10 Types Of Movies You Don't See Any More
Nuns, Nazis and Nudie Cuties.
“You can’t make money on a small scale with a movie in this country anymore,” George Romero said in 1982. “The small distributors have all gone belly up; there’s just no competition anymore. You just can’t get screens. It’s part of the McDonaldization of America, unfortunately.”
It’s apt that Romero, who satirized mall culture in Dawn Of The Dead, should compare film distribution to fast food franchising. Like Dawn’s parodying of consumerism, his comments proved prescient.
To the casual observer, Hollywood seems to have adopted the characteristics of a fast food restaurant. Instead of hiring chefs who can prepare many kinds of food, everyone makes the same thing over and over again. Formulas are followed, portions emphasize quantity over quality and the limited options seem designed to appeal to a particular demographic.
Slick, calculated horror franchises have become the norm – the more uniform the product, the greater the chance of predicting its success. The problem with “scientific management” is that filmmaking isn’t a science at all – it’s an art, and standardizing the process sucks all the life out of it.
Instead of rushing to grind out more of the same, filmmakers should take inspiration from the kinds of pictures that Hollywood just doesn’t make anymore. Here are 10 examples they might consider.
10. Nunsploitation
A sub-genre of sexploitation films, which themselves serve mainly as a vehicle for softcore porn, Nunsploitation ups the ante by dressing its females as Nuns (high heels are optional).
The basic premise of these pictures usually involves a young woman (unfailingly played by nude models such as Laura Gemser) who offends male authority figures and, for her penance, is subjected to sadistic punishments after being stripped naked, thrown in a cell and hit by a water cannon. This only strengthens her resolve, of course, and she usually seeks solace in the arms of a fellow inmate, whether male or female.
Nunsploitation is a close cousin of that other sexploitation favourite, the Women In Prison movie, and its popularity during the golden age of exploitation cinema ushered in such classic (it says here) pictures as Killer Nun and Ken Russell’s The Devils.