The Genius of Exploitation Film Marketing

 

From 1919-1959 exploitation films ruled underground & sometimes even mainstream theatres. Many exploitation classics were created, and the marketing genius behind these films was outrageous but should be celebrated. 

The marketing and storytelling practices revolved around a strict code:

1. The movies were limited to adult-only showings.
2. Performances used to be segregated by gender.
3. Age restrictions.
4. Lectures & clinical nurses would be in attendance.

The films plot & storyline would revolve around:

1. The Innocent: Young man or woman who either gets addicted to drugs, booze, sexual disease, pregnancy, gambling, cigarettes, abortion. Sets up the story to prove that the innocent lacks and needs an education in such a subject.
2. The Corruptor: The person who leads the young innocent astray and down a path of destruction. Pimps, homesexuals, theatrical agent, drug pusher, seducer, prostitute. They will entice the innocent to ''try'' something.
3. The Parents: They are represented as either being good because they educated their children about vice, or bad because they were selfish & too ignorant to teach their kids about the corruptors.
4. The Crusader: Usually is a teacher, cop, physician, public health officer or reporter who comes to the rescue. They are usually having to fight petty moral codes & the status quo of closed minded society. They are the underdog and they address both the characters and the audience.
5. The Charlatan: The physician, snake oil salesman, back alley abortionist, televangelist or any other quack motivated by greed. The crusader works to expose the charlatans evils.

Education is at the center of these early trash exploitation films, the need to protect the youth from nudists,high-flying hop heads, strippers, vice lords, mafia, bad high school girls.

Most of these movie campaign adverts covered the major appeals and bases that drew people to them such as sex & vice:

1. The aftereffects of heterosexual bonding, ''I was an innocent virgin, now a victim of desire.''
2. Blatant sex & nudity. Images and referencea to sex & catch lines, ''See the queens of burlesque in their sensational strip tease dances.''
3. The unusual, aberrant, or forbidden, ''Sex maniacs, murderers, hookers, victims of passion.''
4. Timelines or expose, ''Scoop! The picture that dares expose the naked & shameless truth about the scarlet street of sin. Timely as todays headlines.''
5. Veracity, ''See & know the truth.''
6. Pedagogic appeal, ''This could be your daughter, why shohld she suffer for your ignorance, dont let it happen.''

Film producers like Kroger Babb, Dwain Esper, William Castle, George Hilriman, Raymond L. Friedgen, Edward L. Alperson, Edgar G. Ulmer, George McCall,

James M. Doane, J. G. Sanford, David F. Friedman, Samuel Z. Arkoffs and Joseph E. Levines, Bob Shaye used all the tricks & tactics in the book to get people into the cinemas. 

"ONCE IN A LIFETIME Comes A Presentation That TRULY PULLS NO PUNCHES! Now YOU Can SEE The Motion Picture That DARES DISCUSS and EXPLAIN SEX AS NEVER BEFORE SEEN and HEARD! THE ONE, THE ONLY, THE ORIGINAL...MOM AND DAD...Truly The World’s Most Amazing Attraction! NO ONE UNDER HIGH SCHOOL AGE Admitted Unless Accompanied By Parents!! EVERYTHING SHOWN! EVERYTHING EXPLAINED!"

If you lived in a small town in the 1940s or ’50s, it was virtually impossible not to know about a film called Mom and Dad. Sooner or later a flamboyant publicity man would drive into town, the ads would appear, and the tempestuous debate would begin. Plastered on every available storefront, barn, bus bench, and shoeshine stand was a poster seducing you with an attractive couple in mid-kiss and black bold-faced ballyhoo exploding all around them. And in a black box in the lower left-hand corner:

"Extra! IN PERSON: ELLIOT FORBES, ‘THE SECRETS OF SENSIBLE SEX.’"

Alarmed letters to the editor would appear in the newspaper. Clergymen would express opinions from the pulpit. If you were Catholic, you’d be banned from attending. In some towns the police would send men to check the film for violations of the obscenity statutes. And as soon as the first women-only matinee was screened, at 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, the town would blaze with Mom and Dad gossip. Though all but forgotten today, Mom and Dad was so heavily promoted that Time once remarked that the ad campaign "left only the livestock unaware of the chance to learn the facts of life."

