The only thing I love more than a good exploitation film is a good exploitation film trailer. I’ve been known to buy Anchor Bay DVDs of films that I hate just to see what trailers will be included in the extras. Often times, when I find myself suffering from writer’s block, I cure it by watching 42nd Street Forever.
Below are 6 exploitation film trailers. They are six of my personal favorites though I could easily list 666.
Enjoy!
1) Teenage Mother (1967) — This trailer (if not the actual film, which is pretty dull) is pure exploitation perfection.
2) They Call Her One Eye (1974) — They Call Her One Eye is the American title for a Sweedish film called Thriller, A Cruel Picture. It’s an appropriate title but its also one of the best movies ever made in the history of cinema.
3) Ms. 45 (1981) — I love this movie. Whenever I break up with a boyfriend or just find myself annoyed with men in general, this is the movie that I end up popping into my DVD player. Consider yourself warned. 🙂
4) The House With The Laughing Windows (1976) — This giallo, directed by Pupi Avati, is probably one of the best films ever to come out of Italy period. The trailer only begins to hint just how girm, dark, depressing, disturbing, and downright odd this little gem really is.
5) Starcrash (1979) — Starcrash was Luigi Cozzi’s attempt to cash in on Star Wars. For what its worth, Starcrash is actually a lot more fun and, as played by Caroline Munro, intergalactic priate Stella Starr is actually one of the few truly strong women to appear in Italian exploitation cinema. (The next Halloween party I’m invited to, I’m going to go as Caroline Munro in Starcrash.) The special effects pretty much define the whole concept of “That’s a great movie when you’re stoned.”
6) Spasmo (1974) — Our final trailer is for that rarest of things, a good movie directed by Umberto Lenzi.
Through the Shattered Lens 
Love it that you have They Call Her One-Eye in this list. 🙂
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Thanks for sharing that great tune 🙂 I really like it!
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Sorry for weighing in so late on this batch. I hadn’t caught these when you originally posted them. But they are all awfully good.
It sounds like the producers of “Teenage Mother” scored Christopher Walken to do the trailer voiceover. “Teenage mutha means nine muntza trouble!” And what was the deal with bringing oranges to school?
And as for “House With The Laughing Windows”, that painting near the beginning of trailer alone has completely creeped me out. Ye gods, WTF is that?! I won’t be able to sleep for a week.
These look fun, except for the aforementioned”Windows” and the somewhat less weird and lurid-looking “Spasmo”, both of which certainly look interesting.
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Spasmo is interesting if just because it’s actually a good film from Umberto Lenzi. Lenzi — who has directed close to 100 films — is pretty much the definition of hack. He’s never had a really strong identity as director beyond the fact that his movies are usually awful. (He’s the man behind the infamous film Cannibal Ferox though I’d actually say that Black Demons is his worst movie.) However, Spasmo is an exception from what we’ve come to expect from Umberto Lenzi. That said, the main reason I like the trailer is just because of that voice going “Spasmo? Spasmo!”
The House With The Laughing Windows — oh my God, that movie gave me nightmares. It’s not so much that the plot is anything special as much as it’s the fact that director Pupi Avati creates this total atmosphere of dread that just seems to radiate from every single scene in this movie. It also helps that this is a rare Italian horror film that was actually made for the Italian market. As such, there’s no clumsy attempts to try to fool viewers into thinking that they’re watching an American film (this was the downfall of the majority of Italian horror films in the 70s and 80s). Another bonus is that, again unlike most Italian horror films, this movie was never poorly dubbed into English. So, even though you have to watch this movie with subtitles (which some people can’t handle for some reason), you’re still getting to see the actor’s original performances and you’re not distracted by the whole lips not matching the words effect that we always get with dubbed films.
I love the oddly moralistic tone of the narrator in Teenage Mother. “She was a real tease….” Meanwhile, of course, the entire trailer is about findings as many clips of (so-called) teenage mother in her underwear as possible. lol. It’s just so totally shameless and exploitive and I love it. 🙂
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Yes, dubbing can be distracting. I have, however, seen a couple of films in which it was done pretty effectively – “Zombi 2″, and an (I assume) alternate release of “Martyrs”. I have some vision problems, so I don’t like subtitles, because I have to actually pause the film for almost every piece of dialogue. Two-hour movies can take three hours or longer. But that’s just my personal problem. And I will deal with them for a good film.
“Teenage Mother” does look like a tacit (or not so tacit) lure for pregnancy fetishists. Interestingly, though, the actual film is apparently different than portrayed by the trailer. I was curious about the odd promotional style of the trailer, so I looked it up. I found these two bits of trivia on IMDB –
“Director Jerry Gross paid a hospital $50 for the graphic footage of a baby being born that’s featured at the climax of the movie. “
“The poster and coming attraction trailer intentionally mislead by depicting the heroine as being in late-term pregnancy, when in fact in the film proper she merely lies about being pregnant.”
There are some funny user reviews that provide some additional descriptive info. Apparently, the delivery footage is unsettling to some.
This one seems to be the very essence of exploitation, with its deceptive marketing and graphic birth footage. Great stuff. And I still suspect an uncredited voiceover from Mr. Walken.
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Admitedly, I’m a bit of a subtitle snob whenever I have the option between seeing a dubbed film and a subtitled one. However, subtitles can occasionally be as much of a problem as bad dubbing. Just to name a few examples:
1) I’ve seen quite a few films recently in which the subtitles aren’t even left on screen long enough to be read, instead they flash by almost like subliminal messages. This has especially been a problem with Asian films.
2) As much as I enjoyed The Girl Who Played With Fire, the frequently snowy locations used in the film made it diffilcult to read the white subtitles, which tended to blend in with the wintery background.
3) I speak French fairly fluently and often times, when I go to see French films, I get distracted by the fact that the subtitles rarely — if ever — correctly translate what is actually being said on screen. The subtitles get the basics but they rarely, if ever, capture the individual nuance of language.
Teenage Mother is actually a fairly dull film. The trailer makes it look a lot more entertaining than it actually is. The heroine does fake being pregnant but fortunately, there’s a sex ed. class that puts everything into perspective. Old school exploitation filmmakers — and Jerry Gross was very old school — always found an excuse to include some sort of sex ed. class in all of their films. That way, they could actually promote them as being educational films (!) and avoid having to submit their films to any of the various Hollywood rating boards. Teenage Mother was a roadshow production, in that Gross sold it to various theaters — mostly drive-ins — himself. It was, I guess, the film world’s equivalent of the traveling carnival. 🙂
Sad to say, I was born too late to experience the true era of the independent exploitation and grindhouse films but at least I have things like the trailer for Teenage Mother to at least give me a hint of what it was like. 🙂
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I experience the first two problems you cited with subs. (Je ne parle pas français, donc le troisième exemple vous avez fait référence n’est pas un problème pour moi. 🙂 ) I deal with the first as stated – with the Pause button. Of course, that would be unavailable in a theater environment.
I do often have to contend with the contrast issue, as well. My first thought was to question the usual use of white for the font color. I have seen yellow, which can be more consistently visible. But constantly-changing scenes can and will make any color difficult to discern at times.
So I thought of designing software that would automatically adapt the text such that it contrasted with whatever background over which it was laid. It would change the text color to the programmed opposite of the dominant background hue,
I think it’s a great idea. Now if I can just figure out how to design software…
As for the exploitation genre, I was thinking sort of the same thing this evening. I was just a kid, so I missed out on the fun of experiencing these films at that time and in that way. They really don’t make them like that anymore. So I am really enjoying your roundups.
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