The Sexploiters / Raw Love (Kino Cult #46)

Kino Cult and Something Weird present two rarely-seen “roughies” culled from the lower depths of the American grindhouse. In The Sexploiters, Terri Steele is a Long Island housewife who immerses herself in the seedy subculture of the camera club, where clients engage live models for private photography sessions. Director Al Ruban later brought the gritty black-and-white aesthetics of of The Sexploiters to John Cassavetes’ 1968 Faces (which Ruban shot and edited), launching a decades-long collaboration between the two artists. Raw Love is a hicksploitation classic virtually unseen for 50 years: a sordid slice of life among the depraved moonshiners and uninhibited daughters of an unspecified rural community. Both films were mastered from original 35mm prints from the Sonney Amusement Enterprises Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.