Kroger Babb, who billed himself as "America’s Fearless Young Showman," ruled over a vast army of Mom and Dad "roadshow units" from his headquarters in Worthington, Ohio. He used a form of exhibition that has all but disappeared today, called "fourwalling." Instead of booking his film into theaters for a percentage of the box office, he would simply rent the theater outright and take it over for the week or, in smaller markets, just one or two days. He would pay for all advertising and promotion, put his own banners and marquees out front, and turn the theater into a midway attraction, complete with lobby curiosities designed to lure customers. But because he was a pariah in Hollywood, he had to use independent mom-and-pop theaters that weren’t part of the big chains like Paramount and RKO, and he had to fight censorship boards, police forces, judges, clergy, and outraged newspaper editors everywhere he went. The film was in 400 separate court proceedings during its run.

The Blowoff

Babb was an expert at creating a kind of mob psychosis that peaked at the moment the projector started to roll. Watching the film today, it’s all but impossible to recreate the atmosphere of a capacity audience waiting breathlessly to see things they knew were forbidden and probably shocking. It was Babb’s peculiar genius that he was able to evoke the emotions of a horror movie using what is actually one of the blandest, most formulaic stories ever concocted. 

At this point the film would stop entirely and the house lights would come up. Elliot Forbes, an "eminent sexual hygiene commentator," would stride onto the stage and deliver a 20-minute lecture on the need for openness in sex education, the morality of the times, the biology of the body, and what the community can do to avoid the ruination of its youth.

If anyone checked the credentials of Elliot Forbes, he would have discovered that the speaker was the busiest man in the history of the lecture circuit, appearing 78 times a day in cities scattered from Maine to Oregon. There were actually 26 Elliot Forbeses, one for each roadshow, and Babb hired most of them from the ranks of retired or underemployed vaudeville comedians. They knew how to work crowds with a combination of earnestness, humor, and downhome "just folks" patter that would always crescendo at the moment when they held up two paperback books -- one called Man and Boy, the other called Woman and Girl -- and made a spiel for "a set of these vitally important books to be read in the privacy of your own home." Two women in nurse uniforms -- supposedly stationed in the theater to take care of people who fainted or had heart attacks -- would then pass among the crowd collecting money and distributing the volumes.

The books themselves were rehashes of venereal disease and pregnancy information that could be obtained at any public health agency. The Elliot Forbes speech was what is known in the carnival world as a "blowoff," long used in 10-in-one freak shows to hustle additional money from people who had already paid an admission price. In any good blowoff, there’s the constant implication that the "good stuff" is in the attraction you haven’t paid for yet -- in this case, the book. Forbes’ main job was to sell the books, which frequently augmented the box-office take by as much as 50 percent. In 1957, for example, at a four-week showing of Mom and Dad in Baltimore, the box-office gross was $82,000, but 45,000 copies of the books were sold, resulting -- 

By the time Kroger Babb came along, the formula for a sex hygiene movie was so well established that all he did was incorporate every element of every sex hygiene movie in history into a single film. But in search of even better profits, he changed the rules slightly. Many of the old sex-hygiene films had played in grindhouses or marginal theaters or even bars and restaurants. He wanted to break through to the biggest theaters in the country.

Howard W. Babb had gotten the nickname "Kroger" from the name of the grocery store where he worked as a boy growing up in Lees Creek, Ohio. Born in 1906, he was a sportswriter, a newspaper reporter, an ad manager, and, by his late 20s, publicity manager for the Chakeres-Warners theater chain, where he distinguished himself with publicity stunts such as having a man buried alive in front of a theater. He got the exploitation roadshow bug when he hooked up with an outfit called Cox and Underwood, which was peddling an aging sex hygiene film called Dust to Dust that was actually a 1935 film called High School Girl with a live-birth reel slapped onto the end. Proving that he was born to be in the business, it’s the same plot Babb would use in Mom and Dad. (The Forty Thieves frequently quarreled over territories, but they never sued for copyright infringement. Of course, many of them were carnival men, who regarded all cons as ancient and passed down from generation to generation, but they may also have simply sold stories the same way they occasionally sold sideshow acts.)

Anxious to go out on his own, Babb got 20 investors to put up the money to make Mom and Dad. The script was written by Mildred Horn, who would later become his wife, and who would also write Man and Woman and Boy and Girl. To direct he hired William "One Shot" Beaudine (so named because he never did a second take), who dated back to the Bowery Boys serials and had made over 200 B movies. He made the whole film in six days in 1944.

