10 Types Of Movies You Don't See Any More

2. Italian Mockbusters

If you were an exploitation filmmaker in Italy and you wanted to know what your next picture was going to be, you only had to look at Hollywood’s box office. According to Luigi Cozzi, who ripped off Alien with 1980’s Contamination, producers didn’t ask what your film was about, they wanted to know what other film it was like.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, Italy’s schlockmeisters produced some of the finest mockbusters that ever met a projector bulb. Dawn Of The Dead spawned Zombie Flesh Eaters, Escape From New York begat 2019: After The Fall Of New York and Star Wars found its opposite number in Cozzi’s Starcrash, surely the greatest movie to feature a lightsabre-wielding David Hasselhoff and a robot with a Southern drawl.

“Italy may make rip-offs,” claims Kim Newman, “but at least it can claim to make the best, most lively, most audacious rip-offs in the world.” Sadly, the declining fortunes of the country’s film industry meant the bottom fell out of the subgenre in the late 80s.