. Yeah.
And that's exactly what happened, and that's where exploitation cinema came up.

Speaker 2 It's like, you can't get this from Hollywood because Hollywood has to play by the rules, but my production studio is my Model T.

Speaker 2 And let's go make this movie. Give me some money.
I'm going to film a child being born close up and put it in the movies. Yes.

Speaker 3 And you can do that. You can make your movies all day long, but if they're never exhibited, then what good are you doing?

Speaker 3 Or not like they were trying to do some good, but you're not making any scratch.

Speaker 3 So the 40 Thieves, they talk about in the documentary, were these filmmakers and exhibitors basically that traveled around like carnies

Speaker 3 setting up these sort of guerrilla film screenings in some places sort of out of the way where they can't get caught. And that was

Speaker 3 for the first time, you know, know, they were taking films outside of the mainstream. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Sometimes they weren't even theaters. They would show them in like VFW halls.
And if you want to go see Birth of a Baby films, apparently they were popular.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was a whole genre, early genre of exploitation.

Speaker 3 Well, and so was early on a lot of the films centered around like how to wear a condom and these sex hygiene films.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because there was no information about that out there. And so exploitation filmmakers, whether

Speaker 2 disingenuously or genuinely, were presenting their stuff like this is a public service. People need to know this.
Right. And making movies about it.

Speaker 2 But also, and people were going on that excuse as well, like, well, I need to know about this. But at the same time, it's like, I want to see this, the craziest thing I'll ever see in my life.

Speaker 2 Exactly. You know, on screen.

Speaker 3 Or they argued a lot of times that they were cautionary tales. If they were about drugs or violence, they would say, hey, this could happen to you.
Yeah. So you should educate yourself.

Speaker 3 But what they really want to do is get their movie seen.

Speaker 2 And make some money.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 3 Paramount decision of 1948, this is pretty big. The Supreme Court voted that movie studios could no longer own their own movie theaters.

Speaker 3 At the time, you know, there would be like the Paramount Theater in Hollywood from the Paramount Film Production Company. Right.
They would show their movies. Right.
Supreme Court said no more.

Speaker 3 And all of a sudden, exploitation films became a little bit more legit because the Hays Code kind of fell apart. Yeah.
And this is post-World War II, so

Speaker 2 people had seen a lot of death recently. Well, a lot of death, and then

Speaker 3 they thought ladies in suggestive roles were good for morale, and there was a little bit of loosening on the sex thing

Speaker 2 a little bit post-World War II. Enough.
That led to another subgenre.

Speaker 2 of exploitation film, the nudist colony film,

Speaker 2 which were pawned off as documentaries.

Speaker 2 Well, most of these were pawned off as documentaries, which legitimized them, but really,

Speaker 2 maybe it actually was filmed at a nudist camp. Probably not.
Mostly they were actors and actresses just engaged in archery naked or long walks naked.

Speaker 3 There could be no sex still. That was still taboo.

Speaker 2 But it was just like naked, pretty people

Speaker 2 at a nudist colony, which is interesting because you're not a nudist, so come learn about them. Exactly.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 After that, through the history, we had things like the teen, like you said, the teen rebellion of the 50s with Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle and movies like that all of a sudden were targeted specifically at teens, which was new.

Speaker 3 And then drive-in theaters were built so teenagers could see movies where their parents weren't going to be. Apparently the adults didn't go to the drive-ins a lot at first.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. It was all kids.
I didn't know that.

Speaker 3 So they showed exploitation films and then later the beach films, which were marketed as, it's silly, it's Frankie Avalon, but they were decidedly weird and overtly sexual sometimes.

Speaker 2 And then, Chuck,

Speaker 2 if you'll notice,

Speaker 2 we're kind of progressing along in this

Speaker 2 chronological order, and each thing is kind of being built on the last.

Speaker 3 It was very much a step process, right?

Speaker 2 And apparently, that was kind of the form that exploitation filmmaking followed until 1960.

Speaker 2 It was just it was centered around drugs, violence, sex, and in a lot of ways they were presented as documentaries. They might not have a plot.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 basically, it was one person would make some film and it would just break all the rules, and then a bunch of other people would make similar films.

