Exploitation

"Exploitation films" is a blanket term for a heterogenous array of low-budget products with one key commonality: A calculated decision to emphasize shocking, lurid, politically incorrect, and/or sensationalistic elements ahead of artistic value in a bid to guarantee a quick, dependable return on investment, especially considering the ludicrously meager budgets allocated to such films. Usually these are independent productions based on screenplays that are often shaky and incoherent, and that generally wallow through the muck, using flimsy excuses and tired cliches to depict violent, horrific, grotesque, and sexually charged content.

One of the undisputed founders of exploitation films was Dwain Esper (1894-1982), who over the course of the 1930s directed a series of moralizing works with themes ranging from the prevention of venereal diseases (1932's "The Seventh Commandment") to the detrimental consequences of drug addiction (1936's "Marihuana"). In the US, the exploitation genre got another shot in the arm when drive-in movies boomed in the 1950s, and again in the late 1960s from "grindhouse" theaters, which specialized in endless B movie marathons.

Among the numerous sub-genres included in this Tag, we would cite:

• Blaxploitation: black actors appearing in (stereo)typically African American contexts or in "Black" versions of great classics of film and/or literature.
• Biker films: rowdy outlaw motorcycle gangs, rebel bikers, hotheads on two wheels - and they're on a collision course with the establishment.
• Hixploitation: killer rednecks, hillbillies, or yokels - and they're often rapists, racists, and/or deranged to boot. Most commonly they hail from the rural South or Appalachia, but any forsaken area seemingly cut off from the rest of the country will do.
• Ozploitation: Australian exploitation films.
• Dwarfsploitation: mean, nasty "little people", circus sideshow freaks with anything but wholesome intentions, men affected with bizarre deformities... Basically the be-all and end-all of bad taste!
• Women in Prison: 1) in its purest sense, WIP films are audacious stories focusing on captive women in exotic and sexual contexts. 2) Naziploitation films take place in claustrophobic World War II-era concentration camps, focusing on sadistic and/or licentious Nazis and their generally nude female prisoners. 3) Nunsploitation deals with the repressed libido of cloistered nuns in the context of (pseudo)historical convents highly reminiscent of the so-called "Decamerotic" subgenre of films set in medieval or Renaissance times (with an eroticism inspired by "The Decameron").
• But the list could extend indefinitely: Nurseploitation, Drugsploitation, Bruceploitation, Christpolitation, Namsploitation, Pinky Violence, etc.

 
P.S. Taking into consideration the aesthetics of the "exploitation" tradition, we've decided not to apply this Tag to films released after 1989.