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Exploitation Nation #2: Hunting Cryptids of the Cinema!
Exploitation Nation is back with our second issue! All about cryptids of the Bigfoot, Nessie, The Mothman, The Yeti, The Pope Lick Monster - we got 'em all! Well, most. The monsters and the movies that love them. Also this issue, journalist Mike Watt takes a look back at his time covering 2009's "Sorority Row". Plus, bidding a sad and fond farewell to George A. Romero.
80 pages, Paperback
Published September 11, 2017
11 people are currently reading
2 people want to read
About the author
Mike Watt
24 books1 followerMike Watt is a writer, journalist and screenwriter. He has written for such publications as Fangoria, Film Threat, The Dark Side, the late Frederick Clarke’s Cinefantastique, Femme Fatales and served as editor for the RAK Media Group's resurrection of Sirens of Cinema.
Through the production company, Happy Cloud Pictures, he has written and produced or directed the award-winning feature film The Resurrection Game, as well as Splatter Movie: The Director’s Cut, A Feast of Flesh, Demon Divas and the Lanes of Damnation and the award-winning Razor Days.
He is the author of the short fiction collection, Phobophobia, the novels The Resurrection Game and Suicide Machine, and from McFarland Publishing: Fervid Filmmaking: 66 Cult Pictures of Vision, Verve and No Self-Restraint. In 2014, he launched the acclaimed Movie Outlaw book series, focusing on "underseen cinema". He is also the editor-in-chief of the magazine, Exploitation Nation.
Through Happy Cloud Media, LLC, he edits and publishes 42nd Street Pete's Grindhouse Purgatory Magazine, as well as Pete's autobiography, "A Whole Bag of Crazy".
In 2017, he edited the 40th Anniversary printing of Paul Schrader's TAXI DRIVER screenplay, featuring a new interview with Robert De Niro, published in 2018 by Gauntlet Press.
Through the production company, Happy Cloud Pictures, he has written and produced or directed the award-winning feature film The Resurrection Game, as well as Splatter Movie: The Director’s Cut, A Feast of Flesh, Demon Divas and the Lanes of Damnation and the award-winning Razor Days.
He is the author of the short fiction collection, Phobophobia, the novels The Resurrection Game and Suicide Machine, and from McFarland Publishing: Fervid Filmmaking: 66 Cult Pictures of Vision, Verve and No Self-Restraint. In 2014, he launched the acclaimed Movie Outlaw book series, focusing on "underseen cinema". He is also the editor-in-chief of the magazine, Exploitation Nation.
Through Happy Cloud Media, LLC, he edits and publishes 42nd Street Pete's Grindhouse Purgatory Magazine, as well as Pete's autobiography, "A Whole Bag of Crazy".
In 2017, he edited the 40th Anniversary printing of Paul Schrader's TAXI DRIVER screenplay, featuring a new interview with Robert De Niro, published in 2018 by Gauntlet Press.
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June 12, 2018
I am ever on the lookout for periodicals that can expand my knowledge of sleazy and lowbrow entertainment. If you’ve followed my reviews of magazines like “Grindhouse Purgatory,” then you know that I have a real soft spot for media that veers just a bit off of the beaten path. I grew up enjoying all kinds of left-field trash, from comics and paperbacks and pro wrestling to UFO reports and porn. Kids growing up today with the internet have no idea how much fun it was to have to physically seek out books and magazines and movies that could feed our addictions to illicit words and images. Video tapes were a great boon to the collectors of sleaze, but of course just as video killed the radio star, it also ended up killing a thriving print industry that had previously catered to collectors of all types who hoarded their mags and rags in boxes and drawers and under mattresses for years. Granted, you can now find literally ANYTHING on the internet to feed your own particular fetishes, but the thrill of the chase is gone.
Even the movie business felt the pain, as summer and holiday blockbusters have become the Hollywood norm. As it so happens, there has been a renaissance in independent and micro-budget movie making in recent years, AIDED in large part by the relative ease and economy of digital video. It’s probably the one piece of media from my day that has weathered the information age and managed to survive and even thrive, although in a very much mutated form.
