Have bad movies edged out good?
IPA REVIEW ARTICLE | Chris Berg Chris Berg reviews Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics.It may not come as a surprise that Hostel: Part II, the 2007 movie which depicts nearly an hour and a half of brutal, explicit and uninterrupted torture, is part of a rich cultural lineage. Hostel II is part of a new movement of neo-exploitation cinema, and its direct artistic ancestors date back nearly half a century.So have ‘bad’ movies like these edged out ‘good’ movies?Few cultural fields illustrate the blurring between ‘highbrow’ art and ‘lowbrow’ craft more than the movies. As Jeffrey Sconce points out in the new edited collection of essays on trash cinema Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics, movies were never an elite art; condemned to be practiced and enjoyed only by the cultured few. Instead, movies have always existed only to entertain, and as such, have always been a ‘vulgar medium’ designed to appeal to the unwashed masses.But
