Schaefer’s study is less a soup-to-nuts chro­


nology of the exploitation industry than a social history that examines, category-by-category, the roughly 40-year phenomena that began in ear­ nest with the postwar VD titles and continued with the anti-dope scare films (MARIHUANA, SHE SHOULDA SAID “NO!”) and vice exposés (SLAVES IN BONDAGE, GAMBLING WITH SOULS) of the 1930s, the nudist docudramas made before (THE UNASHAMED) and after (THE GARDEN OF EDEN) WWI1, the stripper reels and burlesque compila­ tions (Irving Klaw’s TEASERAMA), the atrocity films (THE LOVE LIFE OF ADOLPH HITLER, MAU MAU) and the oddments that fell between these desig­ nations—perhaps most infamously, Dwain Esper’s MANIAC, which retooled Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” as an alleged treatise on mental ill­ ness. Because no study of this ignoble cinematic subclass would be complete without some dis­ cussion of its grimy allure, Schaefer devotes half of his hefty study to analyzing the tricks of the trade, the ballyhoo and razzmatazz, the flim-flam and fakery that lured audiences away from Holly­ wood fare with the promise of the forbidden. CJn- like their Hollywood betters, the exploiteers reached back to their carnival roots, embroider­ ing their presentation with the larger-than-life pitch of the medicine show, which condescended to inform and amaze in equal proportions. However outwardly lurid, most exploitation films betrayed a decidedly conservative agenda that nonetheless cut them little slack with the censors, who de­ nounced them roundly as unwholesome, subver­ sive and—most damning of all—“foreign.” Working below the production standards even


of Poverty Row, often with amateur crews and actors grabbed off the street, exploitation pioneers such as J.D. Kendis, Louis Sonney, Willis Kent and Dwain and Hildegarde Esper eked out an occasionally profitable but always unstable exist­ ence churning out titles “for the masses, not the classes” and locking antlers with regional censors and states rights’ arbiters. Readers cold to the subject but for memories of late night broadcasts of REEFER MADNESS will be astounded to read of the legislative sturm und drang kicked up over the exploitation game—yet the outraged filibus­ tering, gubernatorial grandstanding, and pious profiteering that more often served political resumé-building than the movie-going public will seem all too contemporary. With Washington politicos and Hollywood


mouthpieces still debating America’s moral obli­ gation to clean up the motion picture industry, with such “real life” television programming as


AMERICA’S DEADLIEST CAR CHASES and TEMPTA­TION ISLAND pulling in big audiences, and with feature films like Darren Aronofsky’s REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) warning that the perils of addiction are dismemberment, sexual degrada­ tion and insanity, the moral of the story remains that the more things change, the more they stay the same. With its lurid title and jacket design, BOLD!


DARING! SHOCKING! TRÜE! manages a little bally­ hoo of its own by luring readers to its 400-1- pages (which include a 40 page filmography of perti­ nent titles) with the seeming guarantee of cheap thrills and justifiable belly laughs that have long been considered part and parcel of the exploita­ tion film experience. But Schaefer’s well-founded and persuasive analysis never condescends to its subject and proves itself a worthy follow-up to Felicia Feaster and Bret Wood’s FORBIDDEN FRC1IT: THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE EXPLOITATION FILM (re­ viewed VW 57:74). Trash film fans may want to keep their distance; although Schaefer’s writing style is as approachable as it is fact-filled, this is a serious and exhaustively researched academic study that may even tell aficionados of the bi­ zarre—as did the films themselves for many a moviegoer during the first half of the 20th Cen­ tury—considerably more than they want to know. —Richard Harland Smith


THE FILMS OF JOHN CARPENTER By John Kenneth Muir


McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640: June 2000. 265 pp., $48.50 (hardcover), To order: 1-800-253-2187


Little more than a year after publishing WES


CRAVEN: THE ART OF HORROR [reviewed VW 73:74], McFarland publishing dynamo John Kenneth Muir returns with this ample study of the works of John Carpenter. THE FILMS OF JOHN CARPENTER is organized


similarly to Muir’s Craven book, offering an over­ view of the director’s oeuvre, synopses and analy­ ses of each Carpenter-directed picture, a chapter on films written/produced (but not directed) by Carpenter, another on Carpenter’s TV work (de­ liberately excluding ELVIS, ZUMA BEACH, and the two TV Westerns he scripted as “non-genre,” though the book’s title does not suggest a genre- specific overview), and a series of Muir’s trade­ mark appendices, listing some of the directing opportunities Carpenter turned down, the slasher films made in the wake of HALLOWEEN (1978), people who’ve worked with Carpenter more than


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