My Uneducated Thoughts on Modern Exploitation Films and Manborg (2011)

Certain movies change the film landscape for years after their release.  The release of Jaws brought about the blockbuster era of filmmaking.  The release of The Avengers in 2012 caused studios to perk their ears up at the idea of shared universes.  When Star Wars was released, it was followed by many knockoffs including Starcrash, Battle Beyond the Stars, and Moonraker.  Even Die Hard had its fair share of copycats when it came out in 1988.

Few filmmakers have managed to change the film landscape more than once.  One director who has shifted the film world multiple times is Quentin Tarantino.  In 1994, he released Pulp Fiction.  It didn’t win best picture in a year of strong contenders, but it did cause waves in what would come after.  There were many indie directors and studio releases that played off what Pulp Fiction was.  From the crime elements to the way the story was told, there were elements of Pulp Fiction throughout the releases for the rest of the decade.

The second time that Quentin Tarantino made huge waves by releasing a movie was Grindhouse.  The 2007 release saw Tarantino teaming up with Robert Rodriguez to give a double feature throwback to the 1960s and 1970s underground horror scene.  Other directors got in on it, too, with the mock trailers that were placed between the two movies.  Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, and an up-and-coming director named Jason Eisener each contributed a trailer for the film.  The style that Grindhouse was giving homage to saw a resurgence following the release.  A bunch of modern grindhouse films came to the forefront for a few years thanks to Quentin Tarantino.

The most obvious movies to come out as a result of Grindhouse were the movies based on the trailers that played between the two halves.  Robert Rodriguez directed a trailer for a fake movie called Machete, which starred Danny Trejo as a machete-wielding action hero.  He took the trailer and extended it, making a no holds barred action movie that hit many of the trailer’s beats.  Machete would get a sequel called Machete Kills, which kept going with the grindhouse feel set up on the Tarantino/Rodrigues project from 2007.

Hobo with a Shotgun was the other trailer from Grindhouse that would turn into a full-fledged feature film.  Jason Eisener made a low-budget, Canadian action film out of the trailer.  He recast the hobo with a bigger name.  The original actor was David Brunt but, for the feature length version, Rutger Hauer took on the role.  Other than that, it played into the same exploitation era of action as the rest of Grindhouse and made for an entertaining throwback ride.

Now, these weren’t nearly the only movies inspired by Grindhouse.  The throwback double feature created a wave of modern exploitation films, harkening back to the old days with the limitations of a modern world.  Some of them may have been directly influenced by Grindhouse.  Filmmakers went to see the Tarantino/Rodriguez joint venture and it gave them some creative juice to make similar pieces of art.  Then there were the filmmakers who already had similar ideas and the release of Grindhouse gave them a reason to be released.  Whatever the case, there were many more exploitation style movies coming out after 2007.

There were a few different paths that the post-Grindhouse exploitation movies went.  One of the easiest ones to look at, and one subgenre that I haven’t really dived too deeply into, is the stripper movie.  There have been a bunch of stripper or scantily clad women movies that were released in the years following Death Proof and Planet Terror, the two films in Grindhouse.  Strippers vs. Werewolves was one of them.  Bitch Slap was another.  Zombie Strippers, Machine Girl, and Spring Breakers could all be considered a part of this kind of exploitation film.

The blaxploitation film made a comeback with Black Dynamite, among others.  It came out in 2009 and was a comedic throwback to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s.  It was one of the more notable movies in the first couple years after Grindhouse’s release.  It parodied the genre while also becoming a part of it, in the way that only the good parodies do.  It spawned an animated television show, a web series from Nerdist, and a potential sequel.  It also starred Michael Jai White, which is always a good thing.  There were others like Django Unchained and the soon-to-be-released Shaft that also tapped into blaxploitation.

Horror got an exploitation boom as well.  There were horror movies throwing back to the 1970s style all through the past 12 years.  WolfCop and Another WolfCop blended horror, action, and comedy into a great exploitation style campy piece of entertainment.  Tom Six put out his Human Centipede trilogy, with each movie tapping into the exploitation feel in a different way.  From the woman in peril trying to get revenge of the first film, to the down and dirty body horror of the second, to the insanity of the third, everything felt like a throwback while being Tom Six’s modern schlock.

