If you are the parent or guardian of an impressionable adolescent DO NOT BRING HIM or PERMIT HIM TO SEE THIS MOTION PICTURE, proclaims the somewhat sexist “admonition” in the top corner of the lurid black-and-red poster for the legendary Blood Feast, the granddaddy of all splatter/slasher flicks. In the near half-century since its barnstorming debut in America’s drive-in circuit, literally thousands of imitators have followed in its sanguine candy-apple-red wake, treating its rigid formula as a cheap, schlocky Rosetta Stone. Through its gallons of stage grue, exploitation producer David F. Friedman and his faithful journeyman director Herschell Gordon Lewis uncovered a simple yet lucrative recipe for success: keep the gore running down the screen (and make sure it’s extra vivid in all-important BLOOD COLOR), keep production costs dirt-cheap, and profit handsomely from millions of bloodthirsty, drunken moviegoers. What was an outrageous endurance test fifty years ago exists today, in light of its countless imitators, as a laughably crude, amateurish (yet still stomach-churning) piece of cinematic flotsam that nonetheless possesses an inexplicably mesmerizing power. Not once in its lean, mean 67 minutes will you find yourself even remotely bored.

As with all splatter/slasher movies, the plot is as threadbare as logic will allow, serving to link together exploitative elements: a weirdo with a knife is carving up beautiful young women in picturesque Miami Beach, Florida, mutilating the bodies beyond recognition and taking away various trophies from his victims. We start off with an obligatory curtain-raising murder; Sandra Sinclair from H.G. Lewis’ proto-roughie Scum of the Earth (not to be confused with Scum of the Earth) enters a spartan one-bedroom apartment, laughs off the frantic radio bulletins regarding the Miami Beach serial killer, disrobes for a bath, and finds herself face-to-face with the grey-haired, bug-eyed, knife-wielding maniac in a matter of seconds. Suffice it to say she does not survive the encounter with both legs intact.

Since Blood Feast does not even attempt to create an aura of mystery or suspense, we are immediately introduced to the weirdo at his day job. His name is Fuad Ramses, an “Egyptian” with a Mideast American accent, dark hair seemingly colored with silver spray paint, his own “exotic catering” storefront, and a hypnotic stare. What he does in the cavernous back room of his catering/grocery store is best left to the imagination, but don’t let that imply that Lewis doesn’t show us the grisly goings-on in fetishistic detail … but not at this early stage. Instead, a cartoonishly matronly well-to-do Caucasian lady named Ms. Dorothy Fremont makes a fateful trip into Ramses’ store, inquiring about using his dubious services for a dinner party for her daughter Suzette and all her rich, worldly buddies. Seeing an easy mark, Ramses locks eyes with Ms. Fremont and makes several hypnotic suggestions having to do with “an Egyptian feast”, a lavish ritual that he does not bother to explain but Ms. Fremont hastily agrees to pay an unspecified sum of money for. After all, as we are told at least four times in this brief feature, such an event hasn’t been performed for five thousand years.

As soon as Ms. Fremont takes her leave (without giving Ramses any down payment or personal information), the kook limps into a back room adorned with red curtains, lit candles, and a vaguely Asiatic looking mannequin. Ramses raises his hands and gaze skyward and cries, “Oh, my Ishtar! Your resurrection is at hand!!” Sure, Fuad may be a tad confused as to which religion he adheres to, as Ishtar is a Babylonian and Assyrian goddess, but who would take umbrage to the Earthly reincarnation of a deity representing sex, fertility, love and war?? Ishtar’s got a little something for everyone! As an added hilarious cherry atop this absurdist sundae, Lewis continually cuts to closeups of the mannequin’s face as if expecting her/it to deliver reaction shots to Ramses’ insane rambling.

