Grindhouse Fest: Scum of the Earth! (1963)

-Grindhouse Fest is the special section in Celluloid Dimension where you can discover all the goodies…and baddies from the golden age of exploitation cinema. Have fun!

Scum of the Earth! (1963) Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis

Harmon Johnson (William Kerwin) is a porn photographer with a bohemian appearance and a coaxing nature. Sandy (Sandra Sinclair) is the vivacious blonde-haired model who poses for Harmon’s immodest camera. “Okay Sandy, let’s shoot something interesting. You know, the stuff that sells?” says Harmon. To which the chagrined model vulnerable to the camera’s indecorum with some demure demeanor responds in question, “More of those?”. With just this earthy exchange of dialogue in a sleazy voyeuristic setting, Scum of the Earth! may reveal all you need to know about the lucrative business of exploitation in the film medium. It’s a shameless confession that the so-called first “roughie” throws in our faces remorselessly. Violence and sex are the stuff that sells, Harmon the redeemable lead in this sour and coarse tale certainly knows that, and so does David F. Friedman along with his frequent associate Herschell Gordon Lewis understand that their drive-in audience is more invested in the lurid subject matter than in the wholesome experience of a family drama. The controversial pair of Lewis and Friedman made a career out of exploiting that philosophy.

This roughie atrocity – produced by Friedman and directed by Lewis just a few weeks after the two had made the awful but seminal Blood Feast – looks as intimate as it does impersonal for the sleazoid duo. On the one hand, we have what is arguably the finest character Herschell Gordon Lewis has ever written in his extensive career crafting lousy pictures, the pornographer Harmon Johnson played by William Kerwin. A character who partakes in illicit events in the film yet is the only one of the male characters in Scum of the Earth! who has a modicum of moral discernment. He is therefore the only redeemable one. On the other hand, we have the treacherous, mean-spirited, hostile, misogynistic male models who work in the same pornographic biz as Harmon, all employed by Lang, the racketeering, grotesque chief. These characters are appalling and abhorrent, they enjoy brutalizing the female models, and have no human qualities behind their macho mannerisms. The film is perpetually apathetic – not only because of the inescapable ham-handedness of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s filmmaking, but also because of the explicit portrayal of the unsavory subject matter – yet the character of Harmon, in his moments of moral crisis, is thoughtful enough to leave some traces of a certain empathy in Lewis’s rough-hewn film. It’s a character handled with a maturity unprecedented in Lewis’s cinema, a solemnity you wouldn’t expect from David F. Friedman’s lewd and nasty products either.

My hypothesis is this, I have the feeling that William Kervin’s Harmon is expressed, redeemed and rendered under the personal perspective of both filmmakers; not that they see themselves reflected in him, but that they mold him as a self-critical persona. A character in which both elaborate an empathetic rhetoric giving subtle intimations that Scum of the Earth! is a meditation on the genre they themselves created, many bad things came with it, but also many good things for the evolution of genre cinema. If you are a connoisseur of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ trash cinema you will know that the Godfather of Gore was also a pioneer in roughies, and if you are familiar with his lack of talent with the camera, then you will know what to expect when you watch this film. Scum of the Earth! isn’t unbearably amateurish like Blood Feast, but you’ll still encounter his trademark empty compositions and jittery framing, and a lot of hammy acting – the actor who played the psychopathic main character in Blood Feast has a role here as a chauvinistic douchebag.

The only thing that sustains this tawdry production of unapologetic camp appeal is its commitment to delivering a wildly entertaining film. There is something so rich, so subversive in its tacky, monochromatic cinematography that it ends up fitting seamlessly with the scuzzy story, making it part of its own decadent realm. Although the plot has no plausible progression, sometimes the narrative evokes the quirky exploitation flicks of cautionary tales, the pornographic events are always robust in their artless provocation. A ludicrous melodrama about a porno business with an illicit modus operandi that blackmails a neophyte model – apparently underage – to pose nude and recreate sexual situations with male models, if she doesn’t, her previously taken nude photographs without her consent will be disseminated throughout the school. The denouement is somewhat predictable, but trust me, you won’t be prepared for the sheer amount of misogynistic violence on display in this 1963 film! It’s an exploitative affair, the film doesn’t sell itself as anything else, but its harshness is visionary; in a way, all of the films produced by David F. Friedman foretell the graphic sexual violence that would be seen in American genre films in the modern era.

It’s not an essential film, especially if you loathe the roughies, but this film is the closest Hershell Gordon Lewis has come to making an objectively good film, and that alone is a towering achievement.