Hey, everybody, This is Chuck and welcome to this week's edition of the Stuff You Should Know Saturday Curated selects. Uh. This week I decided to go with how Exploitation Films Work from April four, two thousand eleven. And Uh, this one was an easy pick because I like all of our movie episodes and I think Josh might have put this one together way back in the day when we recorded it, and it was just really cool, and um, not only do we get to talk a lot about just some of the great exploitation films, but just a little bit about the history and how they came about. So I just remember really enjoying recording this one and got great feedback on it. So give it a shot, and if you've already listened to it, give it another shot, is what I suggest. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. This is Stuff you Should Know the podcast and kind of a special edition. Frankly, I am a little excited, Chuck, I'm a little giddy. Shut your mouth. That's yeah, okay, sure, Um, this is Uh, this is our first ever movie centric podcast, right, movie centric for sure. Yeah, we've mentioned movies of course all the time, but this one is like, this is all about movies. Um So this is by by popular request to an extent, people want to see like, um I want they want to hear us talk about movies and just do a movie podcast. So we decided to focus on exploitation films. This is also probably the first podcast that we're gonna say if you are a teacher of children in eighth grade or younger, and you're using this as a teaching tool, you might want to go to the one before this or the one after. Yeah, we don't generally try to alienate on it says we're not attempting to now. It's just a natural byproduct of the exploitation film. I can't talk about exploitation films without talking about some lurid subject matter. You can't say exploitation without they weren't exploiting, just people being nice, right, nice exploitation. So, Chuck, I went and saw a movie the other day called I Saw the Devil. It's a Korean movie. It's by the guy who did um The Tale of Two Sisters. I think he said, more violent than Old Boy. Yeah, they got old Boy is one of the main characters. And I've seen Old Boy. I've seen um uh, what's the other one? He did the Vampire movie first. I think it's pretty good. It was okay, um this one is it's the most violent thing I've ever seen in my life. It's the most graphically violent movie I've ever seen in my life. Um. The only the only reason it, like, I was able to complete because I'm like, this is it's a movie, but I walked out of it like it's so over the top, it's so gory. It's clearly an exploitation film. Yeah. Yeah, but the problem is is, like, really, if you start to look around John Hughes, films technically are exploitation films. The Breakfast Club is technically an exploitation film. Yeah, there's a big wave of teen exploitation films and we'll get to that. But yeah, you're right. So one of the broader definitions of exploitation films is basically anything that's really like over the top, that is beyond reality, um or that maybe focuses on people's fears, um uh, their their sexuality, um and basically just kind of serves it up in a larger than life manner. That's one way of looking at exploitation films. Yeah, you're basically they're exploiting, um, some of the seedier aspects of humanity most times, sure, like murder or sex, like weird sex, that kind of thing sex, weird sex, teenage is rebelling against parents, sure, like weird science. Have you ever been to a party where a couch shot out of the chimney and into the pond? I mean it's a pretty nice party. I don't think it's ever really happened, you know. Um, So that's the vast definition of exploitation. But you and I are um kind of qualified to teach a cinema cinema class at like maybe a low level community college at this point after the amount of research we've done in this, and we found that academically there's a there's a much more distinct um definition for exploitation, and it's seemingly interchangeable term grindhouse. Right, Yeah, what's the Is there a definition definition? It's it's more like a time frame, so from like nineteen nineteen when they really first started making movies to I think nineteen sixty nineteen fifty nine when the Haze act went away, that was exploitation, and then after that it became grindhouse. It's my understanding. Okay, so let's do this all right, Well, that's the old joke, was that? Uh? In In the awesome documentary American Grindhouse, which documents this this era of filmmaking, the old joke, one of the guy says is that um exploitation films began five minutes after the camera was invented, the motion picture camera, because the guy was like the directors like to his girlfriend, Hey, would you mind taking your clothes off to the camera exactly, So it's it says something about the human condition that you invent the film camera, and the first moving images were often lurid um Edison's film that showed clips of like decapitations and violence and guys fighting and naked women um as film tests. So it's just that says a lot about people, like, all right, now we know how to capture things, so let's capture sex and violence first, right and um although that really kind of jibed with public taste, or at least public fascination, Uh, it didn't jibe with the prevailing standards, the agreed upon standards, right right? Uh, I thin Heast in nineteen nineteen. But the first exploitation film was Trafficking Souls