Sunday, June 16, 2013

Junesploitation Day 16: Free Space!

Shine sweet freedom, shine your light on me.

We're over halfway done with Junesploitation, and to celebrate we're taking a day to watch ANY movie you want. Hopefully it's from one of our 28 other categories, but if you've got an exploitation movie you've been itching to watch that defies categorization, have at it! I can't wait to hear what every choose to watch today!

And Happy Father's Day!

18 comments:

  1. Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008)

    Direct-to-video sequel can’t hope to match the original in terms of execution, but it does have its charms. Whereas the first film took on fascism (and predicted – almost to a fault – both 9/11 and America’s reaction to it), this one takes on religion. However, religion is a much stickier issue, and it’s tough to satirize without coming across as smart-ass. The movie is on solid ground when it focuses on the nationalization of religion, but it also tends to view those who believe in God as being naïve morons. It’s great to see Casper Van Dien back as Johnny Rico, but he’s not in the film nearly enough – and neither are the “Marauder” suites that give the movie its title. However, Stephen Hogan is a treat as a John Ashcroft-like Sky Marshal who has his own hit song. Those familiar with Star Trek: Enterprise will be stunned to see that Jolene Blalock can actually smile. While some characters get nekkid (in an obvious callback to the shower scene in the first film), Blalock sadly is not one of them.

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    1. "Suits," not "suites." No, there's not a beautiful musical composition about powered armor (although there should be).

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  2. Here we go! And to those that celebrate it today, HAPPY THIS! :-)

    Gillo Pontecorvo's KAPO (1960) on TCM-HD for the first time.

    Does a movie have to be grindhouse and/or low-budget to be considered exploitation? The now-accepted practice by Hollywood studios of pushing 'Oscar bait' movies engineered to win critical acclaim and awards above any other reason for being made (including being remotely entertaining, i.e. "The English Patient") proves that formulas, concepts and genres that appeal to the narrow-minded and predictable tastes of the 5,000+ Academy Award members (or French people) can be as exploitative as the cheapest Roger Corman flick that's made to play to the cheapest seats. And no genre or film subject has been more exploited and mined for 'Oscar bait' than The Holocaust, the highest-brow form of cinephile NAZISPLOITATION! You know, "The Readers" and "Jakob the Liars" that give "The Pianists" and "Schindler's Lists" a bad name.

    "Kapò," a French-Italian co-production starring Susan Strasberg (whose resemblance to Anne Frank is not coincidental) as a French Jewish girl that hides her ethnicity and becomes an abusive prison guard at a Polish concentration camp to escape certain death, is among the earliest Holocaust movies made (by the director of "The Battle of Algiers" no less). It pretty much set a template/blueprint, in front and behind the camera, that many Holocaust films since have followed. And, God (if he/she/it exists) bless the filmmakers' good intentions and talented international cast (including "Amour's" Emmanuelle Riva), "Kapò" has its head so far up its ass at how important and meaningful it thinks it is it becomes distracting. I was acutely aware of how manipulative and engineered-for-recognition it was, something the better Holocaust movies (i.e. not "Life Is Beautiful") manage to overcome.

    "Kapò" is a decent movie on its own, but it inadvertently (or not) created a monster that has yet to be tamed. And hey, I watched this for Prison! and changed my mind, going with "American Me" instead. Gotta exploit the loopholes and recycle. ;-)

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  3. Fantasia (1940)

    Orchesploitation! Yeah, it's pretentious. Yeah, Deems Taylor's play by play is what DVD chapter skips were invented for. I even concede it can be rough to watch all the way through without the aid of paint thinner. Say what you will, this movie has always had a place in my Disney Top 5. I give credit for the boundaries it was pushing in the 40's; how was Bambi ever delayed because of troubles with the animation while Night on Bald Mountain got the go ahead? It's colorful, it's alive, it's scary, and it's beautiful. It's one of the few times Mickey creates a problem he is incapable of dealing with by himself. I'm not incredibly cultured, I won't lie. I've been to an actual symphony four times in my life. But I will always defend this movie as a huge accomplishment in animation, sound, and plain old American imagination.

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    1. The Dance of the Hours is my favorite sequence in Fantasia. I'm a sucker for hippo ballerinas.

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    2. I posted this in response to someone posting about Fantasia, but their post has mysteriously disappeared. Just in case someone was wondering why the heck I would post a random comment about a Disney movie in the middle of Junesploitation (Mickey-sploitation!).