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing Babb did was to give his film such a bland and praiseworthy title. Who could object to a movie called Mom and Dad? This wasn’t a movie about crazed sex maniacs or loose women or pregnant girls or the vice rackets. It was a movie about the education of all the moms and dads in the world, and, in fact, he wanted every mom and every dad to see it. His principal weapon, when he came under attack, was the very ordinariness of his story.

End of the Hygiene Era

Babb was not just prepared for the inevitable censorship battles he would face. He egged them on. He stirred up the Catholics at every opportunity, capitalizing on the church’s "C" rating (for "condemned") of his film. He wrote fake letters to the editor in advance of the film’s arrival in town, hoping there would be controversy. His most successful letter was supposedly written by the anonymous mayor of a small town. The "mayor" explained that he had opposed the showing of Mom and Dad in his town, too, but then the 17-year-old daughter of a local churchgoing couple found herself "in trouble." He saw Mom and Dad with a friend, and as a result had the courage to tell her parents about her predicament. They were shocked, but forgave her. The girl gave birth to a healthy boy, which was adopted by a childless couple. The girl then completed high school and is now engaged to a fine young man. The mayor goes on to thank Babb for having the courage "to tell young people what their parents didn’t." And the letter ends: "P.S. That girl was my daughter."

Babb’s company, Hygienic Productions, sent out an advance man to place letters like this, buy advertising, do mailings, and hold screenings for town fathers and religious leaders. (If the town’s leaders liked the film, a "soft" campaign would be used. If they didn’t like it, a "hard" campaign, advertising it as "the movie self-styled moralists don’t want you to see," would be used. Both campaigns worked.) The advance man would be followed a week later by a crew of four -- including "Elliot Forbes" and two "nurses" -- to actually manage the film during its run. The crews would stay on the road for 20 weeks at a time. Babb even had one all-black crew for black theaters, with Olympic champion Jesse Owens substituting for Elliot Forbes.

As the Mom and Dad exploitation scheme evolved over time, it attracted imitators. By 1950 there were so many sex-hygiene roadshows that they were starting to get in each other’s way, and after a town was "scorched" by a promotional campaign, it would be spoiled for any film arriving later. So four of the films -- Mom and Dad, Street Corner, Because of Eve, and The Story of Bob and Sally -- banded together to form Modern Film Distributors, carving out territories and agreeing not to steal markets.

"He was the greatest showman this country ever saw," says one still awed associate. "People talk about Mike Todd, but Todd needed an expensive item to promote. Krog could take any piece of junk and sell it."Imagine for instance a 1948 filmed passion play out of Lawton, Okla., where telephone poles were visible behind the Cross and the were so thick, on the order of "When're y'll gonna betray me?" that it became known as "the only film that had to be dubbed from English into English."

That picture, you couldn't giveit away, but I said "Nothing's hopeless if it's advertised right,'" Babb remembers now. "I told them to give me a bottle of gin and let me see what I could come up with overnight."

After retitling the film "The prince of Peace" and creating an ad campaign with lines like "Be Brave bring your troubles and your family to history's most sublime event" and "You'll find God - right in there. Babb ended up with a movie that had crowds ilined up even in sinful New York, where The Daily News bannered its success as "The Miracle of Broadway." "We killed 'em." Babb says with satisfaction. "The thing took off like a turpentined pup."

Babb today is in his 70th year, a heavy-set man with slicked-back white hair and still sharp, hooded eyes peering out of a beefy face. He is semi-retired and recovering from a stroke - "Doing nothing the hardest job I ever had in my life - but neither his living in Palm Springs nor his 3.8-carat diamond ring in a gold and platinum seting particularly denote current wealth. "Money never worried me," he says with enviable simplicity. "I could always make it."

Born in the hamlet of Lees Creek, Ohio, Babb still likes to refer to himself, with artful modesty, as "just a country boy with a shoeshine." Called Kroger as a nickname because of his father's fondness for the B.H. Kroger brand of coffee, Babb had that wild variety of jobs that characterizes so many American entrepreneurs. Among things he refereed enough football and basketball games to make Ripley's Believe It Or Not, and staged Depression-era stunts like burying alive one Digger O'Dell right in the center of Wilmington, Ohio. It started one night in 1943 when Babb attended a town meeting in tiny Burkburnett, Tex., called because local high school girls were being impregnated in large numbers by men from a nearby Army Air Corps base. "It was a hell of a meeting, you had all these old biddies squabbling and roasting everybody, they wanted to declare the whole Air Corps off limits," Babb remembers. "Then the idea hit me, that would make a hell of a movie." 

