Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Canuxploitation


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was redirect to Exploitation film. &mdash; Coffee //  have a cup  //  beans  // 04:42, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Canuxploitation

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Poorly sourced article about a thing that's not really a thing. The backstory here is that in 1999, a Canadian magazine coined the term "Canuxploitation" as a neologistic term for the period in the 1970s when a lot of cheap B-movies were getting made in Canada because production companies could get crazy tax breaks. Reliable sources, however, did, and still do, call this era the "tax shelter" period, not "Canuxploitation" -- other than a single brief namecheck of the concept's existence on one single page of a film critic's book, the term "Canuxploitation" never actually caught on anywhere except one non-notable blog. And even that blog has a very muddled definition of what "Canuxploitation" is, even roping in rather distinguished non-genre non-B's like Goin' Down the Road and La Guerre des tuques and Project Grizzly (er, hello, NFB documentaries now?!?) -- and our article has also been diverging from it, eliding the blog's lapses into thesis-elasticity and instead substituting its own original research inclusion of almost any horror, science fiction, fantasy or sex comedy film that an individual editor personally decided they wanted to add regardless of whether the film was ever actually labelled as "Canuxploitation" by either the original magazine piece or the blog. There's also the problem that the basic definition given of what the term means involves films "about Canadian life and culture" — something which the vast majority of the films listed here quite deliberately and explicitly aren't (although at least that criterion actually does help to explain Goin' Down the Road and La Guerre des tuques.)

All of which means that what we have here is an article that (a) isn't based on reliably sourced evidence of the term's currency in the real world, and (b) isn't even staying faithful to its own isolated unreliable source. A film should not be listed here unless reliable sources explicitly call it "Canuxploitation", but that's not a term that any reliable source (besides the original magazine article) has ever used to label any film. And without the list of films, there's no content left. And the "Canuxploitation" section in exploitation film, from whence this was spun off, also has to go into the trash can for the same reasons. Delete with fire. Bearcat (talk) 05:47, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Exploitation film. I think restoring the redirect is the best course right now, at least until there's more coverage of the genre itself.  This article in Metro News goes into some detail, including canuxploitation.com.  This article from The Toronto Star is a bit more independent and uses the term as an established genre.  I can also source quite a few of those films, but then the article would just fill up with a whole lot of trivial mentions, and it would be a well-sourced example farm.  We can have a nice, sourced paragraph that sums this up well enough in the parent article; no need for an independent article – yet.  There isn't really anything to merge, since the target already includes the sourced parts of this article. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 07:35, 1 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep it! Sounds to me like some trendies from the Great White North are (or is if there is only one) upset Canada can make trashy films that entertain international audiences.  The "tax shelter" term would not be a known term for people outside Canada, nor would all the films produced during that period be considered "Canuxploitation".  A random check on the internet shows the term is in frequent use, and for Wikipedia to remove it would be reallydiculous....Foofbun (talk) 07:49, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Sounds to me like somebody needs to drop his assumptions about other people's motivations. For one thing, I'm no sort of "trendy", and have no issue with the existence of "trashy" films. For two, most of the films listed here were decidedly unsuccessful with international audiences — with the exception of Porky's (a film which, while far from being Canadian cinema's finest hour in terms of quality, could absolutely have been made by a mainstream Hollywood studio and thus bears no resemblance to anything else listed here, and isn't named as "Canuxploitation" by the original source either), hundreds upon hundreds of higher-quality Canadian films were more successful with and entertaining to international audiences than anything else listed here ever was. So that argument has nothing to do with either the article itself or the deletion rationale. For three, the definition given in the introduction says nothing whatsoever about genre "trash"; rather, the term is "defined" as "films about Canadian life and culture", even though nearly every film listed here fails to fit that definition — films that fit the parameters of the list were nearly always designed to increase their marketability by either being set in the United States or in some unspecified "nowhere specific", and did not in any way correspond to the parameters of the introduction. And for four, you've failed to respond to my point about original research: a lot of the films listed here are not listed even on the "Canuxploitation" website, but were added because some Wikipedia editor personally decided that the term meant "any genre film ever made in Canada at all", even though that's not what either the definition given in the introduction, or even the website itself, says the term means. But OR is a thing we're not allowed to do on here: we have to stick to what reliable sources say, not what random people say in comment threads or user-generated discussion forums or self-published blogs, and we don't get to make up our own "hey, this sounds like it fits too!" decisions on anything that reliable sources haven't already named that way for us. Bearcat (talk) 15:22, 1 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Film-related deletion discussions.  Taylor Trescott  - my talk + my edits 14:17, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Canada-related deletion discussions.  Taylor Trescott  - my talk + my edits 14:18, 1 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Well, this is certainly an interesting subject: I remember this period very well. What a weird time. I recall a lot of these films being shot here, and indeed, a whole business model. In addition to the news coverage that NinjaRobotPirate (who sounds like one of these movies), we do get book cites such as this one from Canada's Best Features: Critical Essays on 15 Canadian Films, which cites the Broken Pencil article in its introduction. Bearcat was quite right to call attention to some inaccuracies -- Project Grizzly was a full funded NFB doc that premiered at TIFF -- but if NinjaRobotPirate doesn't feel it's worth its retaining as a separate article, okay. But there's clearly something here -- a notable (and notably weird) period in Canadian film history that is now known by this moniker, it seems. I too would think of it more as the "tax shelter period," but Canucksploitation is clearly more colourful and less ambiguous. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 18:26, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
 * BTW with his book, Mondo Canuck, Geoff Pevere is kind of the go-to critic for this sort of thing and fwiw he has not used the term, far as I can see. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 19:16, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
 * My first thought was to vote to keep it, but I just couldn't find enough sourcing to justify a standalone article. I think we're almost there but not quite.  But we can certainly write about this in Cinema of Canada and Exploitation film. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 21:40, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, — UY Scuti Talk  19:29, 8 March 2016 (UTC)  Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   20:23, 16 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Exploitation film per NRP &mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  \\ 14:26, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Exploitation film because of the fact that sources don't establish notability and per NRP. MrWooHoo (talk) 01:34, 25 March 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.