Speaker 2 And the same,

Speaker 2 that was the way it went. And then in the 1960s, things just started to go every which way, all sorts of directions, right? So nudity, nudity films were

Speaker 2 a long-standing thread of exploitation films. And then they probably reached their pinnacle with Russ Myers, right? King of the nudies is what he's called.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he was the first guy to he's significant because he was the first director to have films featuring nudity that actually were

Speaker 3 uh dramatic narratives and had plots and characters and they weren't classified as uh documentaries anymore.

Speaker 3 And then the ruffies came along and they offered up violence for the f not the first time, but uh

Speaker 3 big time for the first time right

Speaker 2 and that has a lot to do with the fact that it was the 60s and Kennedy was shot and the United States was just becoming increasingly violent America lost its innocence yeah and the other thing that really happened in the 1960s was the Hayes Code officially went away was replaced by the MPAA

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 the I guess the long-standing prohibition on Hollywood producing exploitation films was

Speaker 2 it was lessened decreased and so studios were like oh we can make money over here too well let's start making exploitation films right and this is where grindhouse is born so my uh cinema professor definition okay of grindhouse is big budget studio backed exploitation films okay okay

Speaker 3 yeah that's that's mine i like it that's going to be a quiz question later yeah i'll go with that um actually back up one second we got to mention uh herschel gordon lewis he was a director

Speaker 3 who had a co-director. I can't remember the other guy's name, do you?

Speaker 2 Uh-uh.

Speaker 3 Anyway, he was a co-director, and he was one of these exploitation guys that was getting frustrated because there weren't a lot of places to show your movie, so it was a pretty crowded marketplace.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So he said, What's the one taboo that people will pay to see that you're allowed to show in theaters, but that

Speaker 3 studios won't make? And it was Gore. Oh, yeah.
He was the first guy to start showing really disgusting, bloody scenes in his movie

Speaker 2 Blood Feast? Blood Feast.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Which actually was three years after Psycho, and Psycho also did a lot for the mainstream ushering in of

Speaker 3 a little bit of gore in that, but no, there was like

Speaker 2 a shot of blood following Janet Lee's murder. That's right.
You know, which I imagine is pretty graphic for Hollywood. Right.
And that's what you think of. You're like, oh, those stupid 60s.

Speaker 2 But that's, you know, they were so naive. Like, that was controversial.
Not really, though. Like, if you step just slightly outside of Hollywood, you ran into things like Blood Feast.
Right.

Speaker 2 Or, you know.

Speaker 3 Last House on the Left.

Speaker 2 Yes. Well, that's 1972, I think.

Speaker 3 Yeah, West Craven. So that was important because

Speaker 3 all of a sudden, A, drugs started,

Speaker 3 well, three things. Political themes started popping up.
Right. Sexual freedom, the youth generation.

Speaker 3 Drugs started popping up in movies for the first time. Drug use.
Well, not for the first time because we'll talk about Reaper Madness.

Speaker 3 But teenagers were depicted as victims of violence for the first time. Like Last House on the Left, I believe, is kind of regarded as the first teen slasher film.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 West Craven.

Speaker 2 It's it was almost a snuff film. It was almost regarded like that.
It's pretty hardcore.

Speaker 2 But yeah, it definitely Bloodfeast definitely allowed Last House on the Left to come around, but it also probably more directly s um formed the foundation for slasher exploitation like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. My Bloody Valentine's another big one.
The crazy. The crazy grace.

Speaker 2 Yeah. The crazy.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, that was an original, right? There's a remake now, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Remakes.

Speaker 3 So that brings us, we're in the 70s.

Speaker 3 Politically charged movies brought race into the mix. And all of a sudden we had black exploitation or black exploitation movement starting, exploiting the civil rights movement, basically.

Speaker 3 But the cool thing about black exploitation films is for the first time you had African Americans as heroes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and not heroes in a typical sense, not even anti-heroes, but heroes that were like, they didn't ride into town on a white horse or wearing a white hat.

Speaker 2 They very clearly wore black hats if need be. Like they would engage in crime.
They would murder people if need be.

Speaker 2 They were basically like the

Speaker 2 face of black America coming out of the civil rights era. Like, we're ticked off.
Yeah. You know?

Speaker 3 And we're going to stick it to the white man. Stick it to the man.
And we're going to do it in these movies.

Speaker 2 Chuck, I know the movie you're about to mention. Let's.

Speaker 2 This is it.

Speaker 4 You keep the faith in me. Are you my man? You my favorite man.

Speaker 4 Can you take it, baby?