or Wild New York Sleeps and that, like you said, exploitation often plays into fear. Is that played into the fear at the time of the White slave trade? Uh. Budget of fifty seven grand and gross four and fifty thousand dollars, which is a lot of doubt. That is a ton of though. And that was Universal Pictures and they went, hey, come onto something here. Right after that was released the Hayes Code. Um. Will Hayes was the Postmaster General and Presbyterian elder um and he was making a hundred grand a year during the depression. Unbelievable, right he Uh. He basically said, like, look, we need um, we need to apply some moral standards to filmmaking. There's decapitation, there's naked breast, there's there's white white slavery, Like we need to we need to pure this up. Right. Well, actually there wasn't nudity yet like those early test films. There were, but nudity. We'll get to that later. But yes, that's what Hayes trying to do. And like um prohibition didn't exactly quell drinking um. The Hayze Code actually sort of gave rise to the exploitation movement. Yeah, it's just like just like prohibition, just like marijuana prohibition, just like well any drug prohibition. Any time you say you can't do this, you can't have something that you want, the somebody else is going to operate in a black market. A black market's going to spring up, simple economics, and that's exactly what happened, and that's where exploitation cinema came up. It's like, you can't get this from Hollywood because Hollywood has to play by the rules. But my production studio is my model t and let's go make this movie. Give me some money. I'm going to film a child being born close up and put it in the movies. Yes, and you can do that. You can make your movies all day long. But if they're never exhibited, then what good are you doing or not? Like they were trying to do some good, but you're not making any scratch. So the forty Thieves they talked about in the in the documentary, where these filmmakers and exhibitors basically that traveled around like Carney's setting up these sort of guerrilla film screenings and some places sort of out of the way where they can't get caught. And that was, uh, for the first time, you know, they were taking films outside of the main stream different Sometimes they weren't even theaters. They would show themen like VFW halls if you want to go see Birth of the Baby films. Apparently they were popular. Yeah, that was a whole genre, early genre of well and so was early on a lot of the film centered around like how to wear a condom and sex hygiene films. Yeah, because there was no information about that out there, and so exploitation filmmakers, whether um, disingenuously or genuinely, um, we're presenting their stuff like this is a public service. People need to know this and and making movies about it. But also and people were going on that excuse as well, like well, I needed I need to know about this. But at the same time, it's like I want to see this the craziest thing I'll ever see in my life, you know, on screen or they argued a lot of times that they were cautionary tales. If they were about drugs or violence, they would say, hey, this could happen to you, so you should educate yourself. But what they really want to do is get the movie scene and make some money. Exactly um paramount decision of this is pretty big. The Supreme Court voted that movie studios could no longer own their own movie theaters. At the time, you know, there would be like the Paramount Theater in Hollywood from the paramount film production company they would show their movies. Supreme Court said no more. And all of a sudden, exploitation films became a little bit more legit because the Hayes coat kind of fell apart. And this is post World War two, so people have seen a lot of death recently, well out of death, and then are they thought ladies in a suggestive roles were good for morale And there was a little bit of loosening on the sex thing a little bit post World War two. And that led to another sub genre um of exploitation film, the nudist colony film, which were which were pawned off as documentaries. A lot of well most of these were pawned off as documentaries which legitimized them. But really it was maybe maybe it actually was filmed that a news can't probably not. Mostly they were actors and actresses just engaged in archery naked or um long walks naked. There could be no sex still that was still taboo, but it was just like naked pretty people at a nudist colony, which is interesting because you're not a nudist, will come learn about them exactly? Yeah. After that, through the history we had things like, um, the teen like you said, the teen Rebellion of the fifties with that rebels out of Call as in Black Boar Jungle, and movies like that. All of a sudden, we're targeted specifically at teens, which was new, and then drive in theaters were built so teenagers could see movies where their parents weren't going to be. Apparently the adults didn't go to drive ins a lot at first. It's all kids. I didn't know that, so they showed exploitation films and then later the beach films, which were marketed as It's silly, It's Frankie avalon, but they were decidedly weird and overtly sexual sometimes and then chuck if you if if you'll notice, Um, we're kind of progressing along in this um um chronological order, and each thing is kind of being built on the last. It was very much a step process, right, and um, apparently that