i would not say COBRA and SMOKIN’ ACES where modern gindhouse flicks either. For one cobra is from the 80s along with a few more up there, i would only consider modern late 90s-2000s.
Yeah, I have to go into detail with it one day. But everything about it is over the top. It’s got the Blaxploitation element (going against the Klan), the over the top action, car chases… I have to do a big thesis type for it one day.
What I will say in the meantime is when the major studios noticed the kind of money cheap low budget exploitation films could draw in they decided to make their own with bigger budgets. Roger Corman commented about this during his Directors series episode. He added that when JAWS came out a newspaper critic called it a Roger Corman movie with a budget. And Corman wholeheartedly agreed.
Directors on reelz channel?
In an interview with Joe Carnahan, which I’ll find and post when I get back from seeing Danny Boyle’s SUNSHINE, Joe Carnahan said that after the problems he had when he was in the middle of prep on M:I 3 and leaving the production, that to get the juices flowing again he had to do something crazy… he had to make an exploitation film. And SMOKIN’ ACES was born.
Yes, Roger Corman’s episode of The Directors on reelz channel.
I’ll try to do some reviews but I’m kind of bad at writing reviews but i’ll give it a shot.
I just got back from seeing SUNSHINE. I gotta see that movie at least two more times. And I gotta say it was great to see Michelle Yeoh in a movie again. I haven’t seen her since CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN TIGER and I really missed her.
I just wanted to clarify something before I continue. I am not calling the examples above grindhouse movies. I’m calling them exploitation films. Grindhouses were the theaters that (mostly) exploitation films played in until the early 80s, when they were closed down and forgotten. The movie GRINDHOUSE brought the experience of watching an exploitation double feature in a grindhouse back. Although grindhouses bit the dust, exploitation films continued to flourish, as long as there was a market for them, and there was. By this time they played mainly in drive-ins or smaller theaters that didn’t grind them out 24/7 like the grindhouses did; until the multiplex movement just crammed every type of film together in one place.
Exploitation films are B-films with exploitable elements, a direction the B-movie went through in the 60s.
<LINK_TEXT text=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-movie#Th … .29:_1960s”>B movie - Wikipedia</LINK_TEXT>
Roger Corman’s New World Pictures was an exploitation film studio, as was Golan and Globus’s Cannon Films in the 80s, and Bob Shaye’s New Line Cinema back in the day. (I’m leaving out a lot. You can delve through the whole history of the exploitation film as an offshoot of the B movie here:
B movie - Wikipedia
Once the big studios saw the profit that could be made from these types of films, they made their own. Some were low budget, but once the concept of the blockbuster was adopted, studios tended to make exploitative films with exceedingly higher budgets. They also ended up distributing independently produced pictures.
Exploitation film - Wikipedia
Okay, now for the nitty gritty:
I found this article. It’s from the LA Times, printed on January 8 this year. The piece describes the glut of films coming out this year directly influenced by the exploitation films of the 70s.
Back to exploitation, for the sheer fun of it
By Mark Olsen, Special to The Times
January 8, 2007
Psychotic baby-sitters, a mobbed-up magician, a kung fu-crazed preteen boy and one nymphomaniac — these are just a few of the beyond-the-pale characters coming to theaters this year in a trio of movies that openly (and gleefully) pay homage to the lowbrow “exploitation” films of the 1960s and ‘70s.
"Smokin’ Aces," “Grindhouse” and “Black Snake Moan” all promise to be pure, outrageous pulp as they draw energy and inspiration from the kind of down-and-dirty movies that have thrived, in their own ways, outside the orbit of mainstream Hollywood.
It’s no accident that these directors are all in their 30s and 40s, putting their influences to work by picking up the anything-goes aesthetic that was the hallmark of such cult favorites as “Mudhoney,” “The Last House on the Left,” “Bone” and "The Candy Snatchers."
They saw these films in their formative years and are now looking to push the envelope even further for a new generation whose sensibility has already been subject to the coarsening effects of “Girls Gone Wild,” the Ultimate Fighting world, and Grand Theft Auto.
“It does represent some sort of paradigm shift in how we view the things that influence us,” says writer-director Joe Carnahan, whose “Smokin’ Aces” hits theaters this month, "without the reductive thinking of ‘That’s just trash.’ "
At the beginning of the teaser trailer for “Grindhouse,” written and directed by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, a card defines the title as “a theater playing back to back films exploiting sex, violence and other extreme subject matter,” giving some sense of the outlaw, boundary-pushing aesthetics that follow.
Opening April 6, it is perhaps the most direct homage to exploitation films, down to replicating the grubby, washed-out colors of a faded film print, for little reason besides the sheer fun of it.