Besides the throwback exploitation movies that have been coming out since Grindhouse, there have been a few filmmakers who found a new exploitation style.  They took the story sensibilities of exploitation films and took them to the future with modern greenscreen work.  The most popular of those, at least from the people I’ve talked to, has been Kung Fury.  It took the martial arts exploitation movie, used an 80s action star stereotype, had him fight Nazis, and did it all with backgrounds that were greenscreened to be whatever they wanted them to be.  People went wild for it.  It was only half an hour long, but people wanted more.  And they got more.  A feature length version is in the works.  The 2015 film became a pop culture touchstone for the cult audience.

Before Kung Fury, though, another movie was doing the greenscreen exploitation hybrid.  Out of Canada, Steven Kostanski rose to some fame with his 2011 film Manborg.  The film saw a man killed as a result of a war and turned into a being named Manborg (Matthew Kennedy).  He teamed up with Mina (Meredith Sweeney), Justice (Conor Sweeney), and #1 Man (Ludwig Lee) to take down the evil Draculon (Adam Brooks), who had won the war.  Draculon was now in charge of whatever world they were in, raising a manufactured population and using humans as coliseum fighters.

Manborg was filmed for $1000 in a garage in Winnipeg.  The production team used discarded items for most of the props and costumes, repurposing sports equipment and other items they found in dumpsters.  They borrowed equipment from a high school to film the movie.  Cast and crew didn’t get paid, and food was not provided.  It was as minimalist as a film could be.  A lot of the stuff on screen happened because of the creativity of the people involved.  The creativity was the same thing that came out of exploitation films and their next generation, the crazy low budget 80s action/sci-fi movies.

There have been many other exploitation style throwback films to come out both before and after the release of Grindhouse.  Rob Zombie has been doing them for ages.  But they came closer to the mainstream since Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez came together to produce Grindhouse.  They wanted to make throwback movies to the grindhouse style exploitation they had watched when they were younger.  They wanted a new generation to watch them.  The audiences did, and a new generation of filmmakers joined in to make films in that style.

Sometimes a movie comes out that creates a wave of style.  The releases over the next few years are filled with movies inspired by or sharing themes with that movie.  It could be the numerous “Die Hard in a…” movies.  It could be the animal attack movies that came out after the release of Jaws.  Trends happen all the time.  It’s how the movie business runs.  Modern exploitation is just one trend that is still around, bubbling under the surface.  When will the next big exploitation movie hit?

It’ll definitely hit after these notes:

• Starcrash (week 1), WolfCop (week 121), and the Human Centipede (week 180) movies were mentioned in this post.
• Manborg was suggested by @TheRealMattC
• Have you seen Manborg?  What did you think of it?  Are you as disappointed as I am that I had this exploitation idea, wrote it, then realized that Manborg and Kung Fury fit more into the 1980s, and tried to force that into the exploitation post anyway?  Let me know on Twitter.  Or let me know in the comments.
• If you have any movies that you think I should be watching for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, message me on Twitter or in the comments to let me know.  I’m always looking for suggestions.
• Check out the Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• Now let’s talk about next week.  I went with one of the most classic bad movies in film history.  It’s a movie from way back in the 1930s, all about how bad it is to get high.  That’s right.  Tell Your Children, because I’m going to be writing about Reefer Madness.  See you next Sunday.

The Importance of the Point-of-View and The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story (2014)

One of the most important decisions when writing a movie is to figure out what the point-of-view will be.  This is the way that the audience will come into a story.  Will they be watching it, or will they be a part of it?  Things get more complicated when you get deeper into what the point of view can mean for how a story is told.  Who is the center of the story?  Does that change how the story will play out?  All these thoughts must be under consideration when a story is being written so that the story can be told in the intended way.