that was kind of the form that exploitation filmmaking followed until nineteen sixty. It was just it was centered around drugs, violence, sex, and in a lot of ways they were presented as documentaries. They might not have a plot, um, And basically it was one person would make some film and it would just break all the rules, and then then a bunch of other people would make similar films and the same that that was the way it went. And then um, in the nineties sixties, things just started to go every which way, all sorts of directions. Right, So nudity nudity films were a long standing thread of exploitation films and then they probably reached their pinnacle with Russ Meyers, right, King of the Nudies is what he's called. Yeah, he was the first guy too. He's significant because he was the first director to have films featuring nudity that actually we're uh dramatic narratives and had plots and characters, and they weren't classified as documentaries anymore. And then the Roughies came along and they offered up violence for the not first time, but uh big time for the first time. And uh that has a lot to do with the fact that it was the sixties and Kennedy was shot in the United States was just becoming increasingly violent. America lost its innocence. Yeah. Um. And the other thing that really happened in the nineteen sixties was the Hayes Code officially won away, was replaced by the m p a A and the the I guess the longstanding UM prohibition on Hollywood producing exploitation films was it was lessened decreased, and so studios were like, oh, we can make money over here too, Well, let's start making exploitation films. And this is where grindhouse was born. So my uh cinema professor definition of grindhouse is big budget, studio backed exploitation films. Okay, yeah, that's that's mine. I like it. That's gonna be a quiz question later. I'll go with that. Um. Actually, back up one second. We got to mention Herschel Gordon Lewis. He was a director, um, who had a co director. I can't remember the other guy's named you. Anyway, he was he was a co director and he was one of these exploitation guys that was getting frustrated because there weren't a lot of places to show your movies, so it was pretty crowded marketplace. So he said, what's the one taboo that like, people will pay to see that you you're allowed to show in theaters, but that uh, studios won't make And it was Gore. Oh yeah. He was the first guy to start showing really disgusting bloody scenes in his movie Blood Feast. Blood Feast, which actually was three years after Psycho, and Psycho also did a lot for the mainstream, ushering in of a little bit of Gore in that. But there's like a shot of blood following Janet Lee's murder, you know, which is I imagine it's pretty graphic for Hollywood, and that's what you think of. You're like, oh, those stupid sixties, but that's you know, they're they're so naive. Like that was controversial, not really though, Like if you stepped just slightly outside of Hollywood, you ran into things like Blood Feast or you know, Last House on the Left, Yes, that's nineteen seventy two, I think, yeah, Wes Craven. So that was important because Um, all of a sudden, a drugs started. Uh, well three things. Political uh themes started popping up, sexual freedom, the youth generation. Drugs started popping up in movies for the first time, drug use. Well not for the first time, we'll talk about reefer madness, um, but teenagers were depicted as victims of violence for the first time. Like Last House on the Left, I believe is kind of regarded as the first teen slasher film. Yeah, Wes Craven, It's it was almost a snuff film. It was almost regarded like that. It's pretty hardcore, but yeah, it definitely blood Feast definitely allowed Last House on the Left to come around. But it also probably more directly UM formed the foundation for UM slasher exploitation, like Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare on Elm Street. Absolutely, um My Bloody Valentine's another big one. Yeah the Crazy Oh yeah that was in a original right, there's a remake now, I think, yeah, yeah remakes. Uh so that brings us we're in the seventies. UM. Politically charged movies brought race into the to the mix, and all of a sudden, we had black exploitation or black exploitation UH movement starting exploiting the civil rights movement basically. But the cool thing about black exploitation films is for the first time you had African Americans as heroes. Yeah, and not heroes in a typical sense, not even anti heroes, but heroes that were like, they didn't ride into town on on a white horse or wearing a white hat. They very clearly wore black hats if need be, Like they would engage in crime, they would murder people if need be. They were um. They were basically like the um face of Black America coming out of the Civil rights are like, we're ticked off, you know, and we're gonna stick it to the white man, stick it to the man, and we're gonna do it in these movies. Chuck, I know the movie. You're about to um to mention. Let's this is it? You keep the fathing me. You my man, you're my favorite man. Can take it, baby. So yes, that was a landmark film for a lot of reasons. One because it grows four million bucks and it made the major studio say, hey, you know what the black hero is marketable? Yeah, well you haven't said the title yet. Oh I didn't know. You gotta say it, right, to Melvin Van People's film Sweet Sweet Backs, badass song that was well