February is Blaxploitation month

Since it is black history month we are going to be focusing on the Blaxploitation genre of films. We will be reviewing other movies, too, but our focus will be blaxploiation. We may have a different theme every other month to where we focus on a particular genre or time period of movies. For those that don’t know what blaxploitation movies are or are just knowledgeable of them, I will explain.

In the 70s exploitation films began to take off and blaxploitation films were originally made for the urban black audience. By the mid 70s blaxploitation became popular with audiences of every culture. These types of movies feature soundtracks to funk, soul, and jazz and usually the cast was 90% all black.

The subgenre is what helped these movies branch out by having crime, martial arts, westerns, horror, comedy, musicals, and coming of age films that showed the black culture in modern society. Blaxploitation film ended in the mid to late eighties and has been brought back a few times in the 2000s, but most of the modern films will never live up to the 70s movies.

Zentilack and I have had a discussion on what movies to watch this month regarding blaxploitation. He is relying on me for some of these movies because he has seen very few. We will do a few reviews together on these genre, but not many. The goal is to watch some of the good movies, which is what he will be watching mainly. While I watch some of the lesser know titles that most people have never heard of. I encourage you to read the reviews and you might be surprised and become fond of this particular genre of film. Here are some posters of some movies you might have heard of.