The Return of the Sub-Genre

Share on Facebook posted 08-11-10 by Max Tedaldi

Your parents definitely wore a tie-dye tee-shirt in the 60s and you, or at least a few people you know, wore one in the 90s. You may not be able to lay claim to sporting a popped collar polo in the 1980s but how about the early 2000s. You may not have seen Rocky in theaters in 1976, but how about Rocky Balboa in 2006.

Just like most everything in life, movies are released in cycles. What was popular one day will shine again, often decades later, even if that thing was as specific as Van Halen’s M&M demands. Here are some sub-genres that have come back from the grave.

The Buddy Cop Film

Classic
Lethal Weapon
Tango & Cash
48 Hrs.

Current
Cop-Out
The Other Guys
Hot Fuzz

It seems like cop buddy comedies were everywhere in the 80s and early 90s. It was a time when pairing one smart-mouthed-shoot-first-ask-questions-later-renegade cop with a by-the-book-uptight-veteran was all you needed to strike comedic action gold. It seems that the “you’re a wild cannon but dammit you get results” buddy cop motif went out of style for a brief time in the mid 1990′s to the early 2000′s, but it seems like the barren period in buddy cop movies is over. The Other Guys is number one at the box office this week, and it is the film that ended Inception‘s impressive run of supremacy.

The Blaxploitation Flik

Classic
Shaft
Coffy
Super Fly

Current
BAADASSSSS!
Black Dynamite
Jackie Brown

Exploitation films have always been an easy way for film directors to elicit strong emotional reactions from their audiences. If I had to put a label on the first blaxploitation film it would probably be Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, but I know that it’s impossible to claim the first of any particular genre. But Sweetback definitely popularized the genre, and a slew of blaxploitation films followed the Melvin Van Peebles hit. The 80′s and early 90′s saw the genre decline and then descend into parody with films like I’m Gonna Git You Sucka that riffed on its themes of drugs, violence and sex. It really wasn’t until the master of homage, Quentin Tarantino, made Jackie Brown that the Blaxploitation film came back, and it is back. Pootie Tang, Undercover Brother, BAADASSSSS!, Hookers In Revolt, and Black Dynamite have all contributed to the return of the funk and soul in modern cinema. There are even some films that are getting a revisionist blaxploitation treatment.

Stallone Uber-Action

Classic
Rocky
First Blood
Death Race 2000

Current
Rocky Balboa
Rambo
Death Race

Yearning for the days of yesteryear, our main man Sly Stallone has gone back into the business of continuing his most beloved franchises. Stallone has done this almost to the point of creating his own genre: the meta mid-life crisis.

The Creature Feature

Classic
The Thing
The Blob
Godzilla

Current
Piranha 3D
Cloverfield
The Host

To be fair, the Creature Feature has been an omnipresent presence in film since forever. The only real issue here is that when the glory days of the CF faded the genre took the long plunge into the B film basement where films like Critter went to die. That’s not to say that we don’t enjoy the cream of the crop Sci-Fi original programming Creature Features like Chupacabra: Dark Seas and the classic MegaShark VS Giant Octopus, but it is only in recent years that we have gotten an intelligent spin-off of this usually mindless popcorn-munching genre. Cloverfield and The Host were both cerebral thrillers, but I’m not so sure I’ll be able to say the same about Piranha 3D.

Teen Vampire

Classic
Once Bitten
The Lost Boys
My Best Friend Is a Vampire

Current
Twilight
Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant
Vampires Suck

We know that just about every trend is cyclical. From fashion and design to music and film, anything that was once popular will at some point be popular again. This happens commonly with general trends like clothing. Watching shows like Mad Men and White Collar, it’s easy to see that the protagonists get their style cues from a bygone era. But this can also happen with insanely specific genres, like the teen vampire film. Fright Night, Once Bitten, The Lost Boys, and My Best Friend Is a Vampire all came out within a five year span in the mid 80s and now the genre is back and more popular than it ever was in the days of padded shoulders. However, lines like this one from Eclipse may hint that the sub-genre is taking a turn for the worse.