Exploitation Movies: Bikers, Babes, And Slashers Essay, Research Paper
People inside the movie business call them exploitation movies; more recently, from the perspective of the fans, they've taken on the moniker "psychotronic" or "cult" movies. But whatever you call them, these pictures — biker movies, slasher films, prison (especially women's prison movies), and sleazy dramas — were for many years the unseen iceberg in Hollywood's motion picture output. The last great flowering of the exploitation movie took place during the early and mid 1970s: soon after the introduction of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings system, but before the arrival of home video, and before the film-budget ante was raised by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg (who did at least one picture, The Sugarland Express (1974), for which the audience included those action-film fans and drive-in patrons who make exploitation pay). At the time, Hollywood was on a blockbuster kick, making fewer but bigger pictures, but there were still lots of small theaters that hadn't a prayer of booking big-time titles like Earthquake (1974) or Midway (1976) — or which catered to audiences that didn't want them. There were never enough major mainstream films to fill the booking needs of the country's theaters, especially once they started converting to duplexes and triplexes in the mid 1970s. Theaters needed titles for their screens, and major studio production was dropping. There was still a lot of money to be made providing pictures for the bottom half of double-features and the smaller multi-screen theaters. The answer lay in exploitation movies — and, ironically enough, their marketing was aided by the MPAA ratings system, which had been intended to make it more difficult to make exploitation movies. The MPAA ratings — G, M (later changed to GP and then to PG), R, and X — were supposed to guide filmmakers and audiences in the making and choosing of films. To some extent, they did just that, influencing the major studios and filmmakers — with such notable exceptions as John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969), Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), all originally X-rated — to tone down the extremes of violence and sex, and to boast "socially redeeming significance" as a justification for any sex, profanity, and violence which did leak through. But those same ratings, and the resulting caution imposed on the major studios and distributors also created a major problem. When Hollywood stopped making films with excesses of violence, sex, and profanity, it ignored the fact that there was still an audience out there for those kinds of pictures; those people needed more than a James Bond picture every two years, or a Robert Aldrich film every 18 months, to keep them happy. Into this breach stepped the exploitation filmmakers. Exploitation filmmakers didn't care about socially redeeming significance. They very honestly (or shamelessly) cared mostly about making money and knew how to do it by making fast-moving, diverting pictures that piled lots of action and sexuality onto the screen. They were happy to exploit the less-respectable sides of life, and they did so with gusto — as long as it was profitable. No subject was too risky or sordid — desperate bikers, horny cheerleaders, black private dicks, velvet vampires, student nurses, chainsaw killers — and their stories were, at the same time, appreciated by audiences on 42nd Street or at some godforsaken rural drive-in. The hottest genre for "B"-picture producers during the late 1960s was motorcycle pictures. Almost as a belated acknowledgment of the success of the Marlon Brando-starring 1950s classic The Wild One (1954), producers began grinding out a steady stream of violent, crudely sexual, and decidedly low-budget pictures around thugs on two wheels. Not that these pictures had much to do with The Wild One — the scripts, acting, and direction in pictures such as The Sidehackers (1969, aka Five The Hard Way), The Mini-Skirt Mob (1968), or even Hell's Angels On Wheels (1967), were laughable, but they were also great fun, and their mixture of violence and unintended laughter kept a lot of people entertained in between the release of major Hollywood productions like The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Kelly's Heroes (1970). Some filmmakers even tried to mix their genres, with such delightfully dubious results as Werewolves On Wheels (1971). The other major subject that the 1960's "B"-producers exploited to the hilt was the counter-culture itself — hippies, drugs, protests. Riot On Sunset Strip (1967), The Love-Ins (1967), and Psych-Out (1968) stand out as classics of this sub-genre. (Riot actually features music and footage of that legendary late-1960s group the Chocolate Watch Band sandwiched between its story of teen rebellion, drugs, and sex.) The Hollywood studios and the MPAA had overlooked the audience for these pictures in trying to clean up movies — it wasn't the most discriminating film-going audience in the world, but they sure knew how to have a good time. Occasionally, a respected Hollywood figure might find their way into such a picture — Jane Russell, that legendary physique of the 1940s and early '50s, appeared in the biker flick The Born Losers (1967), which had the greater significance of introducing Tom Laughlin's Billy Jack screen hero, an American Indian martial-arts expert, years before the movie Billy Jack (1971) (a major exploitation-film success) parlayed soft leftist politics and politically correct violence into a mega-hit. Aldo Ray found work in the American International Pictures drug exploitation title Riot On Sunset Strip. And the late John Cassavetes, in between directing his own respected serious pictures, made money by starring as a gang leader in the '