Time For An Empowered Female Holiday!
If you are looking for a more “unique” type of gift for the cinephile in your family, time to jump into the deep end of the “exploitation cinema” pool as we are going to celebrate empowered women who fight back!
Biker Chicks!
Let’s begin with a great movie genre: biker chicks! As you can see from the “Angels Die Hard” poster, they also live hard and love hard too!
The women in these films end up fighting back and fending off a variety of evil – always with an attitude!
There are many great examples of this genre, and I count them down here:
In the annals of “blaxploitation” cinema, one woman stood above all others – the legendary Pam Grier!
She was tough as nails and gave it as good as she got – there was no messing around with “Foxy Brown!”
Here are some of Grier’s greatest cinematic beatdowns:
Here is another example of a VERY empowered woman:
“They’ll Love The Very Life Out Of Your Body!”
How can you not love a film with that tagline? “Invasion Of The Bee Girls” is classic 70’s cinema, because these women have all the power and plenty of sting!
This 1973 camp classic has a simple plot: A powerful cosmic force is turning Earth women into queen bees who kill men by wearing them out sexually!
See the trailer here:
https://johnrieber.com/2016/04/06/sexy-bee-girls-campy-cult-cinema-gets-its-buzz-on/
And what about this offer?
That’s right, one film is willing to give you inside information you need – about cheerleaders!
The “wild Cheerleader” genre is hilarious for many reasons, and while they began as pure exploitation cinema, they became much more of a statement about empowered women – you can click here to see the five best ones!
And of course, it all got started here – the “Citizen Kane” of “wild wild women kicking ass” movies:
“Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”
Legendary filmmaker Russ Meyer never topped the inspired title for this classic 60’s drive-in movie, but he made films for decades. The iconic Tura Saldana showed this sap who’s boss, along with her gang of gals who had one simple motto:
Director Meyer was at the forefront of the empowered female trend in exploitation film – and while he loved buxom women, he let them kick ass as well!
In fact, his films always had strong female characters who were tougher than any man they encountered.
If you haven’t seen this movie, here is the trailer with the immortal line:
“Wild Women! Wild Wheels!”
Check out all of the classic Russ Meyer films here:
https://johnrieber.com/2012/03/16/sexploitation-classics-the-russ-meyer-edition/
In 2012, indépendent filmmaker Harmony Korine brought back the “empowered women” genre with the controversial “Spring Breakers”:
James Franco starred alongside some of the most popular young stars at the time: Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson. It was a wildly original take on 60’s “empowered women” cult cinema, and is worth checking out. See the trailer here:
That’s just a primer on the “empowered women of exploitation” genre of film – let me know what you think!