“Grindhouse” is a self-styled double feature with each filmmaker directing his own section — Rodriguez the zombie-fighting “Planet Terror” and Tarantino the killer-with-car “Death Proof.” The two push the exploitation aesthetic into truly surreal realms — actress Rose McGowan plays a stripper who is outfitted with a machine gun for a prosthetic leg — yet strive to make the world of the film seem legitimate on its own terms. To link the sections, they’ve also cooked up trailers for fake films, such as “Machete,” during which the announcer booms, "He gets the women and he kills the bad guys!“
Over-the-top doesn’t quite convey the near-hysterics of the sensibility at work.
“Smokin’ Aces,” which opens Jan. 26, involves competing hit men (and women) all converging on a Lake Tahoe casino to collect the bounty on magician-turned-mobster Buddy “Aces” Israel.
Carnahan’s previous work, 2002’s “Narc,” was consciously done in the style of early ‘70s films such as “The French Connection.” After that, Carnahan was attached to direct “Mission: Impossible III,” although he left the project. He says the frustration of putting so much effort into something that did not come to fruition had a direct effect on the high-energy, thrill-hungry style of "Smokin’ Aces.”
“I wanted to do something that was so my own,” he said, "the darkest parts of my humor, the most aggressively visceral action. I just wanted to punch people in the chest. I wanted to feel the air in my lungs and really go.“
Showing off the breadth of Carnahan’s influences, each team of assassins seemingly comes from a different genre — blaxploitation, gangster, gritty cop, post-apocalyptic madness — and there is a frenzied feel to the film as it constantly shifts styles. Carnahan culls from influences as wildly divergent as the Coen brothers and Sam Peckinpah, and no genre is off-limits.
“I made this thesis early that whatever character is occupying the frame,” Carnahan says, “I’m going to let that personality dictate the way I shoot it. What you run into is it goes from this really outlandish over-the-top cartoon violence to these really desperate moments.”
“Black Snake Moan,” which opens Feb. 23 after its premiere at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, is writer and director Craig Brewer’s follow-up to “Hustle & Flow.” That film drew from the '70s blaxploitation genre to tell the story of a Memphis pimp who wanted more out of life. With “Moan,” Brewer dips into a strain of race-baiting exploitation films, purposely pushing the limits of already loaded imagery.
This time, Brewer draws out the existential blankness of his exploitation predecessors to craft a raw fable of redemption, suffused with the spooky, unadorned feel of the rural folk blues that is part of its milieu. A young woman with a compulsive sexual appetite (Christina Ricci) is taken in by a blues musician-turned-farmer (Samuel L. Jackson) looking to exorcise some demons of his own.
Throughout, Brewer teases the audience with startling imagery of sex, salvation and the South — Ricci spends a good chunk of the movie chained to a radiator wearing only a tiny pair of white underpants and a gray T-shirt with intertwining Confederate and U.S. flags.
Drawing from the daringly louche iconography of such predecessors as " 'Gator Bait,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Baby Doll,” Brewer purposefully flirts with and then unsettles the audience. He knows full well that viewers may be filled with conflicting feelings of stimulation and distress.
"I know everybody’s going to get excited … over ‘Black Snake Moan,’ " he says, "but in the end, it’s a father-daughter movie."
For all its dark and sinister blues symbology, the story is kept balanced with a playful sense of fun.
“We’re in an age now where that kind of titillation is all around us,” Brewer says of his film’s sexually charged imagery, "but when you start doing anything that’s remotely serious with a touch of camp, then you’re somehow disrespecting the seriousness. And I can’t disagree with that more."
Whether they are blowing off steam, pushing deep-seated societal buttons or just palling around, these filmmakers seem to be connected by a palpable sense that they are getting away with something — perhaps using the resources of major media conglomerates to create movies that are somewhere between touched and bonkers.
“I’ll never forget this moment,” Brewer says of the “Black Snake Moan” shoot. “It was the first shot Christina had with the white cotton panties, gray shirt and the chain. And God bless this girl, she insisted. That’s a heavy chain. She had to do this shot where she runs towards us” and is violently dropped to the ground when the chain comes to an end.
"All the producers were there, and all of my crew…. I’ll just never forget the silence that came over the crew. And we were all thinking the same thing, ‘Are we really making this movie?’ "
I haven’t scratched the service on this subject. I promise I’ll get to more info on this stuff. I promise to do a writeup on BAD BOYS II and its exploitativeness. I realize Michael Bay isn’t the most popular director on the internet, and I understand if I’m in the minority being a fan of his work.