The only two people investigating this case in the entirety of the greater Miami area are a pair of incompetent, slow-witted cops speaking entirely in Dragnet dialogue and hard-boiled cliches. “All this horrible butchery and not a single shred of evidence! Not even a fingerprint!” bellows the senior officer, a police captain known only as “Frank”, punctuating the sentence by pounding on his Formica desktop. To which hapless young Pete, the junior detective, responds “Looks like it’s gonna be one of those long hard ones,” without a hint of irony. Meanwhile, Ramses continues his reign of terror with nary an obstacle to get in the way of compiling all his ingredients for Ishtar’s Cannibalistic Resurrection Feast.

It’s quite difficult to discern whether Blood Feast is intended to be hilarious or just happens to be as a result of shoddy filmmaking combined with a frenzied production schedule. Filmed in a mere nine days with a paltry budget somewhere between 24 and 60 thousand dollars (most of which surely went into stage blood and development fees for the mandatory BLOOD COLOR), the film has an unfettered, crude sort of energy aided by a minimalist yet strangely effective musical score. An ominous kettle drum accompanies the limping Ramses as he stalks Miami in search of his victims, and a trio of blaring trumpets underline various “shocking” moments with the expected lack of subtlety.

And yes, the vaunted gore scenes are still queasily effective despite their primitive nature. This is before we had F/X savants like Rick Baker, Dick Smith, Rob Bottin and Tom Savini pushing the limits of practical effects makeup, so the candy-apple garishness of the stage blood tends to be enhanced with second-hand slaughterhouse scraps.

The infamous tongue-ripping scene in the motel room, for instance, revolves around a bit of sleight-of-hand involving a sheep’s tongue; a gruesome yet side-splittingly hilarious beach scene is a showcase for some bovine brain matter; the various chunks of meat lying around Ramses’ sanguine kitchen/torture chamber/Ishtar shrine seem to be rotting beef flanks purchased from local butchers (lying beside phony plastic mannequin limbs, naturally). Despite the creepy misogynistic nature of the murder sequences, where quite a few young twenty-something co-eds are desecrated before our eyes, any power they might have is undermined by the Z-grade acting, to say nothing of the noncommittal police investigation subplot.

Mal Arnold’s performance as Fuad Ramses achieves instant ham classic status, and the two cops have all the personalities of cardboard cutouts, but the real bad acting champion is former Playmate Connie Mason as the bubble-headed Suzette, who spends most of the third act blissfully unaware of her imminent doom and suddenly goes into unchecked hysterics the moment the boys in blue storm in to sort everything out. The actress playing her easily hypnotized mother is almost as wooden, but at least she appears to be able to memorize her lines. Mason, in an early expository scene in a living room, seems to be reading dialogue off a nearby lampshade! She was paid $175 for her performance; perhaps this is the sole instance in which Lewis and Friedman overspent their cash.

What more is there to say about Blood Feast? There is no subtext, no moral, no hint of any deeper meaning to its orgy of senseless carnage, yet it’s an essential piece of cinematic history. Its relentless humor is not of the (sheep’s) tongue-in-cheek variety that would later come to characterize Lewis’ gore epics, but rather of a more naive and perhaps unintentional fashion. Follow the example of 1960s drive-in audiences and load up with some cheap brew or else this might be the longest hour and seven minutes of your life.

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Scum of the Earth is a delightful piece of early 70s hack work, as bizarrely endearing as it is oppressively sleazy; if it were sold as a comedy instead of a proto-slasher flick, perhaps it would have a faithful cult following as opposed to languishing in obscurity for the past 35 odd years. While the gross misrepresentation of the VHS artwork is jarring enough (the film does not take place in a bayou, nor does the heroine wear a tattered dress), the original release poster does a better job reflecting the scuzzy hixploitation quasi-romantic vibe, while completely avoiding the slasher subtext. Maybe it was a tough sell. This unique hybrid of God’s Little Acre by way of Johnny Got his Gun has plenty to offer the schlock aficionado, and an even greater appeal for those who grew up in the Bible Belt and managed to escape with their dignity intact.

