SHOCK pastes up 10 tasteless and tacky movie posters from exploitation film history.
Downmarket cinema is a curious circus.
Without the big bucks to make mainstream movies, exploitation and indie genre filmmakers have had to distill their pictures to the most sensational of skeletons, targeting the basest impulses of curious and cheerfully perverted audiences everywhere.
But no matter the moving picture product, whether it be the gloss of Hollywood or the skids of Harry Novak, one thing was essential in putting the paid pundits’ patooties in the seats: a great poster!
Like any good carnival barker at every sideshow and circus ’round the world, the poster has to scream loudly to make people prick up their ears and file inside.
But when it comes to exploitation films, it’s just that greasy product within is so much more lurid and fun to promote!
Good taste goes out the window when it comes to marketing and here, we’ve randomly selected 10 truly shameless posters from films that are generally nowhere as naughty as their come-ons suggest.
In at least 2 cases, the film being shucked is a rather sophisticated work that whatever craven distributor got their mitts on it had to slop into the grindhouse underbelly and make it seem like something it wasn’t.
And no matter what, these wonderfully unsavory posters will fill your eyeballs for a few minutes and make you appreciate that hallowed art of parting a fool and his money.
Exploitation Movie Posters
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MANIAC (1980)
William Lusting's depressing, Tom Savini-gore-fueled melodrama boiled TAXI DRIVER's urban psychosis into a wet stew of sweat and madness and misogyny. This poster is one of the most memorable of its kind and a big middle finger to the mainstream. Nothing like growled warnings from a butcher knife-wielding lunatic holding a bloody woman's scalp to make you whistle a happy tune!
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THE SINGLE GIRLS (1975)
"Half clad - All Bad!"
70's exploitation movies really did their part to pander to perverse male fantasy, didn't they? Here we have some ladies on the look out for a mate and using whatever means necessary to "get him hard". Classy! A film to take your daughters to!
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I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978)
The notorious rape/revenge shocker was originally titled DAY OF THE WOMAN, a far less sensational title that softens the considerable blows the ugly film itself pounds into its audience. But under the I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE moniker, it becomes an X rated supermarket tabloid; and with this Charles Band-devised poster, we see a movie about a woman being raped and tormented repeatedly sold with a titillating bum. Cheeky marketing or just crass? Either way, that's a young Demi Moore's rear, who Band was friends with at the time.
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THE BLACK GESTAPO (1975)
Two unsavory sub-genres cross-breed in this nasty and nutty potboiler: the Blaxploitation picture and the Nazisploitation shocker. Tasteless, racist, sexist and insensitive...this one fires on all "wrong" cylinders!
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TRUCK STOP WOMEN (1974)
More wanton mysogyny and lurid imagery. With all the "jackin", "gear-jamming", "double-clutching" and "hard truckin'", it's no wonder our heroine has a rig exploding between her legs. No wonder there are so many single dudes out there!
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PRISON GIRLS (1972)
Nothing says perversion like criminally minded louts peering up a woman's skirt. In PRISON GIRLS, you can live out that fantasy...in 3D! And these are female prisoners so, hey, they won't mind, right?
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THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND (1976)
Charming, no-budget XXX horror porn flick that's barely watchable and whose poster is both lurid and tacky. Satan's got two of his sex slaves in choke holds while the other is about fellate his tail. It likely tastes as bad as the poster.
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THE HOT BOX (1972)
Relatively innocuous poster that still reeks of last week's trash bags left out in the sun. Something about the color yellow just screams filth and THE HOT BOX, with its chained and caged women and male holding his exploding machine gun like a fantasy version of a member is like the Freudian ID on opium.
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DON'T DELIVER US FROM EVIL (1971)
This film is a masterpiece of French cinema and the blueprint for Peter Jackson's HEAVENLY CREATURES. But that poster! Pedophilia is still one of the most rightly reviled taboos and this poster tastelessly uses a still from the film to sell the movie as a wank-fest for kiddie diddlers. First of all, the actress is not as young as she appears here, second, DDUFE is a mature, complex work of art.Here, it becomes just another 42nd street, sticky-floor spectacular.
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FRENCH KITTENS (1978)
Really, a crass collection of peep show loops called HOLLYWOOD GOES HARD, we've never seen this one and likely never will. But something about this poster is just so damned tacky and artless. So flat. So obvious. It's such a sleazy shrug and with its baby-blue background, oddly sterile, that I find it strangely unforgettable. Hmmmm...