[quote=“moviemike”]
Well, you could always have sections or multiple pages, each for a specific era of exploitation.
The exploitation films of the modern era, films like:
10 TO MIDNIGHT
2001 MANIACS
BAD BOYS II
THE BEASTMASTER
THE BIG HIT
COBRA
COMMANDO
C.H.U.D.
CABIN FEVER
BLACK SNAKE MOAN
BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR
CHAOS
CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT
SHOWGIRLS
SMOKIN’ ACES
HOSTEL
HOSTEL: PART II
HUSTLE & FLOW
DOMINO
KILL BILL (HAD TO)
GRINDHOUSE (WELL, HAD TO)
FROM DUSK TILL DAWN
HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES
THE DEVIL’S REJECTS
DEAD ALIVE
MEET THE FEEBLES
Just off the top of my head right now. I can list more.
[/quote]
Well, this isnt going to be covering the modern takes on exploitation cinema. This is just the real stuff from the Grindhouse era. Mainly just the 60s-early 80s.
If you wanted to write an article about post modern exploitation cinema, that would be great. We need as much info as possible.
I read that article regarding Joe Carnahan last year and for some reason it rubbed me the wrong way. It came out right around the time Tarantino was doing Grindhouse and it seemed like Carny was trying to jump on the exploitation film bandwagon to make himself look like hes Tarantino Jr or something. I think he even dissed QT in one line. As much as I like QTs work. I hate when other directors copy him or try to look like theyre as schooled in exploitation cinema as he is. Cuz they just arent. Its a big turn off. Carnahan isnt Tarantino, neither is Guy Ritchie or Chris McQuarrie or any of those guys.
However I do think Rob Zombie and Craig Brewer know their shit. They seem to really be genuine grindhouse cinema fans.
[quote=“Pete (Back For More Fun)”]
However I do think Rob Zombie and Craig Brewer know their shit. They seem to really be genuine grindhouse cinema fans.
[/quote]
If Devils Rejects isnt a modern day exploitation movie than I dont know what is.
Pete when is the site gonna be rolling? I’m gonna try to do a few reviews.
me: should be in early september hopefully. I gotta talk to Seb about it, hes helping me set it up.
Nowhere in that article that Joe Carnahan diss Quentin in any way.
Actually I don’t see how anyone’s trying to jump on a bandwagon here. Just because Quentin shines the light on a particular genre doesn’t make it off limits.
I never had a problem with many of the so-called Tarantinoesque films either.
When it comes to ripoff movies, I’m right there too. If it’s a good ripoff. Quentin’s the exact same way. He loves Hitchcock ripoff movies more than he loves Hitchcock movies. He loves Van Sant’s PSYCHO remake more than he likes Hitchcock’s PSYCHO! How about that? He considers the remake to be more “real.” I told him when I met him that there were only two things I ever disagreed with him about. One was Van Sant’s PSYCHO, which I love, but not better than Hitchcock’s. It’s more like the Hitchcock version had just made a stop into TWIN PEAKS world. And the other was TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES. Ugh, that movie’s just dreadful. Quentin loved it. I don’t know just how much he loved it anymore. I don’t wanna toot my own horn or nothin’, but after our discussion on T3, I never heard him singing the praises of T3 anymore.
Grindhouse Gang
Quentin Tarantino summons the masters to historic summit
By SCOTT FOUNDAS
Wednesday, April 4, 2007 - 7:00 pm
The following interviews were conducted on the evening of March 31. Sadly, as this story was going to press, it was reported that Bob Clark was killed in a head-on car crash on Pacific Coast Highway in the early-morning hours of April 4. His son Ariel, a passenger in the car, was also pronounced dead at the scene.
It was during a typically long and muggy Florida summer that I first wandered into the dimly lit recesses of a local video store and plucked from its dusty shelves the movies of the Australian suspense maestro Richard Franklin, including his 1978 Patrick, with its comatose yet telekinetic title character. In short order, I would similarly discover the work of the American urban-terror specialist William Lustig (of Maniac and Maniac Cop fame), and that of the Italian splatter king Lucio Fulci (New York Ripper, Don’t Torture a Duckling) — my fondness deepening, with each successive trip to the rental counter, for the golden age of grindhouse cinema. It was only later that I came to realize how thoroughly VHS and cable had cannibalized the theatrical exploitation market, so that by the time I made it to New York and Los Angeles in the 1990s, the decaying movie palaces along 42nd Street and Hollywood Boulevard that once served up exploitation movies by the pound had shuttered or been converted into more traditional places of worship (those with altars in place of screens). Low-budget horror and action quickies were now being manufactured almost exclusively for the home-video market. Per Norma Desmond’s prophetic words, the pictures really had gotten smaller.