Speaker 3 So, yes, that was a landmark film for a lot of reasons. One, because it grossed $4 million,

Speaker 3 and it made the major studio say, hey, you know what? The Black Hero is marketable.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, you haven't said the title yet. Oh, I didn't? No.
Okay. You got to say it right, too.

Speaker 3 Melvin Van Peebles film, Sweet Sweetback's Badass

Speaker 2 Song. Nice.
That was well done. That was 1971.
Melvin Van Peebles, whose last name may sound familiar, he's the father of Mario Van Peebles for you younger cats listening to this one.

Speaker 3 Cats are age, actually, younger cats, because he's kind of like...

Speaker 2 Okay, so Cats R.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's Mario Van Peebles' dad, you know, New Jack City. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 So Melvin Van Peebles made this movie. He produced it.
He raised the money for it. He wrote it.
He directed it. He starred in it.

Speaker 2 And it was the beginning of the black exploitation subgenre, which was one of the most important genres of any American cinema. Absolutely.
Ever. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 And so considering how important that subgenre is, this quote from Time Magazine's film critic Richard Corliss should really hit home.

Speaker 2 Sweet Sweetback is, quote, without question or competition, the most influential movie by a black filmmaker. So this is a really big deal, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, and it was just quickly on the plot. It was about a black man who was a gigolo, who had...

Speaker 2 Which is a male prostitute for you younger cats.

Speaker 3 And he had a deal worked out with the cops where he said, you know, you can arrest me as much as you want. Release me right afterward.
Fill your quota. It's all good.

Speaker 3 And then one day, while the arrest is going down,

Speaker 3 the cops attack a Black Panther and Sweet Sweetback kills one of the cops and then just says he just goes on a rampage against the white man after that. Yep.

Speaker 2 So you've got prostitution,

Speaker 2 tons and tons of nudity and sex,

Speaker 2 lots of violence,

Speaker 2 and other crimes, all wrapped up into a black power theme.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 2 And then to top it all off, you have what is arguably a child sex scene starring Mario Van Peebles, Melvin Van Peebles' son, at, I think, age six. Yeah, he's a kid.

Speaker 2 Having sex as Sweet Sweetback. It's his first sexual encounter with an older person.
Right.

Speaker 2 And in the cult podcast, if he became a cult leader, he would have taken a younger bride, remember? Oh, yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 So if you're interested in that movie and you can't get enough of Sweet Sweetback's badass song,

Speaker 2 you could also check out Badass

Speaker 2 Exclamation Point, which is Mario Van Peebles' biopic about his father making that movie.

Speaker 3 That's right. And I have not seen that, but I wanted to at the time, and it just sort of slipped through the cracks.

Speaker 2 There's always Netflix, baby. That's right.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 what happened with Sweet Sweetback was that, like I said, that told the studios, hey, that we can market this.

Speaker 3 And so they got a little more mainstream with movies like Superfly, which were a little safer. Shaft.
Shaft, movies that wide audiences would enjoy as well.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the ones that didn't scare the man. Exactly.
Like Shaft's a good guy.

Speaker 2 He doesn't take any guff from the man, but the people he's not taking guff from are the cops who he's really on the same side as. That's right.

Speaker 2 So Chuck, Black Exploitation, obviously huge. It affected everything from,

Speaker 2 you know, menace to society to Blackula. All of that came from Sweet Sweetback.

Speaker 2 And we mentioned the guy who directed this next movie, Russ Myers.

Speaker 2 This is probably a seminal work. Let's listen to this clip from the trailer.

Speaker 5 Ladies and gentlemen, go for a wild, wild ride with the Watusi Cats. But beware, the sweetest kittens have the sharpest claws.
For your own safety, see faster pussycats.

Speaker 5 Kill, kill wild women, wild wheels. Race the fastest pussycats, and they'll beat you to death.
Silverwoman, belted, buckled, and Scottish.

Speaker 5 You're wasting yourself on this kid and hanging this up for nothing. For nothing? It's got nothing to do with the money.
Here's the money. Jack and Jill, they make the mafia look like brownies.

Speaker 3 They make the mafia look like brownies.

Speaker 2 That's right. That says quite a bit about them.

Speaker 2 So this, that was Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill, in the 1965 Russ Myers,

Speaker 2 basically

Speaker 2 women exploitation film, nudie film. So remember, Russ Meyers was king of the nudies.
King of the nudies.

