Exploitation film examples, cycle by cycle

The most useful exploitation film examples are the ones you can date, because each cycle was made under a different set of money and legal conditions and those conditions are what the picture is. Freaks waited 31 years for a British certificate. Caligula lost 11 minutes across more than 50 separate cuts. Cannibal Holocaust has been trimmed by the same 15 seconds three times running.

Content is the least reliable way to sort these films. A cannibal picture shot for the Italian export market in 1979 and a sideshow melodrama made inside a Hollywood studio in 1932 both got called exploitation, and they have nothing in common except that somebody official objected. What they do have is a paper trail. The British Board of Film Classification keeps case files on a good number of these titles, and those files put dates, durations and named officials on decisions that otherwise circulate as pub talk.

The studio sideshow picture

Tod Browning made Freaks at MGM in 1932 with real sideshow performers in the principal roles, which is the fact that decided every ruling on it afterwards. The British Board of Film Classification rejected it that year, when only the U and A categories existed, on the ground that it exploited disabled people commercially. A new distributor tried again in 1952, arguing that the film criticises exactly that exploitation, and was rejected on the same ground.

It took a third submission and a deliberately small, managed release to get through. The X came in 1963, 31 years after production, with a condition attached: audiences were to be warned of the nature of the film so that anyone who would find it displeasing could stay away. The rating then walked steadily down, 15 on video in 1994, 12 for cinema in 2001, 12A in 2015 and 12 in 2023, without a frame changing. Nothing about the film moved. The category around it did.

Blaxploitation and the film that financed itself

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) is the example people reach for because Melvin Van Peebles wrote it, directed it, starred in it and got it into theatres outside the studio system, and because the run of studio-backed pictures that followed took its audience without taking its politics. Across 110th Street (1972) and Ganja Hess (1973) sit either side of it, one a hard crime picture with a distributor behind it, the other closer to an art film.

Sweetback also shows how long a censorship file can stay open. It was not submitted in Britain at all until 1996, when it went out uncut on paperwork stating that the young performer in the opening sequence had been 18. Mario Van Peebles said in a 2004 documentary that he had been 13 during filming. On resubmission in 2005 the Board took legal advice, concluded a UK jury would likely find the scene indecent, and passed the film 18 with those shots removed. The film had been circulating for 34 years before the frames came out.

The kung fu window

Enter the Dragon reached the Board in 1973 and was classified X on 23 October, secretary Stephen Murphy having decided the violence could sit at no lower category. Five cuts were made from a list drawn up on 14 August 1973, covering crotch kicks and neck breaks in the fight scenes and glass bottles used as weapons. The chainsticks were the sticking point. Two of the five cuts were dropped for the 1988 video release and the chainstick material stayed out through resubmissions in 1993 and 1996.

Everything came back at 18 in 2001, after the Board changed its approach in 1999 to look at whether a weapon was being glamorised rather than at which weapon it was. The film went out at 15 in 2023 for violence, sexual threat, nudity and sex references. The cycle that followed the film, including Bruceploitation entries like Game of Death (1978), lived off exactly the imagery the cuts had been removing.

Members-only clubs and a seized tape

John Waters made Pink Flamingos in 1972 and it reached British audiences sideways, through members-only cinema clubs, the Scala in King's Cross among them, and then on unclassified VHS in the early 1980s. One seized tape produced a conviction under the Obscene Publications Act.

Classified, it lost material in stages. Three minutes four seconds came out for an 18 on video on 31 December 1990. The cinema version passed on 27 June 1997 with two minutes 42 seconds cut, the singing anus scene waived from that submission onward. January 1999 brought it down to two minutes eight seconds, with the excrement waived. April 2022 passed it uncut at 18. The cuts had been about chicken killing, an insemination scene and explicit fellatio, and the order in which they were dropped is a fair map of what British classification stopped caring about first.

Real money on a sex epic

Caligula belongs on any list of these films because of what was spent on it. Gore Vidal wrote it and Tinto Brass directed, and both had their names taken off after explicit material went in without the director's agreement. The print submitted in April 1980 was seized by Customs and Excise. Getting an X took over eight minutes of cuts for legal reasons and three more for category, 11 minutes in total across more than 50 separate edits, and about six months of work.

The 1990 video submission arrived so heavily reduced that it ran an hour and 40 minutes against the two and a half hours of the cinema version, and passed 18 without further cuts. In 2008 the full version went out uncut at 18 for strong violence, sexual violence and strong real sex, the Board taking the view that nearly 30 years had blunted it. A 2024 theatrical recut ran longer with less explicit material in it.

The video nasty file

The Video Recordings Act 1984 received Royal Assent on 12 July 1984, and its section 4 lets the Secretary of State designate the body that decides whether a video work is suitable for a certificate. Everything before that date circulated on tape with no rating at all, which is why the titles in this part of the story have the strangest paperwork.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was refused a certificate on 14 March 1975, Stephen Murphy having objected to its level of terrorisation and concluded that its tone could not be cut out of it. The Greater London Council passed it X for London the same year while other councils banned it outright. It went onto video at the end of 1981 with no certificate, was withdrawn in 1984 once the Act bit, and was passed 18 uncut on 19 March 1999.

Cannibal Holocaust reached British video in 1982 the same way. Its first formal submission, in 2001, cost it five minutes 44 seconds for sexual violence and animal cruelty. By 2011 the Board had reconsidered the assault scenes, finding them chaotically shot and cut away from rather than eroticised, and passed the film 18 with 15 seconds of animal cruelty removed. The 2022 submission took the same 15 seconds. I Spit On Your Grave ran the other way round. Seven minutes two seconds came out in 2001, reduced to two minutes 54 seconds in 2010 when the Board put back the material showing the horror of the assault and kept out the material dwelling on nudity, and it passed 18 uncut in 2022 after the company pre-cut on advice.

Freaks lost no frames and 31 years. Cannibal Holocaust has lost the same 15 seconds in 2011 and again in 2022, which makes it the one title here whose cut has never been given back.