Despite the reissue title, Scum of the Earth has absolutely nothing to do with the 1957 Peter Graves cornpone drama Bayou, which was re-edited for the drive-in circuit, had its title changed to Poor White Trash, and was a massive success, especially in certain regions of the Deep South. While one could make the assumption that Bayou was some kind of Douglas Sirk styled celebration of backwater hick “culture”, it would be nigh impossible to make the same mistake when judging the merits of its unofficial sequel: Scum of the Earth is unequivocally and uncompromisingly disgusted with its subject matter, depicting every moment of low-class excess with an ugly, overlit Velveeta sheen rendering its hideous supporting cast even more freakish than usual. And then there are the axe murders.

Or rather, the single axing that acts as a dubious curtain-raiser: newlyweds Helen and Paul Fraser are inexplicably picnicking in some off-the-beaten-path sinkhole in rural Texas, enjoying roughly two minutes of vanilla wedded bliss before the business end of an axe finds its way into Paul’s chest.

Helen quickly comes to terms with becoming a widow, but she is unable to find the keys to their station wagon and is cast off into the wilderness. Instead of finding help, she encounters Odis, the odious patriarch of the Pickett clan, and foolishly follows him home to his ramshackle log cabin. Meanwhile, the unseen axe murderer hovers around, contributing an occasional POV shot, but he’s maddeningly inactive for the bulk of the running time. It would seem that his plan is to allow Helen to enjoy her Southern hospitality until it breaks her very psyche, and the Pickett clan is more than up to the task. Every member of the household embodies one or more crass Southern stereotypes to go along with their other fatal character flaws.

It’s a motley crew indeed.

Odis (pictured at Right), our heroine’s “savior”, is a misogynistic moonshine-chugging Good Ole Boy, who doesn’t have the slightest intention of helping Helen; the house doesn’t have a phone, nor does he have a vehicle, but what he DOES have is a raging libido and more than enough homemade booze chillin’ in the well to keep it raging. Meek Emmy (in chair, to Left of Odis) is pregnant with the newest member of the Picketts, and her pleasant yet vacant demeanor belies the fact that she’s essentially trapped in a loveless marriage, as her first husband essentially used her as collateral in order to pay off a loan to Odis. She’s hardly of an upper-crust background, but her down-to-earth humility stands in stark contrast to perennial tart Sarah Pickett (at Left of frame). Pronounced “Say-Ruh”, she’s been living at home since she done got run straight outta Beaumont, and Odis probably fathered her first aborted child. Good times!

Later we meet Bo Pickett, Sarah’s dimbulb younger brother, who is often tasked to “fetch a jar” of moonshine for his alcoholic dad, and is more than handy when it comes to bringin’ home chow for supper.

So while Helen may not exactly relish the thought of freshly killed possum in her stew, dinner time with the Picketts is by far the least horrific ordeal in what turns out to be a very, very, very long night out in the boondocks. But the frequently hilarious dialogue, and whimsical musical score, turn the proceedings into high camp rather than the penetrating social commentary that Z-list auteur S.F. Brownrigg was likely aiming for. Sure, there are still rural areas in the undeveloped Southern countryside where people still live like it was the late 19th century, inbreeding is common, and progressive politics are demonized, but the depiction of the lifestyle in Scum of the Earth is part affectionate parody, part hysterical exaggeration; there is no ring of truth to its gallery of low-rent horrors. The script plays on cliches and stereotypes, depicting this regressive culture as nothing short of Hell on Earth.

It’s a tonally appropriate companion piece and spiritual sequel to Brownrigg’s inexplicably titled Don’t Look in the Basement, which examined the treatment of the mentally ill and the inherent dangers in experimental treatments vis-a-vis group therapy. It works well for its micro-budget but does not transcend the trappings of its genre. Ultimately Basement devolves into mindless slasher fare in its third act, and the blatantly telegraphed Big Twist is less mindblowing and more shrug-inducing. The film has lapsed into the public domain, and is worth checking out if only to plumb the cinematic genealogy of Scum of the Earth. The price is right.