Speaker 2 He made 26 movies, but this is probably, at the very least, his best known, if not like his masterpiece.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and he hatched a slew of, I mean, not that he wasn't legit, he was, but what mainstream people would call legit filmmakers came up through the Russ Meyer film camp, basically.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So it's pretty cool.
Yeah, and Russ Meyer also, little known fact,

Speaker 2 another movie that's mentioned in this article. There's an article on the site, by the way, called 10 Noteworthy Exploitation Films that this is based on.
Yeah. Written by you? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Which I strongly recommend going to read because it has a lot of extra stuff we're not going to cover in this one. Yeah.
Or at least extra movies. But

Speaker 2 Russ Meyer directed a movie called Beyond the Valley of the Dolls 2. Right.
Which was the bastard son of the legitimate film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Speaker 2 It's a jiggle fest fest written by none other than Roger Ebert. That's right.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's the movie Roger Ebert ever wrote.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he had a, yeah, it was a very brief career, but that's an illustrious one, really.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so if you're going to talk about the plot of Faster Pussycat, kill, kill.

Speaker 3 And I say that because there's three exclamation points.

Speaker 2 Faster Pussycat. And a comma.
Exclamation point. Kill.
Oh, no, is it three exclamation points?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay, I thought it was a comma, then two. All right, either way, that's a lot of punctuation for a film title.
Right. And it was about three bisexual go-go dancers.

Speaker 3 They go on a crime spree out in the desert. And what do they do? They end up killing a man and a...
No, they kill the man and a couple.

Speaker 2 Keep the woman. Keep the girl.
They basically empower her. Yeah, come on with us.
By murdering her boyfriend, and she ends up on a crime spree with them.

Speaker 3 And they basically end up going to an isolated house with a wheelchair-bound old man and his sons. Who's a lech.

Speaker 2 They're all leches. They want these women.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but they don't know that these women are tough.

Speaker 2 No. Tough ladies.
And

Speaker 2 the man and his sons apparently are allegedly have a large amount of cash stashed in this house. So it's kind of like a standoff of

Speaker 2 gall to see who will come out on top.

Speaker 3 Well, and you know who comes out on top.

Speaker 3 And this film was noteworthy for one big reason was that

Speaker 3 there was a lot of dualism toward gender. So on one hand, he's exploiting these women, and apparently he got women in their first trimester of pregnancy so they were more voluptuous.

Speaker 2 Yeah, not in this film, but in his other films

Speaker 2 he would hire,

Speaker 2 I can't remember the lady's name, but the star of Faster Pussycat Kill Kill was in other Russ Meyers films. Gotcha.

Speaker 2 And he made sure that she was like well into her third, first trimester to enhance her natural bustiness. That's right.

Speaker 3 Her bosom, if you will.

Speaker 3 But the script, like I said, it was dualism because while he did that, it also empowered women because the women in his films bowed to no man. No.
They were the champs.

Speaker 3 They were heroines, really, for the first time.

Speaker 2 But they were objectified very clearly, but at the same time, if you follow the script and really look at their characters, then, yeah, they're powerful women.

Speaker 3 And this

Speaker 3 kind of kicked off a big slew of women exploitation films, sexploitation films, the women in prison movies.

Speaker 2 Yes, which

Speaker 2 sisters.

Speaker 3 Very big at the time.

Speaker 3 Women were lead actors for the first time. They were aggressors for the first time.

Speaker 3 Still nude, often while they were doing this stuff.

Speaker 2 Spawned the television show The Facts of Life.

Speaker 3 But the interesting thing is they found that these movies appealed to men and women because men would go see it for obvious reasons.

Speaker 3 Women would go see it because it was empowering and they didn't mind looking at the naked ladies because women are much more grown up than men are.

Speaker 3 But, Josh, the 70s also got a little schlocky, which in a sense was true to the exploitation model.

Speaker 3 They really went over the top. No more political statements, no more advancing of

Speaker 3 women's gender or African

Speaker 3 Americans. It just got really schlocky and outrageous at that point.

Speaker 2 Well, what happened starting in the 60s, but really took hold in the 70s, and then from that point on was exploitation cinema early on, showing a live birth, nudist camps.

Speaker 2 These were all geared toward adults.

Speaker 2 In the 60s and then later on, big time in the 70s, the audience became almost exclusively teenagers. Right.
Like those drive-in teenagers or

Speaker 2 well, teenagers anywhere, who cares?

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the audience was teenagers, and the cast started to become teenagers.