Fortunately, there are a number of people working diligently to keep the memories of that bygone era of hard copy and film alive for future generations. Magazines like “Weng’s Chop,” “The Sleazy Reader,” “Cinema Sewer,” and the aforementioned “Grindhouse Purgatory” are all small-scale labors of love, each dedicated to highlighting and celebrating various niches of what used to be considered “underground” or “counterculture” media. Add to that list Happy Cloud Media’s “Exploitation Nation,” edited by none other than ex-Fangoria and Film Threat contributor Mike Watt. (No, that’s NOT the same Mike Watt that played bass for The Minutemen.)
I bought the first two issues of “Exploitation Nation” so that I could try and get a good handle on what the new addition to the lineup had to offer. As it turns out, I ended up reading issue #2 first, as it caught my attention with a focus on cryptid flicks. I enjoy me a good Bigfoot movie as much as anyone, so I’ll do my best to break-down the articles so you can get a taste of what you’re getting into if you should invest in this magazine.
Quick definitional sidebar: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The term cryptid is used by proponents of cryptozoology, a pseudoscience, to refer to beings that cryptozoologists believe may in fact exist but have not yet been discovered. Rejected by academia, cryptozoology is neither a branch of biology nor folkloristics.
“Remembering George A. Romero” - The father of zombie movies had died in July 2017, just as this issue was preparing to go to press. Watt contributes here a hastily-written tribute to Romero that does little to celebrate or explain his enduring resonance to horror movie fans. The article meanders around a bit, repeats itself a LOT, and generally goes nowhere ploddingly. Not a great tone-setter for the rest of the magazine.
“A Look Back at Sorority Row” - Watt is careful and honest enough to explain that magazines often have what the publishing industry generously refers to as “padding.” This particular article is a document of Watt’s time spent on-set during the remake of “Sorority Row,” a slasher flick that really didn’t warrant much of a remake in the first place. Watt tries to cast the film as a “feminist” take on slasher cinema, but both the movie and the article fall flat in that regard. Not a good follow-up to the Romero article, and not a cryptid in sight as of yet.
“Script-Ozoology” - Bill Adcock contributes a skeptic’s take on whether or not fantastic creatures even exist. This is a decent look at the phenomenon from a firm non-believer. It’s especially interesting when he is able to tie the advent of the Chupacabra to the release of an “Alien”-inspired horror film called “Species” in 1995. Apparently, the initial reports of the Chupacabra dovetailed neatly with Natasha Henstridge’s character in the movie, and the first witness to report the cryptid might have been….ahem….very “suggestible.” Adcock works his speculative magic again when he suggests that Bigfoot sightings took an a monotone descriptive arc after the release of the family-friendly sasquatch flick “Harry and the Hendersons.” These are neat insights and make this a more than worthwhile thought experiment. I won’t spoil his other big reveals on the possible origins of various big-name cryptids, suffice to say that he presents some pretty strong arguments that imagination can be a powerful and easily manipulated mental process.
“Bullshit or Not? Cryptids of the Cinema” - Watt himself takes on a similar stance on the veracity of fantastic beasts with a look at a few of the more obscure creepies to be seen on screen. Sadly, I have to concur that The Pope Lick Monster might, just MIGHT, be a figment of the subconscious. Of more interest to me is the discussion of West Virginia’s “Mothman,” a creature described in great detail by author John Keel in his book “The Mothman Prophecies.” Keel’s book is one of the all-time classic paranormal texts, given that Keel himself had an active role in the spread of the legend. It’s a stew of paranoia and crazed creature reporting, and the film starring Richard Gere did NOTHING to bring any of those elements to the screen.
“The Man Behind Sascratch - Thomas Berdinski” - Dough Waltz interviews and profiles micro-budget movie maker Berdinski. A fun and thankfully short little article. And yes, you read that right….”Sascratch.” Make up your own jokes, I just really don’t have time for this.
