I am a film student in the process of defending my thesis on body-horror cinema, your video was VERY important for the research. I came here just to thank you for having made this content public
Okay, good, even-handed overview from someone with an affinity for the form. I would add that Mario Bava is probably the godfather of Italian exploitation, and a superb cinematographer/director. Mostly but not exclusively horror: titles of interest include Black Sunday, Blood and Black Lace, Danger:Diabolik, Twitch of the Death Nerve, Lisa and the Devil, etc. Also, when Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert were wrote the first draft of the screenplay for Beyond the Valley, the Manson murders had happened, but no one knew who did it. It was something at the forefront of everyone in Hollywood's mind. Sharon Tate had also been in the original Valley of the Dolls. And BVD is basically a satire of how divorced from reality Hollywood had become at the time. It would have been very difficult, and kind of dishonest, for them not to comment on the murders in some way. I would also add Michael Weldon's original Psychotronic Encyclopedia as a must own for fans of fringe filmmaking. There are some inaccuracies due to the fact that it was written in 1983-- a time when very little of this stuff was even on VHS. But the writing is sharp and funny, and it really shaped my own perspective on these films.
PS: The king of Brazilian "garbage mouth" exploitation films was Jose Mojica Marins, and his alter ego Zé do Caixão-- later kind of Americanized as Coffin Joe. In 1970ish, his amazing film Awakening of the Beast got banned outright, so his output in the 70s was greatly diminished. No one wanted to give him money, and he ended up mostly shooting porn under fake names. In the 80s/90s, the great Something Weird Video started putting his films out on VHS, causing a resurgence of interest. A very promising blu ray box set called Inside the Mind of Coffin Joe is coming from Alpha Video later this month.
You skipped the British exploitation movies. For those who don't know, during the 60's, we had Hammer and the Carry On movies (comedies that starred a group of rep actors in numerous films, Carry On Cowboy, Carry On Constable, Carry on Doctor, Carry on Screaming, etc.) But by the early 70's both Hammer and the Carry On had started including a little bit of bare flesh. T&A. This lead to a whole slew of terrible British sex comedies. Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Confessions of a Taxi Driver, Adventures of a Private Eye, The Amorous Milkman. There were lots of them. Mostly unfunny and unsexy. (Unless you were a teenage boy, at the time, as I was). However, they did help bring about the Feminist debate to the surface. Were these films liberating and revolutionary (as the actresses claimed), in up-tight Britain, or insulting and demeaning, as feminists claimed? They certainly lead to more nudity on British TV, and slowly helped loosen up the British a little bit. Of course, in these woke times, Victorian values seem to once again have a strangle hold on British film and Television.
