Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		4.0
Overall		3.5

That’s Sexploitation! Blu-ray Movie Review

Porn yesterday.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 9, 2016

It’s not exactly a closely guarded secret that the internet is a virtual wonderland of pornography, and one of the kind of interesting tangential shifts in the entertainment landscape which the world wide web helped to usher in has been the compartmentalizing of pornography viewing into private, typically solitary, events. While there are still “peep show” palaces in most major cities (including my hometown of Portland, Oregon), the questionably “communal” aspect of going to an arcade or theater to watch porn is by and large a thing of the past. I’m old enough to remember the cheap, often disgustingly dirty, theaters where porn used to play, though I should hasten to add I only ever saw a porn film theatrically twice in my life, both times as a kind of joke. A bunch of buddies and I more or less snuck into a Salt Lake City porn palace back when we were teenagers (yes, that’s right, even a straight arrow locale like Utah’s biggest burg had porn, something that some current Utah lawmakers are evidently loathe to admit, as evidenced by some recent news reports I've seen concerning statements made about the "dangers" of porn and a perceived need to legislate against it). We saw some regrettable feature which revolved around stewardesses, if I recall correctly after so many years, and it may have actually "only" been a softcore offering. Later as a whimsical present for my 21st birthday, my girlfriend at the time took me to see Deep Throat, which had been ensconced for years in one of Portland’s most notorious porn theaters, The Aladdin. (The Aladdin later “cleaned up” and became a great performance venue for live music acts.) The thing about going to an actual theater to see porn was that there was a kind of built in “shame” involved, at least if you were a (relatively?) straight and narrow kid like I was. It was titillating, of course, and “fun” in an indecent way, but you couldn’t help but look around to see if there was anyone there you might not want to be seen by, as well as a nagging pang of conscience that you might be sullying some pristine topography in your soul. The “privatization” of porn courtesy of the internet age has largely erased that feeling of shame, at least in terms of what a porn viewer might be otherwise forced to confront out in the open (meaning the dark and disturbingly sticky confines of a porn theater).

One of the kind of ironic things about reactions to porn as exemplified by my aforementioned comment on the situation in Utah right now is the fact that some form of pornography has been around probably since the dawn of Mankind. (The recent Comedy Central special Time Traveling Bong had a funny little riff on this idea when two cousins ended up back in antediluvian days and some of the cave painting "graffiti" was on the decidedly suggestive side.) Even before the advent of moving pictures, there were all sorts of phenomena like “French postcards” and the like, and so it shouldn’t have come as that big of a shock when naked ladies (and even a few naked gentlemen!) started populating early “flickers”. Now, it's certainly inarguable that the glut of porn available on the internet is probably more ubiquitous than it ever has been before, and decidedly more easily accessible than it was in days of yore, but the urge for guys to ogle nude women seems to be an inescapable genetic imprint (and one that may in some small part account for each and every one of us), one that cinema has been more than happy to exploit (and/or sexploit).

That’s Sexploitation! is a largely loving tribute to an at times quaint, at other times hilarious, at still other times frankly slightly shocking, genre of “films” that were part and parcel of both pre-code and post-code cinema history. Hosted by director Frank Henelotter, That’s Sexploitation also features long interview segments with legendary exploitation maven David F. Friedman, who offers a lifetime of memories and sometimes piquant commentary on the wide array of archival footage included in the documentary. That array includes early silents which offer little more than topless girls frolicking at the beach, and then an increasing number of talkies which sought to undermine the nascent Hays Office by cloaking sexually charged films in the guise of “educational” offerings that supposedly sought to warn America’s youth of the dangers of things like necking.

The documentary moves through the decades rather briskly, but with so many clips that things feel stuffed to the gills at times. There’s some nice biographical information on some of the “stars” of these niches of American cinema (and those interested may want to check out tangentially related documentaries like Bettie Page Reveals All or fictionalized treatments like Bettie Page: Dark Angel), as well as a rather interesting subtext that reflects changing attitudes toward sexual behaviors and just how far depictions of them on screen could go. There’s a lot of patently goofy material on display here, a lot of which younger viewers especially will hardly find “pornographic” in a contemporary sense, but that’s actually part of the unexpected charm That’s Sexploitation ends up offering.

That’s Sexploitation! Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

That's Sexploitation! is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Severin Films with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in a variety of aspect ratios (due to the source archival elements), but "generally" in 1.78:1. As should be expected from a documentary cobbled together out of such a wide variety of sources, That's Sexploitation! has a rather heterogeneous appearance. The contemporary interview and/or talking head segments pop reasonably well, though kind of humorously the interlaced presentation leads to some combing artifacts when a pretty and scantily clad woman twirls the tassles on her pasties. The archival source video is all over the map quality wise, with nothing ever totally escaping the vagaries of time, wear and tear, but some clips (especially the more relatively recent ones) certainly looking at least somewhat more consistent than others. Black and white clips have widely variant contrast and black levels, and similarly the color clips have varying levels of palette accuracy and general densities. Grain structures fluctuate as well, and damage ranges from minimal to pretty dramatic at times.

Note: We try to shy away from screenshots which feature outright nudity, which made providing screenshots for this release a bit of a challenge. Suffice it to say there is no dearth of full frontal nudity in this documentary, both female and male.

That’s Sexploitation! Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

That's Sexploitation!'s LPCM 2.0 track gets the job done, providing expected fidelity in the contemporary interview and talking head segments, but encountering some difficulties overcoming age related damage to some of the archival clips, which often are hobbled by hiss, pops, clicks, and minimal distortion. I kind of wished the documentary hadn't been so intent in slathering on music over great swaths of the enterprise, some of which leads to some (slight) prioritization issues during some of the contemporary talking head segments.

That’s Sexploitation! Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Sexploitation Shorts from the Something Weird Archives (480i; 3:32:49) is an absolutely amazing compendium of old "nudie" films and the like, arranged in chronological order, and quite capably documenting some changing attitudes toward sex and its depiction on screen.


• Audio Commentary with Director Frank Henenlotter and Something Weird's Lisa Petrucci

That’s Sexploitation! Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It might seem odd to call a documentary like That's Sexploitation! charming, but it frequently is, at least if you're not easily offended by the sight of naked females doing a variety of at times patently odd "maneuvers" (maybe that should be man-euvers). Anyone interested in the history of stag films or "nudies" should certainly find a wealth of great information here, and the glut of clips makes this a virtual encyclopedia of one of the more curious byways in the history of film. Technical merits are fine, given the wide range of archival material involved, and the supplemental package of sexploitation films is, well, mind boggling. Recommended.