Undaunted, Babb made the film for his own Hygenic Productions company for a bargain-basement $62,000 invested by 20 individuals. Each investor, Babb claims, made back $63,000 for each thousand put in, except for one fellow who pulled out before the film was made and ended up a suicide. Such was the power of "Mom and Dad." Its international grosses have been estimated at anywhere from $40 to $100 million, and even Time Magazine claimed in 1949 that one out of 10 people in the world had seen it. "Mom and Dad" did not flourish because of its birth footage, featuring normal, breech birth and cesarean section, or because of its puerile plot, which Babb himself disparages as dealing with "this dumb high school girl, very beautiful, who wanted to know more about her body, about sex, but every time she asked her mother a question, the mother said, 'Tut, tut, you're too young to know.' So then she went to a party, danced with a good-looking stranger, and she got pregnant."

The success flowed, rather, from Babb's extraordinary promotional abilities. Working from the premise that "You've got to tell 'em to sell 'em." Babb would simply overwhelm a town with exploitation material, even pioneering the use of direct mail "Krog would spend more money on promotion than the theater would normally gross, but our returns would be sensational," remembers K. Gordon "Cagey" Murray, a former Babb associate. "Sometimes we'd find some old wino somewhere, dress him up to look like a streetcorner preacher and stand him on a corner talking about the terrible evils of this movie. People would grab the handbills and head for the theater," where separate shows for men and women, to avoid unsightly embarrassment, were the rule. The result, wrote Time, "left no one but the livestock unware of the chance to learn the facts of life." Even today, Babb's eyes glisten when he says, "We packed 'em!" The piece de resistance here were Babb's newspaper ads, still stirring models of enticement. "It Happens Somewhere Every Night!" roared the copy. "One mistake . . . can ruin an entire lifetime of happiness. So bold - it's shocking! So human - you'll both laugh and cry! So wonderful - you'll be lucky to get in!" And the real clincher, "You May Faint But You'll Learn Facts!"

Patrons of "Mom and Dad" got more than a movie, they got "Two Nurses in Attendance" plus a lecture by "Elliot Forbes, Fearless Hygiene Commentator," strategically placed midway in the film. The purpose of the lecture was to sell books, either "Father and Son" or "Mother and Daughter," depending on the audience, antediluvian sex manuals that cost next to nothing to print but a whole dollar to buy. "They made you feel you had to buy this thing or you were the most ignorant person in the world," remembers one spectator. And this didn't happen in just one city at a time, oh no. In his salad days Babb had 300 units on the road at the same time, each complete with its own nurses and its own lecturer, and to this day he continues to run into men who tell him. "You don't know me Mr. Babb, but my name was Elliot Forbes."

In today's carefree, enlightened times, when films like Mom" and Dad" could probably be shown on television - "Oh, it'd be nothing, very tame, it'd be a Sunday school picture," Babb himself says - it is hard to imagine what a fuss its showing stirred up in the late 1940s. Yet grown men were known to faint at the "clap opera" sections, medical reels exhibiting the aftereffects of venereal disease - "In Minneapolis, we had 'em laying there by the dozens on marble benches in the lobby, like slabs in a morgue" - and by Babb's own count the film was taken either to court or before local censorship boards 428 times. "Oh, my God, you don't have any idea of the vigor with which opponents pursued this film, it was absolutely fierce," remembers Henry Fox of Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin and Kahn, Washington's second-largest law firm, who supervised some of "Mom and Dads" litigation. "Its almost incredible as you thing back, but censors called it salacious, obscene, they swore they'd die before they'd show the thing."

This combination of outraged decency and lusty curiosity led to startling crowd scenes for "Mom and Dad," scenes which Babb cannily photographed and used to stimulate further throngs. And while riots were not exactly commonplace, things did tend to happen. "In Hamilton, Ohio, they came like a stampede of wild animals," Babb remembers. "They took the box office right off its foundation, they moved it clear through the glass doors into the lobby, and the girl inside with it." And in Phoenix, "They had to bring the fire department and flush men out the front of the theater because the cashier had gone berserk, berserk, and had sold 2,000 tickets for a theater that had 800 seats." But most astonishing of all was what happened in New Orleans. "The first time we played there, the priests from the various parishes came down early that morning and put themselves in a chain by locking arms, they put a complete chain around the front of the theater and no one could get through, it was like a football line," Babb says, still sort of amused.

