This volume serves as a comprehensive catalog and critical guide to over five hundred low-budget and genre-specific films, focusing on the aesthetics and tropes of exploitation cinema. L. A. Morse provides a structured overview of niche film categories, utilizing a descriptive approach to categorize titles that often fall outside the purview of mainstream critical analysis. The text functions as a reference tool for collectors and enthusiasts interested in the historical and stylistic development of police, women's prison, martial arts, and mystery cinema.

The work provides a specialized, taxonomical approach to a broad swath of genre cinema that is frequently overlooked by traditional film scholarship. Its focus on specific, high-action subgenres suggests a text intended for the dedicated enthusiast or researcher of mid-to-late twentieth-century exploitation film history.