done. That was Melvin Van Van Peebles, whose last name may sound familiar. He's the father of Mario Van Peebles. For your younger cats listening to this one, Um, cats are age, actually younger cats, because he's kind of like, okay, so cats are Yeah, that's Mario Van People's dad, you know, New Jack City. Yeah, exactly. Um. So Melvin Van Peoples made this movie. He produced it, he raised the money for it, he wrote it, he directed it, he starred in it. And it was the beginning of the black exploitation sub genre, which is one of the most important genres of any American cinema absolutely ever, absolutely, and so considering how important that subgenre is, this quote from Time Magazine's film critic Richard corless Um should really hit home. Sweet Sweet Back uh is quote, without question or competition, the most influential movie by a black filmmaker. So this is a really big deal, right, yeah, And it was. It was just quickly on the plot. It was about a black man who was a jiggielow who had as a male prostitute for you younger cant and he had a deal worked out with the cops where he was. He said, you know, you can arrest me as much as you want, release me right afterward. Fill your quota. It's all good. And then one day while the arrest is going down, they the cops attack a black panther and Sweet Sweet Back kills one of the cops and then just said, he just goes on a rampage against the white man after that. Ye. So you've got um prostitution, um, tons and tons of nudity, insects um, lots of violence um, and uh other crimes all wrapped up into a black power theme. That's right. Uh. And then to top it all off, you have what is arguably a child sex scene starring Mario van People's Melvivan People's son I think age six, having sex as Sweet Sweet Back. It's his first sexual encounter with an older person. Um. And in the cold podcast, if he became a cult leader, he would have taken a younger bride, remember I am. That's right. So if you're interested in in that movie and you can't get enough of Sweet Sweet Backs bad ass song, um, you could also check out bad Ass exclamation Point, which is Mario van People's biopic about his father making that movie. That's right, And I have not seen that, but I wanted to at the time, and it just sort of slipped at the cracks. There's always Netflix, baby, that's right. Uh and uh what happened with um, Sweet Sweet Back was that, like I said, that told the studios, hey, that we can market this, and so they got a little more mainstream with movies like super Fly, which were a little safer shaft shaft movies at wide audiences would enjoy as well. Yeah, the ones that didn't scare the man exactly like Cheft's a good guy. He doesn't take any guff from them, and but the people he's not taking guff from or the cops, who's really on the same side as That's right. So chuck um blaxploitation obviously huge affected everything from um, you know, Menace to Society to Blackula. All of that came from Sweet Sweet Back. And um we mentioned the guy who directed this next movie, Russ Myers. Um, this is probably a seminal work. Let's listen to this clip from the trailer. You ladies and gentlemen go go for a wild, wild ride with the White Cats, but be aware the sweetest kittens, have the sharpest claud for your own safety. See Faster pussy Cats Kill Kill wild when wild whales race the fastest pussy cats and they'll be jilling your stuff on this kid then hanging it up. Nothing. He's got nothing to do with the money. The money, jack and chill. They make a maffia look like brownies. They make the mafia look like brownies. That's right. That says quite a bit about them. Um. So this that was faster Pussycat Kill Kill Um. In the nineteen sixty five Rust Myers UM basically women exploitation film NUDI film. Remember Russ Myers was King of the Nuties. He made twenty six movies. But this is probably at the very least is his best known, uh, if not like his masterpiece. Yeah, and he hatched a slew of I mean not that he wasn't legit. He was, but what mainstream people would callegit. Filmmakers were came up through the Russ Meyer film camp. Basically Yeah, so it's pretty cool. Yeah, UM and rust Me are also little known fact. Another movie that's mentioned in this article. There's an article on the site, by the way called ten Noteworthy exploitation films that this is based on written by you yeah, um, which I shall only recommend going to read because it has a lot of extra stuff we're not going to cover in this one, or at least extra movies. But um russ Meyer directed a movie called Beyond the Valley of the Dolls too, right, which was the bastard son of the legitimate film. But Beyond Valley and Dolls is a jiggle fest written by none other than Roger Ebert's right, yeah, the movie Roger Ebert ever wrote, Yeah, he had aum. Yeah, it was a very brief career. But that's a that's an illustrious one really. Uh yeah, So if you're going to talk about the plot, a faster pussycat kill kill um. And I say that because there's three exclamation points. Exclamation point kill three exclamation points. Okay, I thought it was a comment then too. All right, either way, that's a lot of punctuation for a film title. And uh, it was about three bisexual go go dancers. They go on a crime spree out in the desert and what do they do? They end up killing a man or no, they kill the man in a couple keep a girl. They basically empower her, yes, come on with her by murdering her boyfriend, and she ends up on the crimes for you with