Cut the Cord: Exploitation II
July 2024. Volume 3, Issue 4.
Welcome back to Cut the Cord.
Just like last July, this month’s edition will be another exploitation flick sampler.
Every June, genre film fans convene over at FThisMovie.com for Junesploitation, their "month-long celebration of exploitation and genre films." Every day has a different theme, from aliens to kaiju to Italian horror to Bruce Lee ripoffs, and each day folks play and watch along.
2024 marked my third Junesploitation and I thought that since sites like Tubi and Freevee seem to be a great resource for those participating, I would make most of my picks Cut the Cord friendly and pass them along to you.
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
Seymour works in a skid row florist shop and is in love with his beautiful co-worker, Audrey. He creates a new plant that not only talks but cannot survive without human flesh and blood.
In honor of the late Roger Corman, many prompts for Junesploitation this year were centered around Roger, his numerous production companies, and his lasting legacy. As a result, many of the movies on this list were something he had his hands in.
I've wanted to watch this one for a long time, but because of its public domain status, its easy and wide availability over the years has meant bad transfer after bad transfer. It was practically impossible to find a watchable version for what felt like forever. Fortunately, over the past few years, professional and amateur archivists alike have realized that that same public domain status meant they could take the time to clean it up. You can find nice-looking versions easily on YouTube now.
Little Shop of Horrors is a top-5 stage musical for me and I've long been interested in the source material. Finally finding the excuse to squeeze in this 72 minutes only really showed me to what degree Howard Ashman and Alan Menken were true visionaries. I will never understand how they saw this movie and went, “There’s something here…”
Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (1979)
To salvage his job and the circulation of his magazine, an editor decides to publish an expose revealing the inside story of the famed cheerleading squad and plants his reporter/girlfriend among the girls.
A large contributing reason that the Dallas Cowboys became America's Team is their cheerleading squad, affectionately known as America's Sweethearts. The short-skirted, tall-booted, fit-bodied young ladies captured the hearts of Cowboys fans, yes, but particularly adolescent boys across the nation. In 1979, they were everywhere: bedroom posters, magazine spreads, and television specials made them synonymous with institutions like The Rockettes.
It would only make sense that they would get their own narrative film and on January 14th, ABC's Sunday Night Movie promised to "find out what really goes on behind the scenes with the most gorgeous girls in America" according to a print advert they ran. I'm not sure this does that, unless the audition process does actually require an initial round of doing nothing but look pretty and a semi-final audition freestyle dance to "Disco Inferno." I guess that's why the Cowboys produced that show Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team on CMT for all those years (and also that new Netflix series.) To set the record straight. (There does seem to be some public fascination with the audition process for these extremely competitive and highly selective tropes. There's that famous who-knows-if-its-true anecdote about Rockettes having to apply lipstick and leave a perfect smooch mark on their own legs during a high kick.)
Bond girl Jane Seymour is the leading attraction (Bucky f*cking Dent, the New York Yankee, makes an appearance as a Cowboy - the '70s were weird) and I suppose pre-teen boys and perverts get their money's worth of her in the skimpy outfit in the movie's final scenes. For the most part, however, it's a touching story about the bond of sisterhood. It's about the ladies being there for each other during the audition process and moments of camaraderie during things like grueling rehearsals.In the film's climax, a few of them help another out of an abusive relationship. Can you believe it? It's more A League of Their Own than Debbie Does Dallas.
The Intruder (1962)
A man in a gleaming white suit comes to a small Southern town on the eve of integration. He calls himself a social reformer. But what he does is stir up trouble–trouble he soon finds he can’t control.
It must've taken a lot of guts to make this movie. Roger Corman puts his own money on the line to make a film about integration - right in the middle of integration protests from both sides. Shatner gives a hell of a performance and whole-heartedly committing to a piece of shit character before any hint of fame can't be the right career move.* If they made this movie now, I'd be blown away. Making it 60 years ago is unfathomable. Both guys, and all involved, find themselves on the right side of things.
*I was always a Star Wars kid and never gave a damn about Star Trek. In preparation for my Summer of '89 series, I did a Trek binge and a ton of research. Watching both this film and Shatner's Captain Kirk was mind-boggling. I have the same feelings about his work that I have about Dakota Johnson. Do with that what you will.
Bad Boy Bubby (1993)
Bad Boy Bubby is just that: a bad boy. So bad, in fact, that his mother has kept him locked in their house for his entire thirty years, convincing him that the air outside is poisonous. After a visit from his estranged father, circumstances force Bubby into the waiting world, a place which is just as unusual to him as he is to the world.
I've wanted to see Bad Boy Bubby since June 17, 2009. Why do I know the exact date, you ask? That's when filmmaker Travis Betz recommended the movie on a now-defunct YouTube channel called The Rough Cuts. Remember those channels where each contributor was assigned a day of the week? For The Rough Cuts, a movie review channel, it was Coolduder on Monday, McGoiter on Tuesday, Travis Betz aka The Receptionist on Wednesday, K80Blog on Thursday, and ImJakeSrsly on Friday. I didn't need to look that up, I still remember it to this day. I watched religiously. So many of the movies recommended on that channel lived in a mental watchlist for a long time before I started keeping an actual list on Letterboxd. Some I've seen (Bad Ronald, Troll 2, Lo) since, while others (The Peanut Butter Solution, The Dark Backward, Crawlspace) still take up room on my watchlist.
