Exploitation Poster Art

With 10 film poster anthologies already under their belts, editors Nourmand and Marsh turn to "the one genre defined not by content but by attitude": exploitation films. White slavery, motorcycle psychos, crazed beatnik dope fiends and "the seemingly widespread menace of gorillas having sex with young white women"—with enough exclamation points to fill a DD cup, the posters promise it all and ultimately deliver more than did the films themselves. "Teenage killers taking their thrills unashamed!" "The shock by shock confessions of a Sorority Girl." From Fast and Loose to Curse of a Teenage Nazi , High School Hellcats , The Love Wanga and beyond, the huckster's allure of these posters' salacious images takes us back to some oddly quaint times. Accompanying the posters is a well-written minihistory of the genre's dance with the Hays Code, as well as brief insights into the films, their directors and the poster artists themselves. The large format book covers films from the 1910s through the mid-'70s, after which the genre fell off the map. As film critic Dave Kehr writes in the foreword: "Now that nothing was forbidden, there was nothing left to exploit—the audience's expectations, once so artfully teased, could now be bluntly and banally fulfilled." (Apr. 1)