CINEMA: SEX! VIOLENCE! TRASH!

THE EXPLOITATION MOVIES OF A BYGONE ERA HAD EVERYTHING BUT MONEY. AND TALENT. AND SCRUPLES

They were the original movies your mother didn't want you to see. For half a century exploitation films--a robust compromise between stag loops and major-studio product--would grind away in Main Street fleabags and drive-ins, inflicting their lurid, no-budget fantasies on generations of bored salesmen and horny teens. Hollywood put sweet dreams on screen; exploitation directors filmed the raging id. See brutal men sweat over balky virgins! Thrill as mousy guys find sluts whose sexual appetites are insatiable! Or, as Rene Bond says it in Edward D. Wood Jr.'s 1971 Necromania, "insashable."

Grindhouse movies were bad as in dirty and bad as...

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