I've tried Bad Boy Bubby many times over the years. It pops up on and quickly disappears from Tubi from time to time and just about every time I catch it, I turn it on. However, I've never been able to stomach it past the first ten minutes. This story, which Betz describes as what would happen if "Hal Ashby's Being There met Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump," is about a mentally stunted man who has been kept in captivity by his mother for over 30 years. The opening scenes alone feature incest, physical and mental abuse, and animal cruelty. Every time I've tried to turn it back on to muscle through, it has disappeared from Tubi.
Well, I decided to finally finish it for this Junesploitation. It does get decidedly less gross, but it's never less perverse. When Bubby does enter the world, people treat him like a freak, a pervert, and an amusement, while he rapes, murders, and learns nothing about himself or the world. It's a hard, humiliating watch. I'm glad I've finally finished it, if for no other reason that I won't feel the need to watch it again.
Hard Bounty (1995)
Donnie and her whores strap on guns, saddle up, and ride out seeking justice.
Jim Wynorski directs this story about prostitutes who grab some guns to get revenge on cowboys who did them wrong. As you can imagine, there are a lot of boobs. I watched three movies for Junesploitation's Westerns Day: Hard Bounty (mainly just boobs), Scooby-Doo! Shaggy's Showdown (I was hoping this would be a candidate for Underrated Doo, but not exactly...) and the first quarter of Kevin Costner's sprawling Horizon: An American Saga (depending on how much you like westerns and not knowing who anybody is, your mileage may vary.)
Hard Bounty was shot at the recently reopened Old Tuscon Studios and looks and feels like movie sets on a studio lot, which I'm a total sucker for. My grandparents retired in Arizona and took me to Old Tuscon when I was a kid. I still remember everything about it. I think I'll have to make another trip...
Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979)
A group of rock-music-loving students, with the help of the Ramones, take over their school to combat its newly installed oppressive administration.
We have a buddy who comes over every Tuesday for what we quite cleverly call Tuesday Movie Night. Seeing as we're both public school teachers, I like to show a school-related movie on the last Tuesday before summer break begins, commemorating ten months of hard work. Last year, it was Bad Teacher (boy, she was one bad teacher). This year's screening perfectly aligned with Junesploitation's New World Pictures Day, celebrating the films from Corman's production and distribution company, so we watched Rock 'n' Roll High School.
Not only was this my favorite first-time watch of Junesploitation by far, but it's one of my favorite new-to-me movies this year. PJ Soles plays Riff Randell (great name), a high school student much more concerned with the music of the Ramones than anything she has to sit through in school. She's so incredibly charming. I fell in love with her. Sure, she plays a high schooler, which is weird, but she was older than I am now when she filmed it, so it's cool. As a teacher, I should hate her screw-education attitude (and the climax where they blow the freaking school to smithereens), but it's just so infectious. When she sang the title song, I couldn't help but sing along. I sang it around the house for days.
The entire film is like that, silly but joyous. It made me love the music of the Ramones, made me second-guess just how oppressive education is, and made me laugh harder than I have at any joke all year (the rat who listens to rock music made me choke.)
Colossal (2016)
A woman discovers that severe catastrophic events are somehow connected to the mental breakdown from which she’s suffering.
When Junesploitation's Kaiju Day rolled around, I wasn't in the mood for any of the classics or go-tos, so I decided to rewatch a movie that I first saw during its original 2017 limited theatrical release (the only film I've seen at Ithaca's iconic Cinemapolis) and have thought about it from time to time since.
In Colossal, Anne Hathaway's mental health/alcoholism physically manifests as a kaiju creature all the way across the world in Seoul. Both she and Jason Sudeikis play interesting twists on their normal personas. It’s much more drama than kaiju flick, but it still has some fun monster stuff to go along with the strong performances. I liked it better the first time I saw it, but it's worth a first-time watch for anyone who thinks the premise sounds interesting.
Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011)
A chronicle of the long career of American filmmaker Roger Corman, the most tenacious and ingenious low-budget producer and director in the US film industry, a pioneer of independent filmmaking and discoverer of new talent.
Let's wrap up this list with one final dedication to Roger Corman, this career retrospective documentary. It's kind of amazing that this documentary came out when he was 85 and he still wasn't done working and making movies.
It's also stunning to see all of the people who show up to appreciate and thank him. When you see them all in one place, you can see what an impact he had on the industry. Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Ron Howard, William Shatner, Bruce Dern, David Carradine, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, Peter Fonda, Pam Grier, and Penelope Spheeris - a few of whom have movies appearing elsewhere on this list. There's a moment when Nicholson gets choked up talking about Roger and...just...damn...
For a guy who made such crazy exploitation movies, he seemed like the nicest, most down-to-earth guy. Rest in peace, Roger. Thanks for everything.
Credit: Each plot synopsis comes from Letterboxd via TMDb.