The Sexploitation Canon: The Historically Essential Ten

Before hardcore pornography went mainstream in the early 1970s, there was a long, strange, commercially vital middle ground: sexploitation. These were films made to show more skin than Hollywood dared, released through a shadow distribution system of drive-ins, grindhouses and “art” cinemas, and often far more ambitious than the label suggests. The best of them smuggled real craft, real satire and real ideas past audiences who had come for the nudity — and a handful of the film-makers were genuine artists working in the only market that would have them.

This is a historical canon rather than a greatest-hits list. Each of these ten marks a turn in the road: the birth of a form, the moment sexploitation touched respectability, the point where the art house and the adult house briefly became the same building. Several of the directors here treated the genre as the art house of its day, and the films bear that out — you can watch American commercial cinema’s relationship to sex change decade by decade simply by moving down this list.

A note on where to watch: the boutique restoration labels — Severin, Cult Epics, the specialist Meyer and Metzger reissues — have rescued nearly all of these from the murk of bad bootlegs and censored prints, and the difference is night and day. Colour, framing and wit that were invisible on a fifth-generation tape suddenly land. Watch the restorations wherever you can find them.

The American birth

The Immoral Mr. Teas (Russ Meyer, 1959). The film that started an industry. Meyer’s cheap, sunny little comedy about a man who can suddenly see through women’s clothing invented the “nudie-cutie” and proved a fortune could be made showing bare flesh with a wink and no promise of anything more. It is slight and dated, closer to a burlesque postcard than a film, and it is the door everything else walked through. Restored by the boutique labels as part of the Meyer catalogue.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965). Meyer’s masterpiece contains almost no nudity, which is the joke — a black-and-white desert blast about three go-go dancers on a homicidal joyride, powered by pure attitude, whip-fast cutting and Tura Satana’s immortal glare. My full read on its desert blast of attitude argues it is one of the great American B-films full stop, a film whose influence runs through Tarantino and a hundred imitators. The disc from the specialist labels is superb.

Vixen (Russ Meyer, 1968). The commercial breakthrough that made softcore respectable at the box office, playing regular cinemas and outgrossing studio pictures on a shoestring budget Meyer recouped many times over. It is faster, funnier and more explicit than what came before, and its runaway success helped force the modern ratings system into being. The case for it as the film that made softcore respectable is worth reading. In print from the Meyer restorations.

The studio flirtation

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970). The moment a major studio handed Meyer a real budget and a script co-written by a young Roger Ebert, and got back a delirious satire of Hollywood excess that flopped on release, then became a cult monument. My longer piece on this studio fever dream unpacks how strange it is that a studio financed something this deranged at all — proof of how badly the majors misread the moment. Widely available on disc.

The elegant European strand

Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967). The respectable face of the same cultural moment — Bunuel’s cool, precise study of a bourgeois wife’s secret afternoons in a Paris brothel, so poised that it played the art houses while trading in exactly the fantasies the grindhouses sold raw. My read on its elegant study of fantasy makes the case for it as the sophisticated pole of this canon, a film that never once shows you what it is really about. Criterion’s edition is the standard.

The Lickerish Quartet (Radley Metzger, 1970). Metzger was sexploitation’s true auteur, and this is his cleverest film — a puzzle-box about a jaded aristocratic family watching a stag film, then meeting a woman who may be one of its performers, staged in a real Italian castle with genuine visual wit and a modernist’s eye for reflection and doubling. The film-within-a-film puzzle shows how far the genre could reach when a real film-maker took the money. Cult Epics has restored it beautifully.

The multiplex breakthrough

Emmanuelle (Just Jaeckin, 1974). The film that took softcore to the multiplex and kept it there — a glossy, French-financed travelogue of a diplomat’s wife in Bangkok that became one of the highest-grossing films in French history and ran continuously in one Paris cinema for years. Its mainstream respectability was a genuine watershed, whatever one makes of the film itself, which is more perfume advertisement than drama. My piece on this softcore hit that played the multiplex covers the fallout. On disc from the boutique labels.

The Story of O (Just Jaeckin, 1975). Jaeckin’s adaptation of the notorious French novel pushed the glossy prestige-erotica model into darker, more troubling territory, and the argument over its craft and its politics has never fully settled. It belongs here as the point where mainstream erotica confronted what it was actually depicting and could no longer hide behind the perfume-advert gloss. Available restored.

The eastern extremes

School of the Holy Beast (Norifumi Suzuki, 1974). Japan’s studios ran their own lavish exploitation lines, and this is the nunsploitation peak — a woman infiltrating a corrupt convent to avenge her mother, staged with astonishing colour, cherry blossom and a genuine anticlerical fury beneath the sacrilege. My read on this nunsploitation film with a real argument makes the case for its seriousness as a work of anti-authority anger. Restored by the specialist labels.

In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1976). The endpoint of the whole story — Oshima’s unsimulated account of a doomed, obsessive affair in 1930s Tokyo, a film that erased the border between art cinema and pornography and dared the censors of two countries to react. My longer read on Oshima’s art-house provocation sits it exactly where this canon ends: the moment the middle ground closed and the question of what was permissible became a matter for courts. Available on disc.

The economics of skin

Sexploitation was a business before it was anything else, and its shape was dictated by a distribution system that operated in the margins of respectable cinema. Films were often “four-walled” — the producer would rent a cinema outright for a week, keep all the takings, and move on before word of mouth or the local authorities caught up. Others roadshowed through the drive-in circuit and the grindhouses of decaying downtowns, where a lurid poster and a promise of forbidden content did the selling. Budgets were tiny, shooting schedules brutal, and the profits, when a film caught fire like Vixen, could be enormous relative to the outlay.

The whole enterprise lived in a permanent, productive tension with the law. Obscenity was a matter for local courts, so a film legal in one city could be seized in the next, and a prosecution was often the best publicity a producer could hope for. That legal jeopardy is why so many of these films strain to justify themselves — the framing lecture, the pretence of a moral, the “educational” veneer — and why the cleverer film-makers learned to smuggle real wit past both the censor and the raincoat crowd. When the courts finally permitted hardcore and cinemas could show everything, this careful, allusive middle ground lost its reason to exist. The market that made these films profitable and the legal fog that made them daring both burned off at once, and the form was over.

Where the story goes

Watch these ten in order and you have watched an entire commercial cinema born, peak and dissolve inside two decades. When hardcore arrived and the grindhouses could show everything, the reason to be clever about showing something evaporated, and the middle ground vanished almost overnight. For the film-makers who worked there, the natural next stops are Metzger’s Score and Camille 2000, and Japan’s ferocious Female Prisoner Scorpion. The skin was the bait. The craft is why they lasted.