The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story was about Dustin Diamond (Sam Kindseth) and his time with the show Saved by the Bell.  It began with his meeting Mark-Paul Gosselaar (Dylan Everett) at the audition and their working with Lark Voorhies (Taylor Russell) on Good Morning Miss Bliss.  A year later, the show was retooled as Saved by the Bell, and they were joined by Mario Lopez (Julian Works), Tiffani-Amber Thiessen (Alyssa Lynch), and Elizabeth Berkley (Tiera Skovbye).  The six teens and young adults went through many ups and downs during the show’s run, and The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story showcased the emotional turmoil they experienced.

The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story used Dustin Diamond’s point-of-view to lay the whole story out, and that was an important detail.  Before I get into that, however, I want to get into the various general points-of-view from which a story can be told.  Particularly, I’m going to go over the various ways that movies bring audiences into the story.

The first way a story can be told has the audience watching everything unfold without really following any single character.  This one is more common in ensemble movies, and even then, only in ones where the concept becomes more important to the writers than the characters themselves.  Take Dorm Daze for example.  The movie involved a bunch the dorm interactions of college students over the course of a day.  The stories weren’t fleshed out beyond their surface and none of the characters were deep enough to create an emotional connection.  The focus was on how each of the stories interwove with one another to create a series of gags.  This usually happens in the lesser movies where the writers become so involved in their nifty idea that they forget that an audience wants to be immersed in the story.

There is also the multiple point-of-view style of storytelling, where multiple sides of the story are told through multiple characters.  They all work together to tell one all-encompassing story.  Or they happen alongside one another to build a certain theme.  New Year’s Eve did a fairly good job with the multiple point-of-view storytelling by having various stories that each contained a main character.  The audience connected with each of the main characters and their journeys, whether it was the older woman getting a night out on the town with a younger man, the mom worried about her daughter, the man trying to get to a party, or the woman in charge of the ball drop.  It did a good job of building each point-of-view and bringing them together to show the various stages of life.

The other major way to have multiple point-of-view storytelling can be to show the opposing sides of a conflict.  The audience connects with both opposing parties to either sympathize with both or sympathize with one and despise the other.  The Apple had the opposing sides each getting their point of view.  Bibi and Alphie were the main characters and it was their story that was being told.  But there was also the point of view of the villains, the BIM company characters.  Seeing what they were doing only helped to strengthen the sympathy for Bibi and Alphie.

Then there is the single point-of-view style of storytelling, where it all comes from one character’s experiences.  There are a few ways to do this.  One is to put the audience directly into the character’s shoes.  The whole movie becomes a first-person sort of thing.  The slew of computer screen horrors and thrillers that have come out recently have managed to work well with this kind of storytelling.  Found footage is also pretty good with this point-of-view.

The other main way, which can be split in two, is to follow one character’s story.  Or a group of characters who are working together for the same goal.  One of the two ways to separate this point-of-view is to have the movie only show what that character is doing.  They must be in every scene for it to completely work.  The other way is to have them narrate.  This is similar to the opposing sides point-of-view, with the caveat being that what happens to the other characters comes from what the narrator character tells us.  If the narrator is a part of the story, that is.

That’s where we come back to The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story.  The movie was a singular point-of-view through the way of narration.  It was a television movie based on Dustin Diamond’s book, Behind the Bell.  Thus, the movie ended up being through Dustin’s eyes.  Not in the first-person kind of way, but through his telling the story to the audience.  In a nifty little callback to the Saved by the Bell show, Dustin was able to call a time out and talk directly to the viewers.

The movie didn’t paint Saved by the Bell in a positive light.  Dustin Diamond was shown to be the outcast of the group.  All five of the other teens were friends with one another, for the most part, but Dustin was pushed to the side.  This became more apparent after Good Morning Miss Bliss evolved into Saved by the Bell.  There were three new cast members, and Mark-Paul gravitated to them instead of sticking with Dustin.

Another negative aspect to the whole behind-the-scenes was that Dustin’s character, Screech Powers, was only seen as the comic relief.  The show, at its heart, was a comedy.  Yet each of the actors was able to craft their character into someone that teens could relate to.  For the most part.  The struggles that they went through were struggles that the average audience member was going through.  Screech never felt like a real teenager, though.  He was always popping in to get laughs with his ridiculous antics.  He wasn’t grounded.  He wasn’t relatable.  He was a machine for laughter.  Dustin Diamond felt like a joke because his character was a joke.

