Genre-benders

One of the best thing about exploitation movies is how readily producers and directors are prepared to play with genre convention. Mind-bending genre fusions come with the territory and here are some great examples.......

Kung-fu western
Red Sun (1971 - Director Terence Young)
Not only does Red Sun have a cast to make international production guru's slaver (Alain Delon, Ursula Andress, Chuck Bronson and the great Toshiro Mifune) but the film actually delivers as both a western and as a martial arts film, with grumpy Mifune hacking, slashing and splattering his way through cowboys, saloons, cathouses and dusty town squares like Lone Wolf. It's flawed, certainly but it's great fun.

Sex-horror
Shivers (1975 - Director David Cronenberg)
There are loads of great horror films with a sexual element, but few of them successfully meld both elements and deliver on both scores - the only other one I can think of off-hand is Jose Larraz' Vampyres (1973). Shivers is a brilliant, heady, cerebral horror film with a genuinely powerful sexual charge. Although the whole film is queasy, several sequences stand out - the Octenagarian woman and teenager necking in the lift of starliner towers, the fate of Barbara Steele's character, the final, slippery orgy in the swimming pool of the Starliner Towers. Given that the prime market for horror is teenage boys and here's a film that's guranteed to generate all kinds of emotional 'confusion'!

The Hollywood wallow
Mandingo (1975 - Director Richard Fleischer)
Even excluding the deliberate bad taste efforts of indie auteurs like John Waters and Russ Meyer, there were no shortage of material for this group of Hollywood product wallowing in the gutter, Drum (1976), Mommy Dearest (1981), Redneck County (1975) and Lipstick (1977) are just 70's examples, but Mandingo is the real deal, mixing inept social drama, softcore coupling in soft focus and scenes of barbarity that would never be seen as acceptable today. Slavery is a touchy subject at the best of times, so what made director Fleischer think that the Bull in the China shop approach would work is anyone's guess.

The Action/Martial Arts/Horror movie
Silent Rage (1981 - Director Michael Miller)
A small area for sure, but Silent Rage deserves a mention for the fact that someone tried to mesh these disparate elements together and whilst it's not entirely successful, it's successful enough to be tense when it needs to be and star Chuck Norris and director Michael Miller are canny enough to know how this game works. Silent Rage delivers, and is a great example of how even the most daft genre fusions work if they're made with a bit of moxie.

The Sado-western
Five Bloody Graves (1971 - Director Al Adamson)
There were a few of these films, westerns with deliberately sadistic overtones made in the early 70's - Five Bloody Graves, Cry Blood Apache (1970), Cain's cut-throats (1971) and the biggest budgeted - Michael Winner's Chato's Land (1971). These films are threadbare, cheap and nasty splatter films with western settings. Five Bloody Graves features rape and lashings a plenty and John Carradine as a preacher who carries jars full of severed heads on the stagecoach with him. A short-lived trend, but an eye catching one.

There are others, why not add your own?