#exploitation thriller

[moviesandmania]

ESCAPE Reviews of exploitation thriller

‘Fight back or die’ Escape is a 2023 exploitation thriller about ten young women who are taken from an island resort by a violent criminal gang for shipping to an overseas sex trafficking client. A young nurse and feisty dancer (Sarah Alexandra Marks) hatch an escape-plan, finding themselves in the desert fighting for survival against ruthless traffickers. The movie was written, directed and…

[esqueletosgays]

ANGEL (1984)

Director: Robert Vincent O'Neil Cinematography: Andrew Davis

[sky5532]

LUMPFISH!!!!!!! These guys are the cutest little fish and there's only two posts about them in all of tumblr! Spread awareness 😎!!

[scenephile]

You wanna sit on my face?

[schlock-luster-video]

"A White Hot Night of Hate!"

Here's some original Austin Stoker art inspired by John Carpenter's grindhouse classic Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)!

[spilladabalia]

11 BIZARRE Old Hollywood Movies That Still Shock Modern Audiences Today

[thewingedwolf]

honestly i really think ryan murphy should just do tragicomic thriller stuff again but make it law and order esque ripped from the headlines stuff instead of america horror story stuff i don’t understand this new obsession with writing true crime fanfiction when he knows damn well he doesn’t give a shit about the real story he just wants to dress up his muses in vintage clothes and write the most touchingly homophobic characters in history.

[videoreligion]

De Sade (1969)

[bitter69uk]

Recently watched: giallo film Knife of Ice (aka Il coltello di ghiaccio (Italy) aka Detras del silencio (Spain)). I’ve been on a total Carroll Baker kick lately: I screened her wildly enjoyable 1965 trash epic Sylvia at my Lobotomy Room cinema club at Fontaine’s last week. It felt so gratifying introducing newbies to Baker’s wanton, totally singular charms! I suspect everyone left Fontaine’s that night with a raging crush on her. Anyway, as I explained in my intro, once good opportunities in Hollywood fizzled out by the late sixties, the resilient and durable blonde goddess decamped to Rome and triumphantly reinvented herself in Italian thrillers, extending her career by almost a decade. Until now, the only one I’d seen was Baba Yaga (1973) – which is wild, kinky and highly recommended! (In the UK, it’s streaming on Prime). Last weekend I discovered that stylish Italian-Spanish co-production Knife of Ice is available (dubbed in English) on YouTube. Director Umberto Lenzi and Baker collaborated on four films together – this one was the last. I haven’t seen the previous three (So Sweet … So Perverse (1969), Orgasmo (1969) and A Quiet Place to Kill (1970)), but they apparently leant more heavily into sex and violence: Knife is more austere. And Baker is relatively deglamourised here (she wears a lot of cardigans, brown crimplene dresses and modest box pleat skirts). Baker plays shy and retiring artist Martha Caldwell, who’s been rendered mute ever since she survived the horrific train crash that killed her parents fifteen years earlier. Martha’s genteel life of quiet contemplation with her wealthy uncle Ralph (George Riguad) in the picturesque village of Martinet in the Spanish Pyrenees is threatened by the apparent arrival of a serial killer who is singling out blonde women. The action is then punctuated by devil worship, a malevolent black-caped Charles Manson-inspired hippie, dream-like flashbacks and for some reason, a gory bullfight (consider yourself warned!). Some of the stilted dubbing is unintentionally funny. The terrible performance of Baker’s leading man (American actor Alan Scott) adds to the camp value. But Knife of Ice is a wild ride with a great twist ending. Read more about Baker's Italian era here.

[weirdlookindog]

Signpost to Murder (1964) & Hysteria (1965)

[brokehorrorfan]

Fear City has been released on Blu-ray exclusively from Shout Factory. Limited to 1,800, the 1984 neo-noir exploitation thriller is available for $29.98.

Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant, King of New York) directs from a script by frequent collaborator Nicholas St. John (King of New York). Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, Jack Scalia, and Melanie Griffith.

Both the theatrical and unrated cuts have been newly scanned in 2K from the 35mm interpositive. No other extras are included.

Features:

Theatrical cut (95 minutes)

Unrated cut (97 minutes)

There's a psychopath on the loose in Manhattan who is stalking and mutilating beautiful strippers employed by booking agents Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger) and Nicky Parzeno (Jack Scalia). But when the madman targets Matt's ex-girlfriend, Loretta (Melanie Griffith), he must confront his own violent past to stop the sadistic killer. Welcome to Fear City, where thrills are cheap, and human life is even cheaper.