Much like its successor, Scum devolves into a very slow-paced stalk-and-kill murder mystery deal, only without any tension or emotional stakes or, indeed, any sense of mystery at all.

During one especially inept sequence, Bo is summoned with the words “fetch me a jar” and sent to the chillin’ well to retrieve more moonshine for his deposed Paw; the interior shots of the cabin show that it’s pitch black outside, but once Bo steps out it’s clearly just past High Noon. The Day-For-Night might match up with the similarly mishandled POV shots, but when there’s bright sunlight, stark shadows and birdsong in the middle of your tense murder sequence, well, say goodbye to any and all tension. To top it off, once Bo has his fatal meeting with a sharpened fence post, the discharge oozing from his open maw looks less like stage blood and more like raspberry preserves.

Once Odis is done slapping around his daughter and trading lewd remarks (it’s a remarkable bout of one-upsmanship that culminates in Odis declaring “They run you outta Beaumont ’cause you gave the Clap to half the town!”), his discovery of Bo’s corpse fills him with sorrow; less because he’s out one son than the fact that he’s going to have to fetch his moonshine by himself. Act 3 sends the atrocities flying at breakneck speed: an offscreen rape, more spousal abuse, a sloppy seduction turned barbed wire strangulation, drunken fury followed by a shotgun blast to the face. Then, of course, the Brownrigg signature: a ludicrous twist that adds absolutely nothing to the story.

As much as the lurid marketing campaign would like you to believe otherwise, there’s nary a single moment of terror to be found in Scum of the Earth, and indeed, were it not for the incest subplot and the occasional freshet of stage blood, it could have been reissued as a tongue-in-cheek parody fit for family consumption. With the somewhat optimistic yet totally bleak conclusion, combined with the weird upbeat theme song “Love is a Final Affair”, there’s tangible Family Values subtext to be found here. It’s just nearly impossible to decipher amidst the layers of grime and sleaze and Z-grade exploitation.

At the very least, co-writer and star Gene Ross deserves credit for creating one of the most loathsome yet inexplicably appealing quasi-villains in Odis Pickett. Making a drinking game out of his shenanigans is easy enough; dying from alcohol poisoning is a simple proposition if one were to drink with every utterance of  “Fetch me a jar”. And when’s the last time you saw a slasher flick that ended with cute little credit buttons?

Recommended with all the usual caveats.

The Slithis is a strange creature, indeed; borne of unchecked seepage from a Venice Beach nuclear power plant and the inbred hillbilly cousin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, he emerges from a drainage canal early in the A.M. to feast on local denizens. But the charming humanoid beast is almost an afterthought until the third act of Spawn of the Slithis, a film which is perfectly content to plant its tranquilized ass on the couch and sloooooowly tell the tale of Wayne Connors, a high school journalism teacher, and his profound disillusionment with the current generation of students, who produce the “worst high school newspaper in the nation” under his ever more jaded aegis. Yes, it’s a sad state of affairs for the Baby Boomers reared during the ultra-conservative Eisenhower Era, who have their optimism dashed against the rocks time and time again by the hippie generation. “Teaching’s beginning to be a big turn-off,” he laments to his wife, who is a woman named Jeff, as they leave his sorry campus for their humble Love Shack and a night full of red wine and Quaaludes.

Sporadic Slithis attacks give Wayne a grim new lease on life, giving him the opportunity to use his Los Angeles press card(!?) and fanangle his way into a string of murder investigations. Since the LA County Coroner must have been stoned on elephant tranquilizers, the Overacting Police Chief declares that the Slithis meals are merely the work of a Mansonian “Satanic Death Cult”. If you’re willing to accept that plot contrivance, you may be functionally retarded. For those who aren’t suffering from severe cognitive impairment, there happens to be a bottled solution that comes in many flavors to suit your particular pleasure. All the actors seem to be drunk or stoned or flying eight miles high, and what’s more, director Steven Traxler’s skewed vision of LA is populated mostly by drunken transients who specifically drink economy-priced red wine. You should probably do the same.

