As is its wont, Youtube proposed this video for me:
I don’t believe I’ve heard of 6 of these films (the Child’s Play remake being the one I have), and certainly haven’t seen any of them either; the other exception is Street Trash, the only one of them not made this century, which I recall liking a lot more than our host, Hannah, one of whose main problems with it is that it’s… exploitation. I mean, sure, the film is fucking grotesque—one of its key scenes features a severed penis being tossed around like a football and kept away from its erstwhile owner—but exploitation? Well, again, sure, most horror films are on some level. For example, whatever points George Romero may have been trying to make about consumerism and so forth in Dawn of the Dead, we all know it was the violence and gore most people were there for. Horror has, after all, been one of the most reliable forms of exploitation cinema for decades, an easy way into filmmaking and all of that.
I find Hannah’s statement that she “wouldn’t willingly sit down and watch an exploitation movie” a little curious, therefore, especially since the next film she brings up, Nutcracker Massacre, looks like the absolute embodiment of that sort of thing. One of the executive producers has nearly 180 released films to his credit since just *2011* (and more than 40 waiting to come out), including that hideous-looking Winnie the Pooh slasher… he looks like he’ll tackle anything he thinks will make money, including westerns and Christian films (!), but the majority of his producer credits appear to be unspeakably shitty horror and action ripoffs (one of the latter is a ninja movie that, per IMDB, took a total of eleven hours to make and whose third-billed star, Danny Glover, only did the film because he owed the director some favour and earned only $37 for eighteen minutes‘ work. That’s 18 minutes on set, not on screen). And the director, Becca Hirani, looks frankly the same, not as many credits as such but some of the titles (anyone for Exorcist Vengeance? What about Witches of Amityville Academy? Pet Graveyard… no?) look like the same sort of dogshit.
So Hannah says she wouldn’t set out to watch an exploitation film, but I presume she willingly watched Nutcracker Massacre and no one forced her to do it? I don’t know. I don’t wish to be mean or anything, cos she at least gives reasons beyond just “ugh, this sucks”—indeed, she actually likes one of the films she brings up, just not enough to rewatch it—and I can certainly respect her choice not to support films where some of the people involved (like Ron Jeremy, alluded to in another video she’s made) have done worse things than just being in these movies. I disagree with her on Slaxx, which she features in yet another video on this theme, I liked it a lot more than she did whatever its faults (I can’t not respect a film about a possessed pair of jeans where the jeans get their own dance number), but I acknowledge that it does require a particular sense of humour not everyone has. I just find something a bit perplexing about her evident distinction between horror and exploitation, not exactly a big deal obviously but for some reason it’s moved me to write this gibberish that no one else probably cares about…