"Well, various women said they weren't Catholics and went up to the line of priests and demanded to get through. When they refused some woman hauled off and slapped one of the priests and it started a real fist fight. It was a sort of knock-down, drag-out situation and the priests finally yielded."

Or so it seemed until the next time "Mom and Dad" showed up in town and Babb got a call from his theater manager. "He said we can't open and I said "Why" and he said. 'We have no street in front of the theater.' 'No street, what do you mean no street?' Well, during the night they had come in there with bulldozers and they had scooped up the entire street, the sidewalk, everything, right up to the building's edge and there was like a 6.8, 10-foot drop there in front of the theater," Babb, ever undaunted, built a quickie box office in the alley behind the theater, sent people in through the exits and ended up playing to capacity for "I don't know how many weeks." 

Babb never quite duplicated his success with "Mom and Dad" with the other films he promoted, but he did create a group of splendid ad lines that even today have a touch of poetry about them. "Karimoja," an African documentary, was advertised as "They wear nothing but the wind," while "Kipling's Women" was hailed as "He had a way with woman: the only way."

And then there was a film "by this foreign director, he became famous, I can't think of the fellow's name," that Babb was called on to promote. The director was Ingmar Bergman, who saw "Monika" become his first American success after Babb tagged it with one of his immortal lines, "The Story of a Bad Girl." Yet though films whose campaigns he worked on still turn up at an occasional theater, Babb has pretty much taken himself out of the movie business. "The pictures just got so bad, so filthy, they call 'em sexy but that's what I call 'em," says the man who once outraged America, shaking his head, "I just didn't have any taste for 'em."

What Kroger Babb does retain, however, is his absolute, almost religious faith in the all-conquering powers of salesmanship. "He had a theory," explains attorney Henry Fox, "That if there was a crowd of at least three people standing around, you ought to be selling them something. It was an absolute sin if you didn't." 

By releasing movies of questionable quality that were propelled by the invention of marketing techniques that leaned into sex, shame, women of ill repute and nudity that made the films irresistible to repressed moviegoers.

Among the films Babb released were Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl – Kroger bought the American rights to an Ingmar Bergman film and cut out all the meaningful stuff to wind up with a crisp 62 minutes worth of sex scenes; She Shoulda Said No!, a cautionary tale of sex and marijuana use; and the Christ story Prince of Peace that was made so cheaply that telephone poles could be glimpsed in shots of the crucifix. 

Babb was a salesman his whole life.  As a young man he had invented gimmicks to promote films, like giving away bags of groceries to raffle winners.  In Babb’s vision of humanity, you had to “Tell ‘em to sell ‘em.”  He became a specialist in buying the rights to grade-Z films about prurient subjects, then creating buzz about them to increase ticket sales.  He repackaged a 1938 film called “Child Bride” and was opposed in print by an Indiana film critic named Mildred Horn.  His solution?  He made love to her, and Mildred became his partner for life.  She wrote the screenplay for the 1945 film “Mom and Dad”, one of the most profitable films of all time. Press kits supplied by Babb provided a template for creating controversy weeks before the film would be shown in each town.  Babb and his employees would write emotional letters to the editor of local papers using pseudonyms, about how seeing “Mom and Dad” had changed their lives or saved them from unwanted pregnancy.  Leaflets were given free to local churches to distribute.  Some were in support, and others portrayed moral outrage that the film would be shown.  It created tremendous local interest in whether or not SEX (gasp) was going on between young people, innocent and ignorant of the risks of pregnancy and disease. Or you might see Olympic Medalist Jesse Owens, who gave the talk to black audiences.  They sold sex information pamphlets (written by Mildred, Babb’s wife) similar to the pamphlets shown onscreen.  It must have been an amazing carnival ride.  I wish I could have seen it in theaters, but I was about eleven when the show stopped touring.  Babb was sued for obscenity more than 400 times over this film, and he won again and again on the basis of “educational value”.

"They cannot be obtained on newsstands or at booksellers, or anywhere else. No, these books are offered exclusively to the patrons of this presentation at a slight charge over the actual costs of printing and distribution. That price -- on dollar ... Now think of it: for less than the cost of a carton of cigarettes, you can have a set of the vitally important books to be read in the privacy of your won home, and I believe with all my heart that a set of these books belongs on the bedside table of every home in this great land..."

