Even as a Brit, when I think of exploitation cinema, I tend to think
of Roger Corman, Russ Meyer, Mom and Dad, Ed Wood, Radley Metzger, and
Chesty Morgan before I remember anything produced in my own country.
I think of David Friedman, Al Adamson, I Spit on Your Grave, and Candy
Stripe Nurses rather than the homegrown trash that circulated through
the British fleapits and then briefly invaded hundreds of thousands
of households in the first years of home video. I even think of European
exploitation, of Jesse Franco, Jose Larraz, and Lina Romay, before I
recall the Poverty Row sleaze that was churned out of Wardour Street,
London, on a regular basis until the end of the seventies.
What does this tell you, apart from the fact that I think too much
about exploitation cinema? Well, in addition to noting that nothing
travelled quite as badly as British exploitation, it also tells you
that there’s very little fondness for it, even in its homeland
and despite the gently ironic nostalgia that is so fashionable in current
film discussions.
But that is not to say the British exploitation pic isn't worth remembering.
There are some of us who miss it. We miss its toe-curling political
incorrectness, its shabby vulgarity, its embarrassed actors, and its
toilet-roll scripts. And, bad as they were, British films like The Amorous
Milkman (1974), Big Zapper (1973), and House of Whipcord (1974) at least
remind of us a time when British cinema wasn't quite so worthy, self-conscious,
and pleased with itself as it is today.
To great filmmaking nations such as the United States and France,
British cinema has never been something to take particularly seriously.
Although it enjoyed a bit of a flowering during the 1960s and very early
'70s - when, with U.S. funding, its arthouse appeal blossomed thanks
to some slightly dangerous, groundbreaking movies, and when its commercial
kudos were inflated by James Bond and a host of sexy, imposing theatre
actors - it has since largely declined to a state of low-budget seriousness,
high-budget catastrophe, and the occasional successful crossover pic,
in which social comment is fused with a dose of popular triumphalism:
Billy Elliot (2000), The Full Monty (1997), Brassed Off (1996), etc.
Almost entirely missing from the slate of British releases during the
last 20 years, however, has been the exploitation film. Admittedly,
in the U.S., the halcyon days of the grindhouse exploitation film are
also a distant memory, thanks to the arrival of home video and the unreal
escalation of the cost of film production. But here at least the genre
has survived in different forms. The days when Death Weekend (1976)
and Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972) could pack a drive-in
week after week may be largely over, and many may be thankful for that,
but there are scores of steamy soft-porn noir thrillers that head straight-to-video
or cable TV each year, and The Blair Witch Project (1999) is simply
another in a line of exploitation movies that got lucky, as well as
being an example of the affordable future of the genre. And what is
Paul Verhoeven's U.S. oeuvre if not just high-budget, Hollywood-stamped
exploitation fare?
The fact is that where the exploitation film has been, to some extent,
regenerated in the United States, it was resoundingly killed off in
the UK. There were indisputable financial reasons for this, but equally
damaging was the sneery superiority and stuffily PC attitude of the
few British film production companies and the culturally apathetic government
that prevailed in the 1980s. Still, it must be said that the very ineptitude
of many of England's exploitation "mavericks" also contributed
to their genre's demise.
Back in the late fifties, however, the British exploitation film had
begun to thrive, boosted by the success of Hammer horror and the snail-paced
relaxation of film censorship. A host of two-bit film outfits were created
in the wake of Hammer's domestic and U.S. successes: Planet, Independent
Artists, Protelco, and Compton (later Tigon) all churned out sub-Gothic
hysteria, sensationally "messagey" sci-fi and rubber-masked-monster
pics for hungry double-feature consumption on both sides of the Atlantic.
And when the censors allowed "tastefully" shot nudist films
to be shown in the early fifties, the next ten years saw a plethora
of naturist "documentaries," which in the late 60s gave way
to the "sex education" film and, in the '70s, to the soft-porn
"adult comedy."
At its height in the late '60s and early '70s, British exploitation
fare was attracting U.S. co-production and distribution: AIP teamed
with Tigon and loaned out Vincent Price for the now highly regarded
Witchfinder General (1968), Columbia Pictures jumped onto the skinflick
comedy bandwagon with the Confessions series (1974-77), and films such
as Deathline (aka Raw Meat, 1972) were taking the genre to more interesting
levels. During this productive period, at the even lower end of the
spectrum, a handful of Poverty Row filmmakers had begun to make regular
contributions to the grindhouse circuit. This article focuses on three
of them: Lindsay Shonteff, Pete Walker, and Stanley Long.
Walker and Shonteff are largely representative of a number of producers
and directors whose careers traversed the burgeoning sex film industry
in the late '60s and attempted to branch into other genres, but Long
remained pragmatically committed to the initially lucrative British
sex film (although he certainly appeared to have no emotional fondness
for it). His work is particularly representative of the tepid smut that
passed for British soft porn in the 1970s.
When, in the mid-'70s, U.S. companies withdrew almost all support for
British feature production, and the country's own higher-profile companies
(Hammer, Amicus, EMI) slipped into recession and unproductiveness, it
was left to these men to sustain not just the British exploitation film
but British popular cinema itself. Sadly, they weren't really up to
the job. But filmmakers such as Shonteff, Walker, and Long should be
remembered more for their cheerful resilience, dogged perseverance,
and obliviousness to fashionable thinking and popular trends than for
their films. In many cases their films are desperately, desperately
bad. But it is instructive to see that, in the early years, they made
money - perhaps more a testament to the desperation of the thrill-hungry
British public than to any merit of the filmmakers.
