Scum of the Earth (1963)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Cast: William Kerwin as Harmon Johnson; Louise Downe as Kim Sherwood; Lawrence J. Aberwood as Lang; Sandra Sinclair as Sandy; Mal Arnold as Larry; Craig Maudslay Jr. as Ajax; Christy Foushee as Marie; Doug Brennan as Carl; Christina Castel as Shirley; Edward Mann as Mr. Sherwood

Canon Fodder

 

Cannon Fodder is for titles from figures, like directors, I hold in good regard which would not qualify for the Abstract List. Here, we plunder through the career of the Godfather of Gore Herschell Gordon Lewis, but not a horror film and in one of his tangents from his reputation...

Released the same year as Blood Feast, I am going to be controversial and say I prefer this to that his most well film. Most of this stems from the fact, when I talk of Blood Feast separately one day, it suffers from the position of being a creator's most iconic work despite not having the best of their idiosyncrasies and details that let me to become a fan of them. His last monochrome movie here, for example, is has a lot more of note for me. It is still to be viewed in the context his exploitation cinema, always subjective in quality due to their technical skill, but from a director who held no pretentions of this and always had a personality.

The tale of an underground pornography photo ring who tempt an innocent young woman into their fold by blackmail, officially this was one of the first "roughies" made, an example of how sixties exploitation could still be transgressive even it was naive, emphasising the roughing up of female characters for the titillation of the audience. This is problematic in the modern day, although it comes with the strange knowledge that the only two prominent women directors of this type of cinema, Doris Wishman and Roberta Findley, made a lot of them themselves alongside male directors. Scum of the Earth thankfully does not flesh out this sub-genre's problematic ideas, so there is very little concern for me with viewing the film either.

Instead, it brings in the entire paradox of these films depicting sordid plot tropes to exploitation whilst feeling quaint in the modern day, in mind that this illicit pornography photo ring, due to the time, can only imply details that are more lurid but can only show quaint nude pin-ups. These are stranger when the women are dressed topless in baseball caps with bats, or if you see the "clean" version of scenes (available for the Arrow Video release in the late 2010s) which just have the actresses in their underwear. There is an unsavoury underbelly, mainly that the muscle bound goon of the villains Ajax (Craig Maudslay Jr.) is a potential rapist, but the film only once plays to the roughies' tropes, a scene of a model being whipped with a belt in a hotel room, whilst this content just to vilify the likes of Ajax rightly as scumbags instead.

The film also has the tone of a fifties anti-drug film which softens the blow, emphasised by the voiceover in the end warning of the dangers for schoolgirls getting involved with these sorts of people. A film like this from its production, likely made as product, puts it on a knife edge in terms of hypocrisy, the hustle of old exploitation being both the sizzle, as we see a young woman about to go to college being blackmailed to pose naked, but with moral guilt emphasised to make sure the makers were not in trouble for being too sordid without punishing the viewers, instead continually emphasising how scuzzy and wrong this is. It avoids hypocrisy, just, because this contradiction is actually more honest than if it was a message film. This actually makes Lewis' way of filmmaking more honest.

It also shows the appeal of these films. This has grit. Its acting is not perfect, it is not close to the best of the medium in the slightest, a low-fi crime drama with sexploitation content, but the actors always give their all. Shot in only a few locations, said locations are also actual environments, adding some verisimilitude to them. These exploitation films are their own island in cinema, the work of independents trying their hardest, even if the films were just for tickets. That I can get on with especially as Scum of the Earth is a tasting but unique tonic soaked in Florida of the early sixties, sexploitation and pulp tropes with none of the drag and padding which sadly plagues other films from this era and type.

In terms of pure exploitation entertainment, this is one of the more interesting of Lewis' work at least. A distillation of old poverty row crime pictures on an even smaller shoestring budget and filtered through the nudie-cutie genre, it neither has the stiffness of Blood Feast which, honestly, Lewis would improve upon in his later splatter films. Mal Arnold, whose performance in Blood Feast is legendarily wooden, manages to have the charisma that would have been great in an old Monogram Pictures film; he is excessively old to play a teenager he is supposed to be here, but as a creepy slime ball, he is memorable. His boss, played by Lawrence J. Aberwood, is the same in his disarming politeness, only to explode in one of the most memorable scenes, one that was immortalised in the Something Weird Video trailer and, with the film cutting closer to his mouth in his evil tirade, shows that Lewis could be inventive. He scoffed at the idea of his films being art, but between this and having one shot of red onscreen, painted in as a frame, to represent someone shooting himself, he did have a lot of creativity too. Even William Kerwin, who was one of the more memorable figures in Blood Feast, gets to act a bit differently as a bit of a slime ball, as the photographer, who still has a morality.

This is bearing in mind a film with the loosest of plots and rough around the edges, but unlike a Blood Feast which feels like an artefact of its era, full of exposition which does undercut its camp fun, this has the decency to be economic. And actually, surprisingly, have a bit of a dynamic worthy of an A-list picture in how the hero is actually an anti-hero, a photographer who openly works for the villains to corrupt an innocent schoolgirl into taking nude photos, blackmailing her with the potential shame if her father found out, only to find his moral compass eventually. It is better if the exploitation film made purely for sizzle rather than art at least has some meat to it, a nature of being gripping in spite of its origins. Knowing that my growing appreciation of Herschell Gordon Lewis comes from the truth that he made fun films without pretensions, there was still the spark of fun in his work. Here it is apparent he could even pull out even some fun old school b-movie drama by way of a c-level film budget, something has been unfairly not presumed from the man more infamous for splatter.