Tag Archives: exploitation

Toys are often the earliest conduits for our fantasies. Silent actors, they play out our hopes, dreams and aspirations. Toys enable us to project our intangible desires onto the substance of the material world. Yet, toys can also be unsettling. ...

Bamboo House of Dolls (Nu ji zhong ying, 1973) is the Shaw Brothers’ oft-mentioned attempt to cash in on the success of The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage, two films shot in the Philippines by director Jack ...

Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is often described as one of the most controversial films ever made. It’s easy to understand why. Provocative and polarizing, its content is both shocking and subversive. Ruggero Deodato’s most notable work has incited repulsion in some, ...

I can’t be certain that Katt Shea’s sexploitation flick Stripped to Kill (1987) holds the record for most gratuitous butt shots, but it features so many of them in the first five minutes alone that I’m confident in declaring it ...

I took a few days off from celebrating Gialloween for an ill-timed work trip, but since I can’t ever really get giallo films off the brain, staying in a hotel inevitably made me think of the grim, slimy, and little ...

But wait, it has regularly been advised, this one is actually good. It’s true, Runaway Train (1985) is the Cannon Group production most often cited as a genuinely excellent movie, not a cult hit, not a niche genre oddity, not an ...

Pioneering exploitation filmmaker Roberta Findlay was prolific in the male dominated pornographic and horror Grindhouse genres of the 1970s, commanding the shifting roles of cinematographer, actor, director, writer, and distributor on over forty sexploitation and horror films. The anarchic blend ...

Directed by Herman Yau, Yi boh lai beng duk (Ebola Syndrome, 1996) is an infamous Hong Kong CAT III entry. Since 1988, Category III has been Hong Kong’s most restrictive certificate – “No persons younger than 18 years of age ...

The wonderful Vinegar Syndrome has really been on a tear this year expanding their catalogue beyond erotica to include cult, horror, and even blaxploitation. Over the last few months, they’ve released a number of restored, Blu-ray editions of films starring ...

For a variety of reasons, revenge films with female protagonists have long been a favorite subgenre of mine: titles ranging from arthouse fare like Clouzot’s Les diaboliques (1955) and Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (1968); more classic exploitation titles like ...