them, and they basically end up going to an isolated house with a wheelchair bound old man and his son's who's allege they're all leeches. They have these women, Yeah, but they don't know that these women are tough ladies. And the men and his son, the man and his sons apparently um are allegedly have a large amount of cash statched in this house. So it's kind of like a standoff of of m gall who will come out on top? Well, and you know who comes out on top? Uh. And this film was noteworthy for one big reason was that, Uh, there's a lot of dualism towards gender. So on one hand, he's exploiting these women and apparently got women in their first trimester of pregnancy so they were more voluptuous. Yeah, not in this film, but in his other films he he would hire um. I can't remember the lady's name, but the star of Fester pussy Kill Kill is in other Russ Meyers films, and um he made sure that she was like well to her third first trimester to to enhance her natural bustinus. That's right, her bosom if you will. But the script, like I said, it was dualism because while he did that, it also empowered women because the women in his films bowed to no man. No, they were the champs, they were the they were heroines really for the first time. But they were they were objectified very clearly. But at the same time, if you follow the script and really look at their characters, then yeah, they're they're powerful women. And this uh kind of kicked off a big slew of women exploitation films, exploitation films, the women in Prison movies, yes, which relead sisters very big at the time. Uh, women were lead actors for the first time, they were aggressors for the first time. Uh still nude often while they were doing this stuff spawned the television show The Facts of Life. But the interesting thing is they found that these movies appealed to men and women because men would go see it for obvious reasons. Women would go see it because it was empowering and uh, they didn't mind, you know, looking at the naked ladies because women are much more grown up than men are. But Josh, the seventies also got a little schlocky, which in a sense was true to the exploitation model. They like, they really went over the top. No more political statements, no more advancing of women's gender or or African marins Americans. It just got really shlocky and outrageous at that point. Well what happened and starting in the sixth but really took hold in the seventies, and then from that point on was exploitation cinema, early on showing a live birth, nudist camps. These were all geared toward adults in the sixties, and then later on big time in the seventies, the audience became almost exclusively teenagers like those driving teenagers or um uh well teenagers anywhere who cares um, but they the the audience was teenagers, and the cast started to become teenage, so it had a little more of a bent on what teenagers are having to deal with, like bullying, like the the kid in this next clip right, which is I have to say one of my favorite movies from way way back. Here we go with Toxic Avenger. Yah, meet little Melvine. He's a ninety pound weekly Everyone hated Melvine. I'm gonna take this mop and shop it down your throat, they teased him. I'm gonna do it with you, okay. They taunted him. They tormented him until he had a horrifying accident and fell into a vat of nuclear waste, transforming Little Melbourne into a hideously deformed creature of superhuman signs and strength move and became the Toxic Avenger. So Josh. The Toxic Avenger movie was unique in that it's film production company, Trauma, is very popular in their own right. Have you ever seen Surf Nazis Must Die? I haven't, but I know about Trauma. I mean they are master self promoters and market tiers. They have. They were one of the first production companies to have a website, like a really comprehensive website. You should go on their website, their whole catalog. It's um really just well done and it's schlocky, but it's well done right in. Toxic Avenger follows the story of a ninety eight pound weakling who has picked on released the same years Ghostbusters. Do you notice that right, Yeah, so it was it occurred at zero year years zero. Uh, we'll just put the null set represent that and um, this kid gets pushed out of a window into a vat of toxic sludge, which that's beyond bullying. Really yeah, I mean this is basically it's a more twisted version of Modern Problems, the Chevy Chase film from a couple of years earlier. That one. Oh, you never saw Modern Problems. It's very silly, but he got toxic sludge dumped on him and had special powers from years earlier, prior or after what win was the movie? It was two years before Toxic Avenger, but Toxic Avenger took it into a gore special effects way that that Modern Problems never did. So the janitor Melvin I believe his name is Um, becomes toxified, It becomes toxic. The Toxic Avenger, who um beats the tar out of people at the health club where he was abused and mutated UM and Uh has tons of sex as the Toxic Avenger because his um newfound manhood is just irresistible to women and UM. One of one of the things that's noteworthy about the Toxic Avenger is that they actually tried to make decent effects. It wasn't just it wasn't horrible. I guess you could say, well, for the time. You know, it wasn't bad. No, they they remained bad and they probably were kind of bad even back then. But for for for Grindhouse films, yeah they were, they were