“It Came From Arkansas” - William J. Wright contributes a great article on a creature and a movie that are near and dear to my heart, “The Legend of Boggy Creek.” Some context here is necessary. I grew up in Texarkana, Texas, in the far NE corner of the state where Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana meet in an area fittingly called the Ark-La-Tex. The 1960s and 1970s were a boom time for the paranormal, especially UFOs and Bigfoot and bog apes in general. Fouke, Arkansas is fairly close to Texarkana, and as things turned out that little township had a genuine folk beastie to call it’s own, known appropriately as the Fouke Monster. The Fouke Monster was pretty much a southern-fried, white-trash version of Bigfoot, complete with eerie howl and massive stench. He left many an outsize footprint in the woods of Arkansas, and many an outsize mental footprint in the imaginations of hundreds of weird kids like me. It’s not at all a stretch to say that the Fouke Monster was the primary driver of my interest in all things strange, and to this day I have fond memories of the many stories I’d heard and the many games we played that had our very own Bigfoot clone as the centerpiece. In 1972, a movie came out that dramatized the creature, calling it “The Legend of Boggy Creek.” Creepy and campy in equal measures, the film plays as a straight-up documentary of the many tales and legends surrounding the monster. It did tons of box-office considering that it was a G-rated movie, and it deserves its place as the creme de la creme of Bigfoot docudramas. There are a couple of scenes in the movie that still creep me out to this day. Atmospheric and truly weird, it’s a movie you should certainly seek out if you have any interest at all in the subject matter. For me, it’s nothing but pure, nostalgic gold.
Side note: my mother and father retired to Douglassville, a small township on the Texas side of the line that was on the southwestern end of the Wright Patton Reservoir. Now a lot of folks saw strange things around that lake, myself included, but my Mom and Dad used to swear up and down that they saw a Bigfoot one day while driving back home from a trip to the grocery store. It stood in the road ahead of them and then lumbered off into the woods as they drove closer. Brown bears are native to the area, though rarely seen. Both of my parents were born skeptics, so for them to tell such a tale repeatedly kinda freaked me out.
“In Search of Bigfoot” - Dr. Rhonda Baughman details the fun and magic of making a micro-budget Bigfoot flick. I need to look for this if it ever gets released.
“Gingersquatch” - Doug Waltz contributes this article on the small cult-classic film that somehow still gets regurgitated on the con circuit, mostly as a result of it’s director donning the ape suit and mugging for attention. Interesting article, though. I might even try to find the movie somewhere and give it a watch.
“Reviews” - All sorts of creature-feature flicks are given the go-over, but the real gems here are the reviews of the soft-porn Bigfoot classic “The Beast and the Vixens,” and the truly interesting and unusual Burt Reynolds joint “Skullduggery.” “Vixens” has two big advantages over its competition in the form of Uschi Digard’s massive mammaries, and “Skullduggery” takes a cerebral turn and contemplates what would happen if mankind really DID discover a race of “missing links.” Plus you get some great interspecies boning courtesy of Roger Carmel, the guy who played Harry Mudd twice in the original “Star Trek” television series.
“I’d Buy That For A Dollar” - More reviews, this time with an eye towards the gems that can often be found when one is willing to scour the bargain bins in video stores for hours on end. There are a couple of good recommendations in this section, most notably “Vendetta for The Saint,” starring Roger Moore as the titular title character.
And that’s it. All of this packed into a compact 80 pages, with lots of black & white photos to illustrate the articles. Overall, I enjoyed the magazine, though probably not as much as I enjoyed “Grindhouse Purgatory.” The focus here seems to be strictly on video, so it gets a little bit one-dimensional after a while. “Weng’s Chop” and “Cinema Sewer” both do a better job of highlighting true sleaze and b-movie gems, but “Exploitation Nation” certainly has potential. I’d give it 3.5 stars if I could, as it is I’ll have to downsize it to 3 stars. There is good stuff to be had here, but there are certainly weaknesses, too. Better and more consistent editing would help, and the magazine sure could use a splash of color once in a while. Still, it’s important to support publications that keep these significant pieces of the past alive, and I do hope that Mike Watt and his team find an audience with this magazine.
Even the movie business felt the pain, as summer and holiday blockbusters have become the Hollywood norm. As it so happens, there has been a renaissance in independent and micro-budget movie making in recent years, AIDED in large part by the relative ease and economy of digital video. It’s probably the one piece of media from my day that has weathered the information age and managed to survive and even thrive, although in a very much mutated form.
