Legend has it B-movie icon Roger Corman once told a director bluntly: "Your movie's called Eat my dust and it needs four car crashes. Here's $300,000, you've got 10 days." When the director called back in eight days to say he'd wrapped the movie, Mr. Corman replied, "I'm sending you another $100,000, shoot the sequel."

The oeuvre of Mr. Corman - rife with breasts, bikers and blood - will figure prominently in Drive-In Classics, the new digital channel scheduled to debut on Sept. 7 with a screening of Mad Max.

"If you like mild titillation and action, these are for you," said Paul Gratton, vice-president and general manager of Drive-in Classics. Although obviously a huge fan of the genre, he admits that the movies are not going to appeal to everyone, but he added that the market is pretty cut-and-dried: "At the end of the day, you either like cheap thrills or you don't."

The drive-in theatre dates to the 1930s but really flourished in the post-war consumer boom. Three decades of teenagers created a social life that revolved around car ownership, and the drive-in became a place to escape the prying eyes of parents and police.

When the reputation drive-ins earned for sexual hijinks sparked a boycott by major Hollywood studios that lasted right into the 1980s, the void was filled by the likes of Roger Corman, along with early incarnations of Jonathan Demme, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and David Cronenberg. Schlock horror, sex and over-the-top violence ruled the roost as cheap films were cranked out in their hundreds. "Because they were shot on such low budgets, you could pretty much do what you wanted," Mr. Gratton explained.

Few of them could remotely be considered artistic, focusing more typically on the topics teens craved. Promising to show something called "beach party bingo," 1964's Muscle Beach Party was peddled with the marketing tag "When 10,000 biceps meet 5,000 bikinis, you know what's gonna happen!" These were movies delivering cheap thrills for what Mr. Scorsese called "the boys on 42nd Street."

Mr. Corman analyzed his style in the 1990 autobiography: How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime: "`Exploitation' films were so named because you made a film about something wild with a great deal of action, a little sex, and possibly some sort of strange gimmick; they often came out of the day's headlines. It's interesting how, decades later, when the majors saw they could have enormous commercial success with big-budget exploitation films, they gave them loftier terms - `genre' films or `high concept' films."

While most of the movies were no more than cheap fun for teenagers to watch - or tune out - on dates, the anything-goes credo did indeed lead to movies about the issues of the day, Mr. Gratton said. "Because you could go from idea to concept to script to shoot to theatre in weeks, you could respond to the day's headlines."

This often led to garishly sensationalistic takes on real or imagined social problems, but it also sparked a number of reasonably accurate portrayals of life on the fringes of mainstream society. Written by Jack Nicholson and starring Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, 1967's The Trip was a cut above many with its look at LSD use. The movie was initially banned in Britain because censors considered it an endorsement of drugs.

B-movies also stepped into the breach when mainstream Hollywood ignored the return of shell-shocked Vietnam veterans. Just as some of the soldiers of previous wars had refused to quietly reassume pre-war jobs and lives, many Vietnam veterans searched for a new meaning and role in life. The rise of the biker film, Mr. Gratton said, is the result of B-movie attempts to explore the growing outlaw credo associated with motorcycle gangs. The cinematic take was often sympathetic, he added, at least in part because the low-budget productions could often not afford motorcycles and had to hire actual bikers to fill in roles around the professional actors.

"The fun is trying to re-create the anything-goes attitude that surrounded the scene. Hotshot young directors nowadays come out of the advertising world, hotshots in the '70s came out of B-movies," Mr. Gratton said. "There was never anyone to tell you what not to do."

Although they will not promise to get you to first base, the channel is setting out to replicate, where possible, the original atmosphere by adding trivia, vintage intermission trailers, interviews with the people who created the films and introductions by hosts in character.

Although sure to make some wince and likely also to recall the chestnut "When the van's a'rocking, don't come a'knocking," Mr. Gratton thinks there is a market for classic exploitation. "No other channel runs these - and I just think that in a 100-channel universe, there's room for this channel."

And he is not just talking as a fan of the genre. In the late 1980s, he programmed an eight-week series of drive-in style movies for First Choice Pay TV, and he says the response was phenomenal.

"People called and said, `I saw that when I was dating my husband. We popped the popcorn and made out all night on the couch.'"