Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts
Your source for exploitation film discussion of B movies.

The Opening That Refused to Cut Away

Genre films rarely enter quietly. A masked killer rises, a chainsaw starts its work, or a spacesuited astronaut begins explaining the rules of the future. For almost 200 episodes, Badasses, Boobs and Body Counts has made that excess readable through the sharp, irreverent commentary of Mike and Iris. Their interest covers what a movie does, how its roughness and visual style work, and why a supposedly cheap genre picture can linger in the mind after its monsters and mayhem have gone.

Some openings make an even stranger demand: patience. When a film’s opening scene was a 20-minute long take of a man walking to a car, the suspense moved from what might happen to whether the journey would ever end. The premise sounds almost comically anticlimactic, yet that is precisely its power. Without dialogue to explain the stakes or a cut to accelerate them, every step becomes part of the event. The walk becomes a test of nerve, a declaration of style and, for some viewers, a long enough journey to check the fridge and reconsider the entire evening.

Twenty minutes as a statement of intent

An opening sequence normally establishes the rules of the world it has entered. Action cinema may offer a chase, horror a forbidden image, and exploitation a promise of bodies or humiliation. A twenty-minute walk supplies almost none of that conventional merchandise. Instead, it withholds the expected payoff and makes ordinary duration feel unstable.

The car can still be an objective, even when it remains out of reach. Each metre of pavement raises a practical question: is he late, watched or heading towards something we cannot see? The destination is simple enough to grasp, which leaves suspicion free to accumulate around the route. Walking towards a car should be the least eventful action in the world. Filmed without relief, it becomes ominous.

That awareness of time also gives the audience permission to become restless. Twenty minutes is long enough to fidget, resent the premise, search for an editing trick or imagine that the film has lost control of itself. A long take can convert that irritation into dread, because there is no obvious point at which the scene promises to rescue us. When the cut finally arrives, it releases a tension that ordinary action rarely builds so patiently.

When one take is really several

A long take is not automatically a single unbroken shot. A sequence may be photographed in one pass, assembled from several takes through hidden cuts, or extended digitally until continuity resembles a continuous journey. The distinction matters because the seams reveal what the filmmakers considered safe and where they wanted the audience to believe time had not broken.

A genuine twenty-minute exterior would demand extraordinary preparation. The performer needs enough movement to sustain the frame without exhausting the voice. Camera operators must manage weight, balance and focus while covering ground. Sound operators must preserve footsteps, wind, distant traffic and dialogue, while extras and assistants maintain their positions without breaking the illusion. A public road would add permits, traffic management and safety concerns; Australian summer heat or a sudden Queensland downpour would add their own production difficulties.

Even with hidden edits, the scene requires a coherent visual argument. Blocking, eye lines and sound bridges must make each section feel continuous. The show’s episode archive offers a practical way to encounter such choices: choose a title that appears to favour atmosphere over plot, then note how sound and framing guide the audience through scenes that might otherwise appear static.

How genre cinema makes waiting dangerous

The long take works differently across genres, but each can use duration to disturb familiar expectations. In action cinema, movement usually supplies momentum. The famous pursuit in The French Connection gains force because it interrupts an ordinary urban routine. A walk to a car can offer the same contrast on a smaller scale, with the possibility of violence remaining outside the frame.

Horror is especially effective at converting the mundane into threat. A door, a staircase or a parked vehicle becomes threatening when the camera refuses to complete the journey quickly. The Third Man makes footsteps and shadows carry moral unease, while Oldboy uses an extended corridor fight to turn a familiar passageway into a prison. The twenty-minute walk operates in that same territory: it gives a viewer enough time to notice details that a quick cut would erase.

Exploitation and sexploitation have their own relationship with duration. Their editing often accelerates towards a promised shock, so a long take can make the body on screen newly vulnerable to scrutiny. That need not make the scene liberating. It may expose the filmmaker’s control over time, attention and embarrassment. The podcast’s irreverent analysis is useful here because it asks who is being watched, who controls the rhythm and when the audience is permitted to look away.

Cult and grindhouse films gain another layer from the attempt itself. Their makers often operate with limited resources and familiar genre shorthand. Spending twenty minutes on a walk can read as an eccentric flourish, a practical experiment or an indulgence that nearly sinks the picture. Either way, the sequence becomes the film’s most conspicuous personality: impatient, strange and impossible to discuss without mentioning the wait.

The Australian context changes the walk

Australian genre history gives the sequence a national accent. Films such as Patrick, Dead End Drive-In and Wake in Fright found menace in suburban streets, roadside venues and the spaces between towns. The car is not incidental in that tradition. It carries characters away, offers a possible escape and sometimes becomes the site where the landscape claims them.

Queensland and the Gold Coast have a particularly strange place in this story. American studios produced wilder films there during the era now associated with Bruceploitation, using tropical heat, cheap locations and unfamiliar roads to reshape imported genre premises. A continuous exterior shot would have been both practical and risky: sudden storms could interrupt a take, while suburban architecture and broad distances could turn a short walk into a long optical problem.

For Australian audiences, the journey towards a vehicle also carries ordinary associations. Sydney drivers negotiate toll roads, tight parking and constant traffic; Melbourne has its own tram corridors, laneways and café crowds. Drive-ins still provide a distinctly local way to watch genre pictures, while the tradition of the late-night drive or a walk back from the pub gives the opening a recognisable Australian rhythm. The fictional man may be carrying dread, but he is also following habits we understand.

Classification provides another layer. Australia’s federal classification system, established through the Classification Act 1966, separates R-classified releases from material restricted to adults, and R18+ material carries an adult-access condition. That framework matters when discussing exploitation cinema: frank treatment of sex, violence and the body sits within a specific legal and cultural system. It also reminds viewers that “available” does not mean identical to the same material elsewhere.

Film preservation and specialist media give the sequence a longer afterlife. The ACMI in Melbourne and the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra preserve elements of Australian screen culture, while second-hand VHS dealers and cult-film collectors keep obscure editions circulating. The habit of treating a movie as evidence is visible in Mike's viewing notes, where plot, performance and production context become parts of the same critical argument.

A viewing guide to demanding openings

Watching an unusual opening requires a slightly different approach from the usual rush to reach the plot. These suggestions are designed to reveal the construction rather than spoil the surprise.

A second viewing can be revealing because the first establishes expectation while the second exposes method. The walk may look completely different once the performance, framing and sound design become visible. For a long take, boredom is often the first measurement, yet patience can also reveal details that familiarity would conceal. The useful question is not simply whether the sequence is slow, but what kind of pressure that slowness creates.

Make the next watch worth the wait

Choose an episode from the podcast’s catalogue, listen before watching the film, and let Mike and Iris explain what the movie believes it can accomplish. Pay particular attention to openings that seem too plain for their own good. They often contain the clearest statement of a director’s method: what the camera watches, what it withholds and how long it expects an audience to stay with the frame.

Press play, keep the lights low and give an odd opening the attention it demands. A man walking to a car may not look like cinema history, but twenty uninterrupted minutes can make waiting feel like the oldest trick in the book.