Fortunately, there are a number of people working diligently to keep the memories of that bygone era of hard copy and film alive for future generations. Magazines like “Weng’s Chop,” “The Sleazy Reader,” “Cinema Sewer,” and the aforementioned “Grindhouse Purgatory” are all small-scale labors of love, each dedicated to highlighting and celebrating various niches of what used to be considered “underground” or “counterculture” media. Add to that list Happy Cloud Media’s “Exploitation Nation,” edited by none other than ex-Fangoria and Film Threat contributor Mike Watt. (No, that’s NOT the same Mike Watt that played bass for The Minutemen.)
I bought the first two issues of “Exploitation Nation” so that I could try and get a good handle on what the new addition to the lineup had to offer. As it turns out, I ended up reading issue #2 first, as it caught my attention with a focus on cryptid flicks. I enjoy me a good Bigfoot movie as much as anyone, so I’ll do my best to break-down the articles so you can get a taste of what you’re getting into if you should invest in this magazine.
Quick definitional sidebar: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The term cryptid is used by proponents of cryptozoology, a pseudoscience, to refer to beings that cryptozoologists believe may in fact exist but have not yet been discovered. Rejected by academia, cryptozoology is neither a branch of biology nor folkloristics.
“Remembering George A. Romero” - The father of zombie movies had died in July 2017, just as this issue was preparing to go to press. Watt contributes here a hastily-written tribute to Romero that does little to celebrate or explain his enduring resonance to horror movie fans. The article meanders around a bit, repeats itself a LOT, and generally goes nowhere ploddingly. Not a great tone-setter for the rest of the magazine.
“A Look Back at Sorority Row” - Watt is careful and honest enough to explain that magazines often have what the publishing industry generously refers to as “padding.” This particular article is a document of Watt’s time spent on-set during the remake of “Sorority Row,” a slasher flick that really didn’t warrant much of a remake in the first place. Watt tries to cast the film as a “feminist” take on slasher cinema, but both the movie and the article fall flat in that regard. Not a good follow-up to the Romero article, and not a cryptid in sight as of yet.
“Script-Ozoology” - Bill Adcock contributes a skeptic’s take on whether or not fantastic creatures even exist. This is a decent look at the phenomenon from a firm non-believer. It’s especially interesting when he is able to tie the advent of the Chupacabra to the release of an “Alien”-inspired horror film called “Species” in 1995. Apparently, the initial reports of the Chupacabra dovetailed neatly with Natasha Henstridge’s character in the movie, and the first witness to report the cryptid might have been….ahem….very “suggestible.” Adcock works his speculative magic again when he suggests that Bigfoot sightings took an a monotone descriptive arc after the release of the family-friendly sasquatch flick “Harry and the Hendersons.” These are neat insights and make this a more than worthwhile thought experiment. I won’t spoil his other big reveals on the possible origins of various big-name cryptids, suffice to say that he presents some pretty strong arguments that imagination can be a powerful and easily manipulated mental process.
“Bullshit or Not? Cryptids of the Cinema” - Watt himself takes on a similar stance on the veracity of fantastic beasts with a look at a few of the more obscure creepies to be seen on screen. Sadly, I have to concur that The Pope Lick Monster might, just MIGHT, be a figment of the subconscious. Of more interest to me is the discussion of West Virginia’s “Mothman,” a creature described in great detail by author John Keel in his book “The Mothman Prophecies.” Keel’s book is one of the all-time classic paranormal texts, given that Keel himself had an active role in the spread of the legend. It’s a stew of paranoia and crazed creature reporting, and the film starring Richard Gere did NOTHING to bring any of those elements to the screen.
“The Man Behind Sascratch - Thomas Berdinski” - Dough Waltz interviews and profiles micro-budget movie maker Berdinski. A fun and thankfully short little article. And yes, you read that right….”Sascratch.” Make up your own jokes, I just really don’t have time for this.