There is an “investigation” carried out by Wayne the high school newspaper editor, wherein he illegally lifts evidence from multiple crime scenes, conveniently left open and unguarded for anyone to walk in, and sends them to his pal “Doctor John” for analysis. Since none of the characters seem to have any sort of background or history, it’s unclear whether the hippie-bearded Doc is a high school science teacher, or just some rogue biologist who spends his free time getting stoned and poring over conspiracy theories.

After a brief period of befuddlement, mandated by the script, the good doctor shows up at Wayne and Jeff’s house one night, unannounced and most likely blitzed out of his hairy gourd, and begins an incredibly insane tale of nuclear waste, stagnant marshes, and radioactive dirt. The Man is trying to play God with his unstable nuclear power plants, nature is becoming polluted, Mother Earth is bleeding, blah blah blah… but then John builds to a kicker:

“It’s one of the most important discoveries in scientific history, and they called this radioactive silt…”

…

“…Slithis.”

How and why Doctor John decided to bombard us with this info overload is a question best left unanswered. What’s more important is the actor’s hilarious, intoxicated delivery of the exposition, and the fact that said info-dump serves no purpose in Wayne’s investigation whatsoever. Sure, it sets up an unexplained scene where Wayne and Jeff go to the igloo-shaped house of a former nuclear scientist, but what comes out of that is just more crap about how Man Shouldn’t Play God. Oh, and a hilarious close-up of the scientist’s “radiation-scarred” visage.

Put as simply as possible, Spawn of the Slithis is about a monster mutated by radioactive silt that comes out at night to feast on society’s undesirables. When it finally decides to become a poor ripoff of Jaws, complete with a hardscrabble crew scraped together and placed on a lonely wooden boat, the narrative is already lying dead in the water and stinking like carp left out in the sun. The film would barely qualify for feature-length if the editing was tighter, and Traxler’s infatuation with his high-speed slow motion camera slows things down even more. There’s one fact that makes it stand out in the overcrowded pool of horrible monster movies, and that’s the basic level of competence behind the scenes, coupled with an earnest desire to make a significant work of art. While there’s no doubt that it fails to achieve any sort of depth, the attempt at subtext is fascinating in the same way of a slow motion train derailment.

Feasting on drunken hobos by night, swimming in irradiated ocean water by day, the Slithis leads a lonesome yet unpretentious lifestyle. His choice of victims leaves plenty up to interpretation: from slum inhabitants to transients to the sexually uninhibited swingers of the Me Generation. The attack scenes are surprisingly gruesome and drawn out, complete with a subjective Slithis-Cam for terrifying split-diopter POV shots. Yet there is a gaping hole in the middle of the story: the monster drops out of sight for a half-hour lacuna while Wayne wanders the city interrogating homeless drunks and charters a boat from a black man named Christopher Columbus, who uses the word “mother” as an all-purpose noun and is obsessed with handshake etiquette. His hobo interrogations lead to a dead end, but Columbus is all too happy to aid Wayne in his thrilling quest to gather specimens from the ocean floor for thorough radiation analysis. There is little to do but bide our time by drinking or otherwise putting yourself in the same mindset as the cast and crew, waiting for the real protagonist to crawl out of the ocean once more.

Once our hero makes his triumphant return, it’s a real doozy. First, a disorienting jump cut puts us in the middle of a bizarre nightclub where patrons make drunken bets on turtle races as an MC provides moronic running commentary. It is in this hideous milieu where libidinous swinger Doug sets sights on virginal vacationer Jennifer, who is 18 but “could pass for 20″. Spirited away by this mustachioed Lothario in his blue Volkswagen Beetle, she all too easily surrenders her humble life story: a lifelong resident of backwoods Suska, North Dakota, Jennifer was just waiting for the day when she would be old enough to jump ship and immerse herself in the bright lights, spinning disco balls, Free Love and free-flowing cocaine of the Big City. And along came her knight in bell-bottoms and leisure suit and dress shirt unbuttoned down to his navel.