Among contemporary filmmakers, none harbor greater affection for (or have been more influenced by) this bygone era than Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, whose Grindhouse offers a vintage double-header (complete with ersatz trailers and print damage) of cheap thrills and gory chills, starting with Rodriguez’s eco-horror zombie movie Planet Terror and concluding with Tarantino’s edge-of-your-(car)seat thrill ride Death Proof. Yet, when I proposed to these two nostalgia junkies that, in lieu of a conventional interview, we might organize a kind of roundtable with a few favorite grindhouse veterans, little did I imagine the historic meeting — or, to quote Tarantino, summit — that was about to transpire. Only too happy to answer our call were Richard Rush, who began his career with the classic biker movies The Savage Seven and Hell’s Angels on Wheels; Bob Clark, who directed the 1970s creep-outs Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and Black Christmas before going on to create the Porky’s franchise; and the British-born Brian Trenchard-Smith, whose résumé ranges from directing Steve Railsback in the cult classic Escape 2000 to latter-day entries in the Leprechaun and Omega Code franchises. Joining them would be three alumni of the Roger Corman dream factory: Allan Arkush (Hollywood Boulevard, Rock ’n’ Roll High School), George Armitage (Private Duty Nurses, Vigilante Force) and Lewis Teague (The Lady in Red, Alligator).
Like the great B-movie directors of the 1950s before them (and Tarantino and Rodriguez afterward), these industrious auteurs often bridged the gap — or muddied the waters — between grindhouse and art house, with Rush going on to receive an Oscar nomination for his direction of The Stunt Man, while Clark helmed the elegant Sherlock Holmes–meets–Jack the Ripper thriller Murder by Decree and that holiday classic known as A Christmas Story. Some, like Teague, graduated to studio tent-pole fare (The Jewel of the Nile), while others, like Arkush, settled into careers in network television. The elusive Armitage emerged in the 1990s from a decadelong hiatus to deliver two memorable slices of modern pulp fiction: Miami Blues and Grosse Pointe Blank. The recent work of Trenchard-Smith, perhaps the most unpredictable of the lot, includes the 9/11-themed Showtime docudrama Time of Crisis and two films (Tides of War, In Her Line of Fire) in the burgeoning subgenre (who knew?) of gay-themed action movies.
As we convened over dinner on the night following Grindhouse’s first press screening, the admiration flowed freely between the masters and their disciples, while the conversation (particularly when Tarantino himself held forth — which was often — with his exhaustive inventory of B-movie arcana) encompassed such obscure objects of cinephilic desire as the forgotten low-budget master William Witney, the Filipino action director Cirio H. Santiago and the sexploitation actress Candice Rialson. Above all, the discussion offered a reminder that, for the filmmmakers present, no matter where their careers have taken them, their hearts will always belong to the grindhouse. What follows are highlights culled from that evening, with the caveat that, per Tarantino’s own sage advice, I have elected to keep some of the magicians’ secrets just so.
QUENTIN TARANTINO: I want you to know, Lewis, that I cast Robert Forster in Jackie Brown because of his performance in Alligator.
LEWIS TEAGUE: Oh, he was great in that. Did you see him in The Lady in Red also?
TARANTINO: Of course, I saw him in The Lady in Red! I even have a story about that. Not knowing anything about them, I went to see every New World picture on opening weekend. A New World picture with Pamela Sue Martin, Robert Conrad and tommy guns? I’m there! I go to see the movie, and I’m watching it and watching it, and eventually Robert Forster shows up. Robert Forster? I thought it was Robert Conrad. Did I read it wrong? So — and I’ve never done this before — I actually got up out of my seat and walked outside of the theater to look at the poster. Nope, it’s Robert Conrad. He just hasn’t shown up yet!
TEAGUE: Forster wouldn’t take credit. Working for Roger Corman, I’d done second unit on a movie called Avalanche that he was in…
TARANTINO: Corey Allen directed that.
TEAGUE: …and I got to direct a whole scene with him on a rifle platform. I had a great time and I said, “If I ever direct a movie, I want you to be in it,â€
TARANTINO:The Black Hole.
TEAGUE: Right. I called him and he asked me, “What part do you want me to play?â€
TEAGUE: Did you ever meet him?
TARANTINO: No. He knew of my enthusiasm. When I wrote that New York Times piece, he was still alive, though he had suffered a stroke and was a little out of it. But he could hear, and his family told him I’d been bringing his name up. What was great was that, after that New York Times article, different film critics said to me, “You got us. You beat us at our own game. We didn’t know who William Witney was, and you made us look at his shit.â€
[quote=“moviemike”]
Nowhere in that article that Joe Carnahan diss Quentin in any way.