 -- Eliot Forbes

If you bought that load of crap, then you bought yourselves a copy of The Digest of Hygiene for Mother and Daughter or The Manual of Hygiene for Father and Son (-- penned by Babb's wife, and Mom and Dad co-screen-writer, Mildred Horn). Now, I have no idea if those editions were segregated like the audiences were (-- anybody else remember the day in High School Health class when the girls had to go watch a film in the library while the boys had to go and watch one in the cafeteria?). Either way, most of the information in these pamphlets was outdated before they were even printed, and the fact that Babb had 25 different touring companies roaming the country at the same time, each with their very own Eliot Forbes to stump for safe sex never discouraged sales all that much. "Nothing's hopeless if it's advertised right."

 -- Kroger Babb

Lightning never did strike again for Babb after Mom and Dad, though. His more famous follow ups include trying to cash in on actress Lila Leeds' drug bust (-- along with fellow actor, Robert Mitchum,) with She Shoulda Said No (1949); Karamojia (1954) -- kind of a proto-mondo movie about a blood-drinking tribe of Africans; The Prince of Peace, a truly atrocious religious film out of Oklahoma with the promise of a new Bible for every paying customer; he also chopped-up Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monkia (1953) and re-packaged as the nudie-flick The Story of a Bad Girl; and last, and least, a badly dubbed Italian version of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1965).

During the intermission of his films and after the showings, books relevant to the subject of the film were sold. Mom and Dad's distributor Modern Film Distributors sold over 45,000 copies of Man and Boy and Woman and Girl, written by Babb's wife, netting an estimated $31,000. According to Babb, these cost about eight cents to produce, and were sold for $1 apiece. While Modern Film was able to sell 45,000 on its own, Babb estimates sales of 40 million, citing "IRS figures." This sort of companion selling would become common practice for Babb: with the religious film The Lawton Story (AKA-Prince of Peace), he would sell Bibles and other spiritual literature; and with his fidelity film Why Men Leave Home books featuring beauty tips. With other films, Babb would try different approaches. For She Shoulda Said No!, an anti-marijuana film of the 1950s, he highlighted the sexual scenes and arranged "one-time-only" midnight showings, claiming that his company was working with the United States Treasury Department to release the film "in as many towns and cities as possible in the shortest possible length of time" as a public service. David F. Friedman, another successful exploitation filmmaker of the era, has attributed the "one-time-only" distribution to a quality so low that Babb wanted to cash in and move to his next stop as fast as possible. At each showing of a film, a singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was also required.

As well as being at the forefront of the battles over censorship and the motion picture censorship system, the exploitation genre faced numerous challenges during the 1940s and 1950s. It was estimated that Babb was sued over 400 times just for Mom and Dad. He would often use the supposed educational value of the films as a defense, also recommending it to theater owners; in his pressbook for Karamoja, he wrote, "When a stupid jerk tries to outsmart proven facts, he should be in an asylum, not a theater." Despite the criticism that Babb drew for Mom and Dad, in 1951 he received the first annual Sid Grauman Showmanship Award, presented by the Hollywood Rotary Club in honor of his accomplishments over the years.

Babb cheaply acquired the rights to what would become "She Shoulda Said No!" shortly after Robert Mitchum and Lila Leeds were arrested for marijuana use. Its original producer had struggled to get it distributed as Wild Weed, and Babb quickly presented it as The Story of Lila Leeds and Her Exposé of the Marijuana Racket, hoping that the title would draw audiences. When it failed to stir up much interest, Babb instead focused on the one scene of female nudity, using a photo of Leeds in a showgirl outfit, and retitled it "She Shoulda Said 'No'!", with taglines such as "How Bad Can a Good Girl Get . . . without losing her virtue or respect???" According to Friedman, Babb's midnight presentation of the film twice a week made more money than any other film at the same theater would earn over a full run; Friedman proceeded to use the film in his own roadshow double features. Another film, Karamoja, was marketed as a shocking portrayal of a tribe from Uganda who wore "only the wind and live[d] on blood and beer". Scenes included "the bleeding of cattle and drinking of the warm blood, and self-mutilation as a form of ornamentation", as well as a full-color circumcision scene. Karamoja proved less controversial than many of Babb's other films and grossed less.

Babb suffered from various ailments toward the end of his life, including a stroke. He retired in 1977, at 70, and died of heart failure (due to complications from diabetes) on January 29, 1980, in Palm Springs, California. His gravestone reads, "His many trips around and all over the world began in Centerville and end here in Lees Creek."