Millions of Americans have been thrilled, scared, titillated, and shocked by exploitation movies, low budget films with many scenes of sex, violence, and other potentially lurid elements. The term derives from the fact that promoters of such films exploit the contents in advertising that plays up the sexual or violent aspects of the films. This is the first comprehensive study of the American exploitation film to be published. It discusses five distinct genres: the teen movie, the sexploitation film, the martial arts movie, the blaxploitation film and the lawbreaker picture. Contained within these genres are many popular American film types, including beach movies, biker pictures, and women's prison movies. The study provides a history and sociopolitical analysis of each genre, focusing on significant films in those genres. It also discusses the economics of exploitation films and their place in the motion picture industry, the development of drive-in theaters, the significance of the teenage audience, and the effect of the videocassette. Finally, the book applies major film and cultural theories to establish an aesthetic for evaluating the exploitation film and to explore the relationship between film and audience.

A comparative analysis of key Islamic ity platforms and their debates

Film noir may seem a familiar term to many, with its use of a complex narrative structure, flashbacks and voiceover narration, and with such archetypal characterisations as the femme fatale and private eye. But this introduction is not so much an account of what film noir is, but more an interrogation of the ways in which the term came to be applied to a particular group of American films of the 1940s and 1950s. Ian Brookes asks: 'What is film noir?' With this sharply focused question active throughout the book, students will benefit from an introductory text designed to provide a sophisticated treatment of the problems inherent in the category. This will be the first critical introduction to film noir which takes into account the complexity of the term and the difficulties of straightforward definition and classification.

Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia is an overview of 20th- and 21st-century noir and fatalist film practice from 1945 onwards. The book demonstrates the ways in which American cinema has inculcated a climate of fear in our daily lives, as reinforced, starting in the 1950s, by television, and later videocassettes, the web, and the Internet, to create, by the early 21st century a hypersurveillant atmosphere in which no one can avoid the barrage of images that continually assault our senses. The book begins with the return of American soldiers from World War II, 'liberated' from war in the Pacific by the newly created atomic bomb, which will come to rule American consciousness through much of the 1950s and 1960s and then, in a newer, more small-scale way, become a fixture of terrorist hardware in the post-paranoid ear of the 21st century. Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia is constructed in six chapters, each highlighting a particular 'raising of the cinematic stakes' in the creation of a completely immersible universe of images. Selling points:*Expands the definition of noir to include numerous lesser known works.*Deals with Red Scare films of the 1950s in the US.*Examines the 'dark side' of the 1960s, or films that questioned the emerging counterculture.*Explores such neo-noir films as The Last Seduction (1993), Angel Heart (1987), The Grifters (1990), Red Rock West (1993), The Usual Suspects (1995), Mulholland Drive (2001), L.A. Confidential (1997), and Memento (2000).*Details the 'noir' aspects of the cybernetic age, both in online and videogame uses.