Speaker 2 So it had a little more of a bent on what teenagers were having to deal with, like bullying, like the kid in this next clip, right?

Speaker 2 Which is, I have to say, one of my favorite movies from way, way back.

Speaker 3 Here we go with Toxic Avenger. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Meet little Melvin. He's a 90-pound weakling.
Everyone hated Melvin. Yeah, I'm going to take this mop and and shove it down your throat.
They teased him. I'm going to do it with you, okay?

Speaker 6 They taunted him. They tormented him until he had a horrifying accident and fell into a vat of nuclear waste.

Speaker 6 Transforming little Melvin into a hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength.

Speaker 6 Melvin became the Toxic Avenger.

Speaker 3 So, Josh, the Toxic Avenger movie was unique in that its film production company, Troma,

Speaker 3 is very popular in their own right.

Speaker 2 Have you ever seen Surf Nazis Must Die?

Speaker 3 I haven't, but I know about Troma. I mean, they are master self-promoters and marketeers.

Speaker 2 They were one of the first production companies to have a website,

Speaker 2 like a really comprehensive website. You should go on their website.

Speaker 2 Their whole catalog is

Speaker 2 really just well done.

Speaker 2 It's schlocky, but it's well done.

Speaker 3 Right. And Toxic Avenger follows the story of a 98-pound weakling who was picked on, released the same year as Ghostbusters.
Did you notice that? 1984, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it was it occurred at zero year.

Speaker 2 Year zero. Yeah.

Speaker 3 We'll just put the null set to represent that. And this kid gets pushed out of a window into a vat of toxic sludge.

Speaker 2 Which that's beyond bullying, really.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, that this basically it's a more twisted version of Modern Problems, the Chevy Chase film from a couple of years earlier.

Speaker 2 Okay. I haven't seen that one.

Speaker 3 Oh, you never saw Modern Problems? No. It's very silly.
But he got toxic sludge dumped on him and had special powers.

Speaker 2 From years earlier or prior? Or after?

Speaker 3 When was the movie? Yeah. It was two years before Toxic Avenger.
But Toxic Avenger took it into a gore special effects way that Modern Problems never did.

Speaker 2 So the janitor Melvin, I believe his name is,

Speaker 2 becomes toxified. He becomes Toxie, the Toxic Avenger, who beats the tar out of people at the health club where he was abused and mutated.

Speaker 2 And has tons of sex as the Toxic Avenger because his

Speaker 2 newfound manhood is just irresistible to women. And one of the things that's noteworthy about the Toxic Avenger is that they actually tried to make decent effects.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It wasn't just, it wasn't horrible, I guess you could say.

Speaker 3 Well, for the time, you know, it wasn't bad.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 they remain bad, and they probably were kind of bad even back then, but for

Speaker 2 Grindhouse films,

Speaker 2 they were great. Right.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it was also noteworthy because it came out of Troma Productions or Troma Studios.

Speaker 2 And it led to a whole line of Toxic Avenger movies and schlock in general, which is basically like some crazy, horrible thing has happened, but we're not going to dwell too much on that.

Speaker 2 Let's see where the action takes us. Yeah, exactly.
So like Bad Taste,

Speaker 2 Peter Jackson's first film is a great example of schlock that came out of Toxic Avenger.

Speaker 3 And he had the film that followed Peter Jackson, Dead Alive, which was at one point supposedly the goriest film ever made. Really?

Speaker 2 Although it sounds like your New Korean movie has surpassed that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think it probably has. I haven't seen Dead Alive.
I've seen Bad Taste. And Bad Taste was horribly gory, but I think this has a beat.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but I bet you if anything, I mean, I haven't seen the one you're talking about, but is it more realistic gore?

Speaker 2 Yeah, with bad

Speaker 2 things. It's like these are aliens that are having their heads blown off, so it definitely takes you at least

Speaker 2 a degree away from caring. Right.
This is happening to human beings in

Speaker 2 I Saw the Devil. So it definitely is driven home a little more.

Speaker 3 Well, and the violence, even the gore back then, it was so over the top, right out of Fangora magazine. It's like, you know.

Speaker 2 Dude, Fangoria is still around. Is it? Yeah.
I figured it was. I'm glad it is.
We follow it on our Twitter feed. Oh, we do? Yep.

Speaker 3 Like a head'll explode in scanners. And, you know, it's not disturbing because it's so clearly over the top, but these new movies are much more disturbing, if you ask me.

