Taste politics clearly remain one of the key dimensions behind the emerging retrosploitation cycle's engagement with history, treating the cinematic past as a ‘politically incorrect’ wellspring of inspiration and distinction for more recent productions that are largely (but not wholly) targeted at the white, heterosexual male viewer who has long consumed exploitation films as cult objects. Yet because, as I suggested in Chapter 1, archival exploitation films can continue to partially uphold retrograde political ideologies by offering visceral pleasures in sexist, racist or homophobic representations that remain earnestly viewed and not simply ironically laughed away, one of the dangers in retrosploitation films which imitate these historical referents is that, ‘[a]s entire periods of the recent past are introduced into the popular historical consciousness through retro's accelerated chronological blur, we risk incorporating its values as well’.

I would argue that this warning is especially prescient in the case of retro-styled exploitation pastiches that, by definition, take a middle position between the positive and negative evaluative tones respectively associated with homage and parody. As noted in the previous chapter, pastiche is the retrosploitation cycle's dominant tenor, precisely because it permits such an ambiguous mix of ironic distance and earnest affectivity that viewers may have difficulty tonally distinguishing it from either homage or parody in any clear-cut way. Nevertheless, for films that self-consciously signal their use of pastiche through temporal, cultural, geographical, ideological or gendered distance or dislocation, Richard Dyer argues that pastiche may operate as a sort of ‘default mode’ that can spin off into various registers of humour, violence, perversity and even serious political commentary – the last of which is of primary interest in this final chapter.

Using a handful of representative films, I shall examine how cultural memory inspires the multivalent political dynamics at work in a number of retrosploitation texts which engage with nostalgia's dialectical tension between the socio-political past and present, both informing and informed by the blurred borderlines between homage, parody and pastiche. In particular, I shall argue that the ideological ambivalence fans and critics may discern in these films’ anachronistic representations reflects the very temporal and aesthetic ambivalence evoked by the retro-styled pastiche, with the mash-up of different tones and periods complicating any clear sense of both political unity and fan-cultural appreciation for these texts.