great. Um and uh. It was also noteworthy because it came out of Trauma Productions or Trauma Studios um. And it led to a whole line of Toxic Avenger movies and schlock in general, which is basically like some crazy, horrible thing has happened. But we're not going to dwell too much on that. Let's see what let's let's see where the action takes us. So like Bad Taste that Peter Peter Jackson's first film, right is a great example of schlock that came out of Toxic Avenger, and he had the film that followed, Peter Jackson Dead Alive, which was at one point supposedly the gorrious film ever made. Although it sounds like your new Korean MOVIEUS surpassed that. Yeah, I think it probably has. I haven't seen That Alive. It's seen Bad Taste and Bad Taste. It was horribly gory, but I think this has it beat. Yeah, but I bet you if anything, I mean, I haven't seen them. When you're talking about but is it more realistic gore? Yeah, with bad like these are aliens that are having their heads blown off, So it definitely takes you, at least, um a a degree away from caring this is happening to human beings in in um I saw the Devil, so it definitely has driven home a little more well. And and the violence, even the gore back then, it was so over the top, right out of Fangora magazine. It's like, you know, dude, Fangoria is still around, is it? Yeah? I figured it was. I'm glad it is. We follow it on our Twitter feed. Ye, like a head will explode in scanners and you know, it's not disturbing because it's so clearly over the top. But these new movies are much more disturbing. If he asked me, I agree wholeheartedly because they're more realistic. Um. So, carrying on with Chucks and my Cisco and eber act. Uh, this is the second to last movie in our little list today and um this one's from way back from the thirties. So let's talk about reefor madness. These high school boys and girls are having a hop at the local soda fountain innocently they innocent of a wo and deadly menace lurking behind closed doors. Marijuana, the burning weed with its roots in hell. Or watch case if you want, I want to bet you will meet Bill or once too broad in his strong will as he takes the first step toward enslavement. Hey. So that was the excellent reefer Madness, which was an exploitation drug exploitation film and very much a cautionary tale. It even shaped the drug culture and how uh people looked at drugs. Is is you know marijuana at the time. It's this really evil thing that can make you crazy to kill people. Yeah, and actually in in very much the vein of early exploitation films. It was produced and distributed UM as a public service. Like the alternate title for it was UM Tell Your Children. And the whole thing set in a PTA meeting where this guy is relating this story and it's a story about lost lives, about murder, about um, guilt and paranoia and all of it is fed and based on rampant drug use, which is really just a lot of pot smoking um which can turn you into a fiend. And um it's apparently the director his name is Dwayne Esper he did other exploitation films from the thirties like Sex, Madness, Psychotic Connections, um, and he made a name for himself basically taking of these things that may have originally been written as a public service and making them so outlandish that he exploited the people who were making these movies and created this legacy of like just insanely over the top exploitation films from the thirties. Well, and ironically, refor Madness years later would become, um, not so much an anti drug propaganda film. How should I say this, but a film that college students would sit around and watch while partaking and laughing at this whole thing, and a cult film. Yeah, because it puts drugs so far out there that, um, if you, despite all the warnings, take drugs anyway and you realize that you don't turn into a fiend and murder somebody, um, you uh. Refor Madness basically dares you to go further. So it's kind of in it's the opposite has the opposite effect of what I think it's original intent was before Dwayne Nesperg got his hands on it. And as a side note, I had troubled deciding between Reefer Madness, and another nineteen thirties film by a guy named Todd Browning called Freaks. Oh yeah, well that was um, that was huge because it was the first big exploitation film pre Hayes Code or and Last. Yeah, first and last, and it was it was an MGM film. Yeah, and it's widely considered a masterpiece. I mean, it looks great. It's it's not it was well done. It's a huge. Um, it's a it's a revenge movie, which is a very common theme in UM exploitation films, especially violent ones. But it's it featured Browning dared to um have real freaks. I guess if you circus sideshow freaks, Yeah, um star in this. Uh and they basically exact their revenge on people who have mistreated them. And uh, I have not seen it really Yeah, yeah, I wanted to. I hear it's just awesome. I can't want it ended his career though, unfortunately. Yeah, and he was a popular filmmaker at the time. Well, hats off to him for first staying true to his art. Chuck just took his hat off. Donnel cap. All right, Chuck, here's the last one that we've got a clip for um, which I think everybody will notice um or recognize without even a word. There's not even a word in this clip, and you will understand what's going on. So here we go. So Josh, those are the unmistakable sounds of fist of fury of Mr One, Mr Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee kicking