“It Came From Arkansas” - William J. Wright contributes a great article on a creature and a movie that are near and dear to my heart, “The Legend of Boggy Creek.” Some context here is necessary. I grew up in Texarkana, Texas, in the far NE corner of the state where Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana meet in an area fittingly called the Ark-La-Tex. The 1960s and 1970s were a boom time for the paranormal, especially UFOs and Bigfoot and bog apes in general. Fouke, Arkansas is fairly close to Texarkana, and as things turned out that little township had a genuine folk beastie to call it’s own, known appropriately as the Fouke Monster. The Fouke Monster was pretty much a southern-fried, white-trash version of Bigfoot, complete with eerie howl and massive stench. He left many an outsize footprint in the woods of Arkansas, and many an outsize mental footprint in the imaginations of hundreds of weird kids like me. It’s not at all a stretch to say that the Fouke Monster was the primary driver of my interest in all things strange, and to this day I have fond memories of the many stories I’d heard and the many games we played that had our very own Bigfoot clone as the centerpiece. In 1972, a movie came out that dramatized the creature, calling it “The Legend of Boggy Creek.” Creepy and campy in equal measures, the film plays as a straight-up documentary of the many tales and legends surrounding the monster. It did tons of box-office considering that it was a G-rated movie, and it deserves its place as the creme de la creme of Bigfoot docudramas. There are a couple of scenes in the movie that still creep me out to this day. Atmospheric and truly weird, it’s a movie you should certainly seek out if you have any interest at all in the subject matter. For me, it’s nothing but pure, nostalgic gold.
Side note: my mother and father retired to Douglassville, a small township on the Texas side of the line that was on the southwestern end of the Wright Patton Reservoir. Now a lot of folks saw strange things around that lake, myself included, but my Mom and Dad used to swear up and down that they saw a Bigfoot one day while driving back home from a trip to the grocery store. It stood in the road ahead of them and then lumbered off into the woods as they drove closer. Brown bears are native to the area, though rarely seen. Both of my parents were born skeptics, so for them to tell such a tale repeatedly kinda freaked me out.
“In Search of Bigfoot” - Dr. Rhonda Baughman details the fun and magic of making a micro-budget Bigfoot flick. I need to look for this if it ever gets released.
“Gingersquatch” - Doug Waltz contributes this article on the small cult-classic film that somehow still gets regurgitated on the con circuit, mostly as a result of it’s director donning the ape suit and mugging for attention. Interesting article, though. I might even try to find the movie somewhere and give it a watch.
“Reviews” - All sorts of creature-feature flicks are given the go-over, but the real gems here are the reviews of the soft-porn Bigfoot classic “The Beast and the Vixens,” and the truly interesting and unusual Burt Reynolds joint “Skullduggery.” “Vixens” has two big advantages over its competition in the form of Uschi Digard’s massive mammaries, and “Skullduggery” takes a cerebral turn and contemplates what would happen if mankind really DID discover a race of “missing links.” Plus you get some great interspecies boning courtesy of Roger Carmel, the guy who played Harry Mudd twice in the original “Star Trek” television series.
“I’d Buy That For A Dollar” - More reviews, this time with an eye towards the gems that can often be found when one is willing to scour the bargain bins in video stores for hours on end. There are a couple of good recommendations in this section, most notably “Vendetta for The Saint,” starring Roger Moore as the titular title character.
And that’s it. All of this packed into a compact 80 pages, with lots of black & white photos to illustrate the articles. Overall, I enjoyed the magazine, though probably not as much as I enjoyed “Grindhouse Purgatory.” The focus here seems to be strictly on video, so it gets a little bit one-dimensional after a while. “Weng’s Chop” and “Cinema Sewer” both do a better job of highlighting true sleaze and b-movie gems, but “Exploitation Nation” certainly has potential. I’d give it 3.5 stars if I could, as it is I’ll have to downsize it to 3 stars. There is good stuff to be had here, but there are certainly weaknesses, too. Better and more consistent editing would help, and the magazine sure could use a splash of color once in a while. Still, it’s important to support publications that keep these significant pieces of the past alive, and I do hope that Mike Watt and his team find an audience with this magazine.
August 24, 2025
Apparently no one bothered to do editing on this book. Parts of sentences were totally missing which you could tell by the black spaces after part of a sentence and then a partial sentence or a newly started one would follow. If there was a second partial sentence it did not complete the first part. I cannot understand why this wasn't found before it was actually published.
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