Exploitation History - vo.rs

Jess Franco: The Prolific King of Eurotrash

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:00:00 +0000

No serious account of Jess Franco can avoid the number, so let us start there. He directed something like a hundred and eighty films, by some counts more than two hundred, under a scatter of pseudonyms — Clifford Brown, David Khunne, Franco Manera and a dozen besides — across five decades and half of Europe. That output is the first thing everyone says about him and the biggest obstacle to taking him seriously, because a good portion of it is genuinely terrible: incoherent, threadbare, shot in a week and abandoned. But bury a real filmmaker under that many films and you are guaranteed a handful of genuine spells, and Franco’s best work casts a hypnotic, dreamlike charge that nobody else in exploitation cinema quite managed. The trick with Franco is knowing how to find the spells without drowning in the swamp.

The Pinku and Japanese Erotic-Cinema Primer

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Here is the fact that reorganises everything you think you know about disreputable cinema: for most of the 1970s, some of the best-shot, most formally adventurous films made anywhere in the world were Japanese softcore. Not despite the softcore — because of it. A studio in crisis discovered that if it guaranteed a set number of erotic scenes per picture, it could hand young directors a camera, a tiny budget, a ten-day schedule and, crucially, near-total freedom over everything else. What those directors did with that bargain is one of the strangest and richest chapters in film history, and almost nobody outside Japan saw it clearly until the disc labels started restoring it.

The Nunsploitation and Convent-Horror Shortlist

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Put a group of people behind a high wall, take away their names, forbid them the one thing every drama runs on, and you have built a machine for tension before a single frame is shot. The convent is that machine. It is why the setting keeps luring filmmakers who otherwise share nothing — a Powell-and-Pressburger Technicolor prestige picture and a grubby Rome quickie can both be set in the same cloister and both be right, because the architecture does the work. Repression concentrates whatever it contains.