bottom. This first movie, Yeah, which was originally titled well, it's still title, I think in Asia The Big Boss, um and uh, in America it is. It's it's titled Fists of Fury. It was on the Other nine on cable. I saw part of it. Yeah, Yeah, I didn't realize it was the first one, though I would have tuned in. Yeah. And it was first of what, um five five major films. Uh. And basically it's the story of a martial arts student who's investigating the murder of his teacher. And um, it began, uh the martial arts exploitation sub genre, which later would become just martial arts films, right or was it still considered exploitation. It's all the same, They're one and the same. Anything that even remotely resembles in a Bruce Lee movie, specifically The Big Boss or any of them, is martial arts exploitation technically, um, because again we arrive at that one definition. It's over the top, Like Bruce Lee is taking on scores of anonymous thugs, um for two one after the other for two hours, just beating the tar out of all these people without tiring. Really. Um. Everybody's kind of waiting their turn politely in a circle around him, and he has to beat everybody and then he works his way up and it's over the top. So it is exploitation. But um. It led to other films like Samurai exploitation. Remember American Ninja. Remember the whole ninja film thing that came in the mid eighties. That's from Bruce Lee's Um, that's Bruce Lee's doing. Well. Yeah, and you go to these at the time when I was first going to New York many years ago, that would be uh, you know, you go to Times Square and this is still one Time Square was kind of gross, and that would be just the martial arts movie store where it was all that stuff, man, like thousands of movies about ninja's and samurai's martial artists and very big. I was inspired by American Ninja to become a ninja memember. I entered ninja training with Tommy Rooper, who had like more throwing stars than any kid I've ever known. What did you have? Like one throwing star I borrowed? Okay, I was not allowed to have throwing stars in my own Oh I wasn't either. Baptist. No, that was very violent. Nunchucks. That transcends like religious back ground. It's like, good parents, you shouldn't let your kid have throwing star. It's a good point. Uh. And as you point in the article, this actually led to another sub genre, which was Bruce Lee look alike movies. Yeah. So he made five movies and he died at age thirty two in nineteen seventy three. So Big Boss released in nineteen seventy one. He dies two years later. Everybody's like, no, so let's find some guys that look like him, which is really kind of stereotypical and racist for the West. But Bruce Lee l I or l E or l E or just Eli there, well, Bruce l I or Bruce Ellie. Um, I don't think there was ever like uh Bruce l E I g H. I don't think it ever got that far. But I mean, they released dozens of Bruce Lee and I just made air quote films there. So Bruce Lee created the martial arts exploitation genre and sub genre, and he inadvertently created the Bruce Lee exploitation subgenre of the martial arts exploitation sub genre by dying young and being very popular. And which one was the one he had Kareem until Jabbaran the Dragon. Yeah. Yeah, if you've never seen a like seven foot plus guy to martial arts, you should check that out. And if you can't get enough Bruce Lee and you have a good sense of humor, check out Kentucky Fried movie made by one Jerry who we met in Los Angeles recently, um and who used an expletive to me. He did it was one of the high points of my life. It is, um, But yeah, Kentucky Fried movie awesome. Actually, when we met Jerry Zucker, we told him that our little speech we were given that night was one of the highlights of our career thus far. And he says, well, it doesn't say much about your career, does it. Like the first thing to dud does something funny and we just like kind of fond over imagine we should mention briefly and it's in the article, but just as a teaser. Uh. The late seventies we got Nazi exploitation movies, not exploitation as a sub genre. Yeah. And one of the major players there movie was Ilsa she Wolf of the s S Yeah, which led to elsa Um Siberian Tigress and Ilsa Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheets. Really, there's a whole sex violence franchise, Dominatrix franchise, that was based out of the Nazi exploitation film. You know, one could argue that qt Mr Tarantino has made nothing but exploitation films since pulp fiction because the kill bills were definitely martial arts exploitation. Really, the Jackie Brown was a riff on on black exploitation death Proof Obviously that was what they were trying to do. Their death Proof is Carsploitation, which follows in the tradition of Vanishing Point Um, which was released the same year as basically its rival to the Um, the founder, the founding movie of carsploitation, Two Lane Blacktop, which movie. Yeah, if you want to start an argument with an exploitation film, buff tell him. Vanishing Point was the beginning of cars Floitation. They'll get mad at you and then finally Tarantino with The Inglorious Bastards, which was clearly a riff on the Nazi exploitation films. Beaten Nazis the Death of the Baseball Bat. It's about as over the top and lard as it's awesome. Yeah, um so uh. And then Machete. I hated it, but Robert she is, Um, it's terrible, and of course he was the other half of the Rodriguez was the other half with his Planet Terror of