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  4. My pick for “Revenge” wasn’t very exploitation-y, and my pick for “Badass Chicks” wasn’t very badass-y, so I made up for both of those today by watching THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE. Swedishsploitation! Does this movie belong in the “trash-sleaze” category, or the “sleaze-trash” category? I can’t tell. A mute girl is abducted, her eye is plucked out, and she’s held captive in a brothel. Except that on her days off (?!?) she learns karate, sharpshooting and speed driving, all of which she uses against her captors. Despite the lurid subject matter, the whole thing keeps trying to be artsy, so that all the action scenes are filmed in super slow motion, sometimes ridiculously slow. Did I like the movie? Eh… sort of?

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  5. I went for a twofer today!

    MIAMI CONNECTION (1987)

    Dragon Sound 4 Life!

    SHIVERS AKA THEY CAME FROM WITHIN (1975)

    Early David Cronenberg Canuxploitation about parasites that causes affluent residents of a apartment to literally become sex zombies. Even with a very grindhouse setup, Cronenberg classes things up and turns a film into a social statement. Unfortunately, it is very slow and the acting is not the caliber of later Cronenberg.

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  6. Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. (1975)

    Nazisploitation "classic" is non-stop torture, gratuitous nudity and violence and general ugliness. It's all very competently made, too, which is weird. I'm glad(?) to have finally seen it, I guess, but this is as hardcore as I'm going to get this month.

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  7. Meet The Feebles (1989)

    I'd never seen Peter Jackson's naughty puppet movie (puppetsploitation) so I took this as an opportunity to check it out. I did not enjoy it, and it was a lot of work. In fact, I wish I had that 90 minutes of my life back. So for me, the best early Peter Jackson is still Dead Alive.

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  8. Death Wish IV The Crackdown (1987)

    Paul Kersey has himself another girl (getting over his last ladies death pretty quickly) who also has a young daughter, but when his girlfriends daughter overdoses on the sweet white powder he's out for vengeance... again. This one plays it more straight than DW 3 but still has a few moments of inspired lunacy involving some crazy drug dealer deaths, one of the coolest dispatchings of a head villain ever, and apparently murdering the editor for Cannon films (guess Bronson saw the rough cut for Superman IV Quest for Peace).

    Still had a heck of a lot of fun with DW IV Crackdown and its gratuitous use of rocketlaunchersploitation!

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  9. Miami Connection

    A movie so good I have enrolled for the fall semester at the University of Central Florida.

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    1. Woo! Shout out to UCF!! (I live in Orlando and went to the University of Central Florida) Haha, sorry, it just tickles me to see my school mentioned.

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  10. Pink Flamingos

    I can't really think of any other movie that deserved an NC-17 rating as much as this!

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  11. The Warriors (1979)

    Hadn't seen this colorfully comic-booky gang war classic in over a decade, but it's still a lot of fun. I still don't really get how Luther (magical leprechaun David Patrick Kelley) managed to frame The Warriors when he shot Cyrus in front of approximately seventeen billion witnesses, but it seemed to work! Also, what would you assume the Baseball Furies' monthly costume, prop, and makeup budget is? Is that the kind of thing you need to think about before deciding which gang to join?

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  12. The Scalphunters (1968)

    Possibly one of the most unwestern westerns of all time. The movie starts out pretty straight, with Burt Lancaster's character losing his horse and his precious "furs" to a groups of Indians and gaining the help of Ossie Davis to retreive them, at any cost nessesary. The Indians are soon brutally murdered in a pretty horrific scene by Telly Savalas and his band of "Scalphunters", who much to Lancaster's chagrin, also take the furs. The movie slowly devolves into a complete farce and Looney Tunes short, which would have been very interesting if it weren't for the super serious tone the rest of the movie took. It does end with a cartoonish mud wrestling match between Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis, which was entertaining (and slightly arousing!).

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  13. Drive Angry (2011)

    This movie reminded me of the days when I liked Nic Cage movies. I miss liking Nic Cage movies. There were some ridiculous action sequences ("We was fucking. He killed them while we was fucking!"), great cars, and William Fitchner, who is the best part of the movie. It's definitely worth a watch for his character.

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  14. Foxy Brown (1974)

    I missed "Blaxploitation!" day because of Netflix issues, and I already watched Coffy for "Pam Grier!" day, so I thought I'd give this a whirl on my day off.

    It's not as good as Coffy.

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