Actually I don’t see how anyone’s trying to jump on a bandwagon here. Just because Quentin shines the light on a particular genre doesn’t make it off limits.
I never had a problem with many of the so-called Tarantinoesque films either.
When it comes to ripoff movies, I’m right there too. If it’s a good ripoff. Quentin’s the exact same way. He loves Hitchcock ripoff movies more than he loves Hitchcock movies. He loves Van Sant’s PSYCHO remake more than he likes Hitchcock’s PSYCHO! How about that? He considers the remake to be more “real.” I told him when I met him that there were only two things I ever disagreed with him about. One was Van Sant’s PSYCHO, which I love, but not better than Hitchcock’s. It’s more like the Hitchcock version had just made a stop into TWIN PEAKS world. And the other was TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES. Ugh, that movie’s just dreadful. Quentin loved it. I don’t know just how much he loved it anymore. I don’t wanna toot my own horn or nothin’, but after our discussion on T3, I never heard him singing the praises of T3 anymore.
[/quote]
I know that Carnahan said something kinda derogatory towards QT in one of those Smokin Aces interviews.
Im not into rip offs of QTs movies for some reason. For me, it depends on who is directing and how they rip stuff off. Not everyone can do it in a good way. There has to be something else to it.
I didnt really like the Psycho remake that much. T3 was a pretty fun movie. But I didnt go nuts over it.
QT is a great artist and has great taste but I dont agree with him always or like everything he does.
Also I love that Grindhouse Gang interview. I actually read it back when Grindhouse came out. You dont have to post the entire thing.
RODRIGUEZ: He was his own director of photography too, and his main cameraman was out sick that day.
TARANTINO: What’s interesting is that I’d shot one whole day of coverage already for that scene, and I was shooting it kind of like I’d shot the opening of Reservoir Dogs, so there were a lot of 180-degree dolly shots, with the backs of the heads and all that stuff. I got home that night and I didn’t feel good about it. I thought, “I’m ripping myself off. Now, if anyone can rip me off, it’s me, but I don’t feel good about it. I just feel like I’m doing it because I know it will work, and that’s not the same thing as doing it because it’s right.â€
TARANTINO: By the way, that’s poetry. I can recite that in my sleep.
ARKUSH: It came to me in the shower, and I ran to the editing room.
TRENCHARD-SMITH: I liked his line for Shogun Assassin. “Shogun Assassin: He’ll Kick Your Ass In.â€
L.A. WEEKLY:So, where have all the cheap thrills gone?
TARANTINO: The exploitation market died when ticket prices went as high as they did. To this day, and I know I’m way out of touch, I don’t think a movie ticket should cost more than $5. Back in the day, you could spend $5 to see a low-budget exploitation movie or you could spend $5 to see A Star Is Born or whatever — it was all the same. Now, I’d feel ripped off if I spent $12 at a movie theater to see Eat My Dust, though oddly, I don’t feel ripped off spending $24 for the DVD. That’s my own prejudice. Having said that, today there’s a huge market of straight-to-video exploitation movies.
L.A. WEEKLY:But whenever I see one of those movies, I almost always feel they lack the expressive grandeur of the big-screen exploitation movies of yesteryear.
TARANTINO: You are absolutely right. Whatever else you want to say about Roger Corman, he was a soothsayer. He knew everything that was going to happen years before it happened. When, all of a sudden, his movies started having these one-week engagements in two theaters just to meet a contractual obligation, and then they came out in video two days later, that was the end of exploitation movies theatrically.
ARKUSH: The second he moved into that studio in Venice, everything had to fit within four walls and you lost all the freedom of location shooting.
TARANTINO: The loss of the theatrical experience was like a loss of heart for the directors, because even though you guys didn’t expect critical respect, there was a chance that Kevin Thomas, or Linda Gross, would see what you had done and give you a good review in the Los Angeles Times.
TRENCHARD-SMITH: [Former Los Angeles Times film critic] Michael Wilmington found The Siege of Firebase Gloria playing on the lower half of a drive-in double bill with Red Scorpion and said, “Why isn’t it playing the top half?â€
You should just put up a link to this article. Ive already read it and Im probably not going to use it for the new site. Its more related to QT and RRs Grindhouse. Thanks tho. I know youre tryin to help.
It wouldve been funny if Joe Carnahan was there too. QT wouldve talked him under the table. Not even Rodriguez could keep up with QTs knowledge. Hell, the actual directors whose movies QT grew up watching dont know as much as he does! 