the Grindhouse double feature. Yeah, and Machete was born from one of the little fake trailers they made in that movie. Oh was that right? Yeah, it was one of the fake movie previews. It is even as far as like a purposefully be movie. Not good. No, well, Death Proof was okay, but I didn't like Planet Taring that much. Um and then Chuck. Well, first of all, before we get to today, we also have to give a shout out to Porno's Porno came out of the exploitation film genre, and it arguably had a lot to do with killing um the X or pushing it into the mainstream, because once you had the movie Deep Throat and all of a sudden, pornography was on the screen, it's like, you can't do an exploitation film about it anymore. If there's the real deal going on, it loses all its power. And then a little movie called Jaws came along, and all of a sudden, a quote unquote B movie style movie made gobs and gobs of money, and that put a little bit of mainstream respectability on the map all of a sudden. And so one might argue, Josh that movies like Jaws and Pornography kind of shoved exploitation films even though they still exist. They're sort of mainstream movies now. Well, yeah, I guess another word for grindhouse these days is blockbuster. Jaws was the first blockbuster movie, summer blockbuster, and now you have to have summer blockbusters, and they're always over the top and exploitative of viewers tastes. And not only Tarantino, there's other filmmakers out that are trying to capture that seventies vibe with overt exploitation films. Again, shot that way, shot him thirty five, I'm sorry, sixteen millimeter films, stuff like that. So, um, Chuck, I say, our message to everybody is number one, go on to the site read ten noteworthy exploitation films, um number two if that interests to you. Like even the ten noteworthy exploitation films I chose, um don't cover even I think a third of the exploitation subgenres. So they'll probably be another article forthcoming at some point. If there is, we'll let you know and then go watch some exploitation movies and enjoy them. Yeah, watch the documentary American Grindhouse too, if you're into that. Yeah, that's a great one. It's free on Hulu. Actually, um, there's ads, but Hulu dot com has American Grindhouse for free. It is not safe for work in no way shape or for him. I was watching it at work and I was like, WHOA, Okay, Yeah, if you are watching it at work, tab browsing is what you want to be doing. And keep your your finger over the mouse and keep the cursor over the other tab right and say for in our case, you can just say it's research. But you can't do that if you if you're an accountant at uh JP Morgan, you're just a sick o, a weirdo, that weird guy in accounting. Um, so look up ten noteworthy exploitation films you can type that into the handy search bar how stuff Works dot com. And now, at long last, it's time for a listener mail Josh or Is I'm gonna call this It's a small world after all. Dear guys, I'm a longtime fan from Minnesota and enjoy spreading stuff. You should know goodness wherever I go. My co workers at a local coffee shop know me for the trivia and information I abound in. But after giving that, he he says he abounds in. I guess he's proficient in. Okay, did he misuse that? Yeah? I don't know. It sounds hilarious. It does um after giving credit where credit is due, which means us several of them decided to subscribe your podcast. Listening to the podcast is also give me an advantage at work for thinking of the coffee shops daily trivia question, which saves people ten cents on their drink. After re listening to How Legos Work, I set the trivia question for which company produces the most tires on the yearly basis abridge stone be good year see Lego Bricks. You know the answer, John. Most people were surprised and pleased to find out it was Lego Bricks, reminding them about the little play sets that their kids enjoy. This is where it gets weird. One of the customers read the trivia question, looked at me and said it's a puncy scheme in the best Italian accent he could muster. Everyone else gave him an odd look. I started laughing. He apologized and then say and said he just heard it on a podcast. Um, he had just listened to Legos followed by Poncy Schemes. Long story short, we were both pleased to find out that we were both fans. We are now on a first name basis, eager to discuss the most recent episodes. So these dudes in Minneapolis, Daniel, that's awesome. Thanks Daniel, and his friend now his new friend, his unnamed friend. He didn't name him. You wouldn't know. I mean med him at camp. Let's write band camp. Thanks Daniel, that's really awesome. Um, wow, that's really cool. Let me let us know if you tweet um those daily facts for your coffeehouse, because we will start following you. Indeed, that'd be very cool. Um, if you want to follow us, we have our own Twitter feed and seriously, it's called s y s K podcast one word strong plus. Um, we're on No, we're up to like eleven and change. That's plus ten. That's true. Um, we're also on Facebook, Facebook, dot com. Slash stuff. You should know. We have a Kiva team. Right, we're trying to get to half a million dollars. Right. That's k i v A dot org slash team slash stuff you should know. Uh, And then you can always send us a good old fashioned email. Um, we want to know what your favorite um exploitation film of all time is. You can send that in an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. H