Speaker 2 I agree wholeheartedly because they're more realistic. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, carrying on with Chuck's and My Siskel and Eber act,

Speaker 2 this is the

Speaker 2 second to last movie in our little list today.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 this one's from way back from the 30s. So let's talk about Reefer Madness.

Speaker 4 These high school boys and girls are having a hop at the local soda fountain. Innocently they dance.

Speaker 4 Innocent of a new and deadly menace lurking behind closed doors.

Speaker 4 Marijuana, the burning weed with its roots in hell.

Speaker 4 Or watch case. If you want a good smoke, try one of these.

Speaker 4 You will meet Bill, who once took pride in his strong will as he takes the first step toward enslavement.

Speaker 3 So that was the Excellent Reefer Madness, which was an exploitation, a drug exploitation film and very much a cautionary tale. It even shaped the drug culture and how

Speaker 3 people looked at drugs as, you know, marijuana at the time is this really evil thing that can make you crazy and kill people.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and actually, in very much the vein of early exploitation films, it was produced and distributed as a

Speaker 2 public service.

Speaker 2 The alternate title for it was Tell Your Children. And the whole thing's set in a PTA meeting where this guy is relating the story.

Speaker 2 And it's a story about lost lives, about murder, about

Speaker 2 guilt and paranoia, and all of it is fed and based on rampant drug use, which is really just a lot of pot smoking, which can turn you into into a fiend. And

Speaker 2 it's apparently the director, his name is Dwayne Esper. He did other exploitation films from the 30s, like Sex Madness, Psychotic Connections.

Speaker 2 And he made a name for himself basically taking these things that may have originally been written as a public service

Speaker 2 and making them so outlandish that he exploited the people who were making these movies

Speaker 2 and created this legacy of like just insanely over-the-top exploitation films from the 30s.

Speaker 3 Well, and ironically, Reefer Madness years later would become

Speaker 3 not so much an anti-drug propaganda film, how should I say this, but a film that college students would sit around and watch while partaking and laughing at this whole thing. Yeah.
And a cult film.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because it puts drugs so far out there that

Speaker 2 if you, despite all the warnings, take drugs anyway, and you realize that you don't turn into a fiend and murder somebody um

Speaker 2 you uh

Speaker 2 reefer madness basically dares you to go further so it's kind of an it's the opposite it has the opposite effect of what i think its original intent was before dwayne usper got his hands on it and as a side note uh i had trouble deciding between reefer madness and another 1930s film by a guy named todd browning called freaks oh yeah well that was um that was huge because it was the first big exploitation film pre-Haze Code.

Speaker 3 And last. Yeah.

Speaker 2 First and last. And it was an MGM film.
Yeah. And it's widely considered a masterpiece.
Yeah, I mean, it looks great.

Speaker 3 It was well done.

Speaker 2 It's a huge,

Speaker 2 it's a revenge movie, which is a very common theme in exploitation films. Yeah.
Especially violent ones. But it featured, Browning dared to have real freaks, I guess if you'll

Speaker 3 circus sideshow freaks,

Speaker 2 star in this.

Speaker 2 And they basically exact their their revenge on people who've mistreated them.

Speaker 2 And I have not seen it. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah.
I want to. I hear it's just awesome.
I can't wait.

Speaker 3 It ended his career, though, unfortunately.

Speaker 2 Didn't it really? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And he was a popular filmmaker at the time.

Speaker 2 Well, hats off to him for

Speaker 2 staying true to his art. Chuck just took his hat off.
Don the old cap.

Speaker 2 All right, Chuck, here's the last one that we've got a clip for, which I think everybody will notice or recognize without even a word.

Speaker 2 There's not even a word in this clip, and you all understand what's going on. So here we go.

Speaker 3 So Josh, those are the unmistakable sounds of Fist of Fury of Mr. one, Mr.
Bruce Lee.

Speaker 2 Bruce Lee Kicking Bottom.

Speaker 3 His first movie.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which was originally titled, well, it's still titled, I think, in Asia, The Big Boss.

Speaker 2 And in America,

Speaker 2 it's titled Fists of Fury.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was on the other night on cable. I saw part of it.
Oh, yeah? Yeah, I didn't realize it was his first one, though. I would have tuned in.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it was the first of what, five. Five major films.
Right. And basically it's the story of a martial arts student who's investigating the murder of his teacher and

Speaker 2 it began

Speaker 2 the martial arts exploitation subgenre.