The real importance of the point-of-view in The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story is that the story would be completely different from any other person’s point of view.  Okay, maybe not completely different.  Each of the teens still lived through the show from at least the retooling until the final episode.  There were many moments that they all shared.  But everyone lived a different life on the show.  They came into each moment from a different perspective, a different background.  Hell, Mark-Paul Gosselaar called out Dustin Diamond on some of the details in his book, saying that his experiences on set were positive and that he never saw the negative stuff that Dustin described.

There were a few different ways that The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story could have gone based on the different points of view available.  Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s point-of-view would have been a story about a teen’s rise to fame as the star of a hit television show.  Tiffani-Amber Thiessen’s point-of-view would have been about a shy girl finding her courage through acting.  Elizabeth Berkley’s point-of-view would have been a young actress struggling to find respect in the acting world outside of her teen show.  Lark Voorhies’s point-of-view could have been a love triangle story between her, Tiffani-Amber, and Mark-Paul.  Then there was Mario Lopez, who would have had a point-of-view that highlighted the excess of Hollywood.  Hell, there was even the producer/director character who could have had the point-of-view of a down and out creative type giving his Hollywood aspirations one last shot and finding the perfect show for it.  Each point-of-view would have still been surrounded by the Saved by the Bell of it all, but would have left The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story as a way different story being told.

The point-of-view that a writer chooses when they tell a story can drastically affect how the story is told.  What Lifetime released was a story about one child actor’s descent into madness and drug abuse as he was mistreated through a four-season run.  It was the perfect kind of melodrama for a network that likes to highlight true crime in an overly dramatic manner.  Only, this time, it was the behind-the-scenes hijinks of one of the biggest shows of the early 1990s.  People watched it.  They drank it in.  The ratings were high enough to greenlight three other unauthorized looks at the behind-the-scenes of television shows a year later.  One of them took a look at Full House, one highlighted the drama behind Beverly Hills 90210, and the other shone the spotlight on Melrose Place.  None of them got the reception of The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story, and the Unauthorized series ended with the three 2015 installments.

The point-of-view of a story is one of the most important aspects of it.  It will change how the audience understands the story.  One character could come into it with an entirely different perspective from another character, and that will shape the story being told.  How a writer wants an audience to connect with their story will change what the point-of-view will be.  It is how they bring an audience into the story.  It is how the audience experiences the story.  Everything in writing comes down to the point-of-view.  That’s why it is so important to understand.

These notes should be easy to understand:

• I mentioned Dorm Daze (week 40), New Year’s Eve (week 57), and The Apple (week 196) in this post.
• The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story featured Sean Campbell, who was also in Blackwoods (week 115), Alone in the Dark (week 152), and In the Name of the King: Two Worlds (week 220).
• Paul Lazenby became a three-timer this week after appearing in The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story.  He had already shown up in The Marine 3: Homefront (week 30) and In the Name of the King: Two Worlds (week 220).
• Eric Gibson made a second appearance this week after being in The Christmas Consultant (week 55).
• One of the actors in The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story was Francoise Yip, who was in Alone in the Dark (week 152).
• Corey Woods returned to the Sunday “Bad” Movies this week.  He had already appeared in Britney Ever After (week 258), another Lifetime movie.
• Finally, Kendall Cross from Space Buddies (week 270) was in The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story.
• Have you seen The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story?  What did you think of it?  Was Dustin Diamond a good point-of-view?  How do you feel about different points-of-views?  Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• Those are two places where you can also contact me to let me know what movies I should try and seek out for the posts.  I’m always open to suggestions.
• There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies where I’ll be doing some stuff soon.
• Now let’s discuss next week.  Canada has had a film industry almost as long as moving pictures have existed.  It hasn’t been a huge industry, but it has been respectable.  I’m taking a look at a Canadian film next week.  This one falls more on the ridiculous side of things, with green screen, violence, and robot men.  I’ll be writing about Manborg, so join me next week for the post.  See you then.