Sexploitation - vo.rs

Russ Meyer: The Satirist of the Drive-In

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The easiest thing to say about Russ Meyer is the thing that lets you dismiss him, so let us get it out of the way. Yes, he built an entire filmography around one physical obsession, promoted it with the shamelessness of a carnival barker, and called himself “King Leer” without a trace of embarrassment. Stop there and you miss the actual story, which is stranger and more American than the caricature: a self-taught combat cameraman turned the cheapest corner of exploitation cinema into a personal signature so distinct that Roger Ebert wrote for him, museums retrospect him, and directors from John Waters to the makers of music videos have been quietly stealing his cutting for fifty years. Meyer is the case study in how far pure craft and pure attitude can carry material that everyone agreed was disposable.

The Sexploitation Canon: The Historically Essential Ten

Fri, 02 May 2025 13:00:00 +0000

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.

Sexploitation Was the Art House of Its Day: The Case of Radley Metzger

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 13:00:00 +0000

There is a stubborn myth about the 1960s that keeps the art house and the grindhouse in separate buildings, one for Antonioni and one for the raincoat trade. For a decade or so they were frequently the same room. The theatres that imported Bergman and Godard survived on the same audiences that turned up for the racy Scandinavian pictures playing next month, and the men who booked those screens rarely drew a moral line between them. Into that overlap walked Radley Metzger, a New York editor and distributor who understood the overlap better than anyone and made films designed to live inside it.