Speaker 3 Which later would become just martial arts films, right? Or was it still considered exploitation?

Speaker 2 It's all the same. Okay.
They're one and the same. Anything that even remotely resembles a Bruce Lee movie, specifically the big boss, or any of them, is martial arts exploitation technically.

Speaker 2 Because, again, we arrive at that one definition. It's over the top.
Like Bruce Lee's taking on scores of anonymous thugs

Speaker 2 for two hours. One after the other, for two hours, just beating the tar out of all these people without tiring, really.

Speaker 2 Everybody's kind of waiting their turn politely in a circle around him, and he has to beat everybody.

Speaker 2 And then he works his way up, and it's over the top. So it is exploitation, but it led to other films like Samurai Exploitation.
Remember American Ninja?

Speaker 2 Remember the whole ninja film thing that came out in the mid-80s? Uh-huh. That's from Bruce Lee's.

Speaker 2 That's Bruce Lee's doing.

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, and you go to these, at the time when I was first going to New York many years ago, there would be, you know, you go to Times Square, and this is still when Times Square was kind of gross, and there would be just the martial arts movie store where it was all that stuff, man, like thousands of movies about ninjas and samurais and martial artists, and very big.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I was inspired by American Ninja to become a ninja.
Remember, I entered a ninja training with Tommy Roper,

Speaker 2 who had like more throwing stars than any kid I've ever known.

Speaker 3 What did you have, like, one throwing star?

Speaker 2 I borrowed his. Okay.
I was not allowed to have throwing stars of my own.

Speaker 3 Oh, I wasn't either. Yeah.
Baptist, no.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 3 That was very violent.

Speaker 2 No nun-chucks. I think that even

Speaker 2 that transcends like religious background. It's like if you're a good parent, you shouldn't let your kid have throwing stars.

Speaker 3 That's a good point.

Speaker 3 And as you pointed out in the article, this actually led to another sub-genre, which was Bruce Lee look-alike movies.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so he made five movies,

Speaker 2 and then died died at age 32

Speaker 2 in 1973. So Big Boss released in 1971.
He dies two years later. Everybody's like, no!

Speaker 2 So let's find some guys that look like him, which is really kind of stereotypical and racist for the West.

Speaker 3 What's the name of Bruce Lee?

Speaker 2 L-I or L-E-E. Or L-E.
Or just L-E. Well, Bruce L-I or Bruce L.
E.

Speaker 2 I don't think there was ever like Bruce L-E-I-G-H. I don't think it ever got that far.
But, I mean, they released dozens of Bruce Lee, and I just made air quote, films. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So Bruce Lee created the martial arts exploitation genre and subgenre. And he inadvertently created the Bruce Lee exploitation subgenre of the martial arts exploitation subgenre.

Speaker 3 By dying young.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And being very popular.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And which one was the one he had Kareem Attil Jabbar in? Was that Enter the Dragon? Enter the Dragon.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 If you've never seen a seven-foot-plus guy do martial arts, you should check that out.

Speaker 2 And if you can't get enough, Bruce Lee, and you have

Speaker 2 a good sense of humor, check out Kentucky Fry Movie made by one Jerry Zuckerberg,

Speaker 2 who we met in Los Angeles recently,

Speaker 2 and who used an expletive to me. He did.
It was one of the high points of my life. It is.
But yeah, Kentucky Fry movie, awesome.

Speaker 3 Actually, when we met Jerry Zucker, we told him that our little speech we were given that night was one of the highlights of our career thus far.

Speaker 3 And he says, well, that doesn't say much about your career, does it?

Speaker 2 Like the first thing the dude did is say something funny. And we just, like, kind of fawned over him after that.

Speaker 3 We should mention briefly, and it's in the article, but just as a teaser, the late 70s, we got Nazi exploitation movies.

Speaker 2 Nazi exploitation.

Speaker 3 As a sub-genre. Yeah.
And one of the major players there, movie-wise, was Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which led to Ilsa

Speaker 2 Siberian Tigress and Ilsa Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks. Really? There's a whole sex violence franchise, Dominatrix franchise, that was based out of the Nazi exploitation film.

Speaker 3 You know, one could argue that QT, Mr. Tarantino, has made nothing but exploitation films since pulp fiction.

Speaker 3 Because the Kill Bills were definitely martial arts exploitation. Definitely.