[emopunkgirl]

MS .45 (1981)

[twittercomfrnklin2001-blog]

Who Killed Teddy Bear

Quick, name a film directed by Kevin Kline’s father-in-law. If you have a taste for failed sleaze you’ll come up with the third film in my “stalker trilogy,” Joseph Cates’ WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR (1965, Prime, Plex, YouTube). The other two are SCREAMING MIMI (1958) and SATAN IN HIGH HEELS (1962), and though the middle one is clearly exploitation, the other two are more exploitation adjacent. SCREAMING MIMI exists to display the physical endowments of Anita Ekberg without showing any naughty bits. WHO KILLED TEDDY BEAR is more exploitation in the C.B. DeMille tradition of wallowing in decadence while seeming to condemn it. It’s altogether possible that Cates, writers Arnold Drake and Leon Tokatyan and producer Everett Rosenthal were seriously concerned with the culture’s growing sexualization, and you could hardly accuse its talented stars — Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse and Elaine Stritch — of spreading smut. Yet it still has a smarmy feel about it, compounded by the low budget and unfortunate, choppy editing that seems to indicate they ran out of money before shooting everything in the script.

Prowse is an aspiring dancer making ends meet as a platter spinner at an early disco. She starts receiving obscene phone calls, but who is it? The vice cop (Jan Murray) who takes a particular interest in the case seems somewhat preoccupied with sexual perversion (he plays tapes of victim interviews while his ten-year-old daughter listens from the next room). But  he doesn’t have the body displayed in the shadows as the man calls her. When the stalker calls while Murray is there, the camera cuts to reveal it’s the club’s busboy (Sal Mineo). Meanwhile, Prowse’s boss (Elaine Stritch) seems to have her own designs on the woman’s body.

This is all shot rather primitively, with cameras following Mineo as he prowls 42nd Street, ogling suggestive lingerie in a shop window, looking at porn magazines and entering a theater showing CALL GIRL 77 (1962). The dancing at the disco is shot from a low angle to make it seem somehow sinister and hyper-sexualized. There’s also a flashback to Mineo’s past, when his seduction by an older woman led to an accident that left his young sister with brain damage. It’s all very sex-negative, yet for some reason there’s also a scene — beloved by gay men, their magazines and their porn sites — in which the camera makes love to Mineo as he works out in a tight Speedo. Is this to associate working out with sexual perversion, or does it possibly include our gaze in the film’s attack on sexuality?

The film’s main virtue is that it was shot in New York, offering a glimpse of the pre-Disney Times Square and theater actors like Rex Everhardt, Frank Campanella, Bruce Glover, Tom Aldredge and, of course, Stritch. She fares the best of the four stars, possibly because her part is too short to be burdened with the inconsistencies facing the others. Her pain when Prowse rejects her advances is touching (she had been directed to play the scene angrily but suggested what she considered a more realistic approach). Mineo probably suffers the worst from the inconsistent writing. He has solid moments, but there are other places where he doesn’t seem sure of where the part is taking him. Murray is unspeakably bad, not endowing his lines with much of anything so his painful story about his wife’s murder is almost funny. The role needed a George C. Scott, and they got a stand-up comic and game-show host, though I doubt even Scott could salvage the moment in which the detective suddenly remembers how mirrors work. Prowse is so beautiful it almost doesn’t matter how good she is. She gets a nice moment of dancing toward the end, and in her final shots, her body language is devastating. Just before the climax, she’s putting away records at the disco while humming “My Desire.” It’s an almost poetic comment on the action with a lot more resonance than the film’s usually shrill attacks on sexuality. If it was her idea, it suggests that, absent any directorial artistry, the actor sometimes has to function as auteur.

[schlock-luster-video]

On August 13, 1968, Targets premiered in New York City.

Here's some new art!

[cultmoodymovies]

Cult Moody’s 13 Films for Halloween

Due to life sucking I am only able to watch 13 films this year. My yearly Halloween film selections to celebrate the holiday! These include horror, sci-fi, cult, B-Movie or Exploitation films I have never seen.

La Llorona (1933)

The Phantom of the Monastery aka El fantasma del convento (1934)

Kwaidan (1964)

Stanley (1972)

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)

Ms .45 (1981)

Videodrome (1983)

Society (1989)

Hatching (2022)

Skinamarink (2022)

Megan (2023)

Renfield (2023)

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

[helena-bottom-farter]