Speaker 3 Jackie Brown was a riff on

Speaker 3 black exploitation.

Speaker 3 Deathproof, obviously. That was what they were trying to do there.

Speaker 2 Deathproof is car exploitation, which follows in the tradition of Vanishing Point,

Speaker 2 which was released the same year as basically its rival to the

Speaker 2 founder, the founding movie of Car Exploitation, Tulane Blacktop. Right.

Speaker 2 Yeah. If you want to start an argument with an exploitation film buff, tell them Vanishing Point was the beginning of Car Exploitation.
They'll get mad at you.

Speaker 3 And then finally, Tarantino with the Inglorious Bastards, which was clearly a riff on the Nazi exploitation films. Yeah.
Beating Nazis to death with a baseball bat.

Speaker 3 It's about as over-the-top and lurid as it gets.

Speaker 2 That's awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 and then Machete. I hated it, but Robert Rodriguez.

Speaker 2 It was terrible.

Speaker 3 And of course, he was the other half of the Rodriguez was the other half with his Planet Terror of the Grindhouse double feature.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay. And Machete was born from one of the little fake trailers they made in that movie.
Oh, is that right? Yeah, it was one of the fake movie previews.

Speaker 2 It is, even as far as like a purposefully be movie. Not good.
No.

Speaker 3 Well, Deathproof was okay, but I didn't like Planet Terror that much.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then Chuck. Well, first of all, before we get to today, we also have to give a shout-out to Pornos.

Speaker 2 Porno came out of the exploitation film genre.

Speaker 3 And it arguably had a lot to do with killing the ex or pushing it into the mainstream. Because once you had the movie Deep Throat and all of a sudden a pornography was on the screen,

Speaker 3 it's like you can't do an exploitation film about it anymore. If there's the real deal going on, it loses all its power.

Speaker 3 And then a little movie called Jaws came along, and all of a sudden, a quote-unquote B-movie-style B-movie-style movie made gobs and gobs of money.

Speaker 3 And that put a little bit of mainstream respectability on the map all of a sudden. And so one might argue, Josh, that

Speaker 3 movies like Jaws and pornography kind of shoved exploitation films, even though they still exist. They're sort of mainstream movies now.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah. I guess another word for grindhouse these days is blockbuster.
Jaws was the first blockbuster movie, summer blockbuster.

Speaker 2 And now you have to have summer blockbusters, and they're always over the top and exploitive of viewers' tastes.

Speaker 3 And not only Tarantino, there's other filmmakers out that are trying to capture that 70s vibe with overt exploitation films again. Shot that way, shot on

Speaker 3 35, or I'm sorry, 16 millimeter film, stuff like that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So,

Speaker 2 Chuck, I say our message to everybody is, number one, go onto the site, read 10 noteworthy exploitation films.

Speaker 2 Number two, if that interests you, like even the 10 noteworthy exploitation films I chose don't cover even, I think, a third of the exploitation subgenres.

Speaker 2 So there'll probably be another article forthcoming at some point. If there is, we'll let you know.
And then go watch some exploitation movies and enjoy them.

Speaker 3 Yeah, watch the documentary American Grindhouse too if you're into that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a great one. It's free on Hulu, actually.
There's ads, but Hulu.com has American Grindhouse for free. It is not safe for for work.
No. In no way, shape, or form.

Speaker 2 I was watching it at work, and I was like, whoa, okay. Oh, really? Yeah.
If you are watching it at work, tabbed browsing is what you want to be doing. Right.

Speaker 2 And keep your finger over the mouse and keep the cursor over the other tab, right?

Speaker 3 And stay sharp. Or in our case, you can just say, it's research.
But you can't do that if you're an accountant and JPMorgan.

Speaker 2 You're just a sicko, a weirdo. That's right.
That weird guy in accounting.

Speaker 2 So look up 10 noteworthy exploitation films. You can type that into the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com.
And now, at long last, it's time for listener mail.

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Speaker 3 Dear guys, I'm a longtime fan from Minnesota and enjoy spreading stuff you should know goodness wherever I go. My coworkers at a local coffee shop know me for the trivia and information I abound in.

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He met him at camp. That's right, fan camp.

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That'd be very cool.

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One word.

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That's plus 10. That's true.

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Speaker 2 And then you can always send us a good old-fashioned email. We want to know what your favorite exploitation film of all time is.

Speaker 2 You can send that in an email to stuffpodcast at houstuffworks.com.

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