Once aboard Doug’s houseboat, the Casanova of Venice Beach lights a couple of candles flanking a B&W framed picture of himself(?!) and doles out the obligatory red wine. For the sake of your sanity, please follow suit.

As Doug reaches behind the love seat for a switch, our minds are left racing. What hideous contraption could he possibly have hidden in this den of horrors? Lamely, it’s just a power switch for some red lights to provide the “romantic ambience” of a nuclear meltdown. Poor, poor naive little Jennifer thinks she’s reeled in a catch. The  awkward, PG rated foreplay commences.

But what’s that? A knocking on the door? Surely it’s just Rex, the friendly neighborhood peeping tom, doing his daily run on Doug’s well-stocked liquor cabinet? Surely nothing could be more important than stealing third base before diving headfirst into the home plate? And yet, and yet… there always remains the possibility of a former hook-up coming to call, and after all, what could be sweeter than parlaying this successful pickup into a threesome? Hoping against hope, Doug ascends the stairs, with Traxler fetishizing his every move with Hitchcockian intensity, then crosses the cabin while bathed in sanguine light, then slicks back his hair, then sloooowly moving for the doorknob, and then

GWAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHNNNNNN

A familiar scaly hand pulls Doug from his haven of moral iniquity and into the harsh realities of life!! There is much rejoicing, much spilling of stage blood, and much red-tinted Slithis action. The beast is back, and hungrier than ever! Would it be redundant to highlight, again, how satisfying this sequence becomes?

What ho? The sounds of a lass crying for her dear departed beau, in spite of all the inhuman groaning, bone snapping and flesh rending! What could be sweeter than a virginal North Dakotan for dessert? And yet… we have come to know this couple better than some of us know ourselves, shared their hopes and dreams and lusts and perversions. Paradoxically, we share the beast’s bloodlust and we want to see Jennifer obey Doug’s softly cooed command to “get naked”, which prove to be his last words uttered as a sentient being. Were it not for Jennifer’s promiscuity, she would not even be in this debacle, and were it not for her naivete in crying for a dead lover, the Slithis would not mosey on board Doug’s Love Boat for his second helping.

This is easily the most drawn out monster attack in the film, a tour de force of conflicting moralities, tragically wasted youth, nature’s inhumanity to man, and copious red lighting. As we’re immersed in the color of sin, Traxler further implicates the audience with multiple cuts to the split-diopter Slithis-Cam, lingering on Jennifer’s mortal terror and fragile, writhing form. Then the attack, inevitably, turns into a molestation, recalling the poster depicting our lovely monster with a scantily clad bride cradled in his loving arms: another paradoxical image that recalls the inner torment of the eponymous 40 foot ape of King Kong. The agonizingly drawn out attack is like some first-year film student’s tribute to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom filtered through The Horror of Party Beach. Was the monster once human, or did humans unknowingly create the monster with their unchecked nuclear power plants? Is this sequence brilliant or idiotic? Have I really gone through an entire 12 pack of Schlitz?

We end with a shot that practically oozes depth and meaning and subtext, etc.

The hilarity doesn’t let up at all, when in the next scene Wayne makes a visit to the police station to check in on the mentally unbalanced Stupid Chief, whose acting style can best be described as “like Vincent Price on amphetamines.” Even when he’s serving as the meat in the middle of a Bad Actor Sandwich, doing his business in the background, this nutcase chews scenery with all the gusto of a failed classically trained Shakespearean actor. The hilarity remains on a constant high pretty much throughout the rest of the film.

Had enough ham to wash down with all that red wine? Good, because now we’re on board the humble SS. Creation piloted by the one and only Christopher Columbus, as Traxler shamelessly rips off Jaws with all the weird fever-dream logic of Jaws the Revenge. It’s kind of refreshing that nobody discovers some simple household chemical that reduces the Slithis back to his radioactive silt stage, so instead Wayne and Chris must engage the creature in a mano a mano streetfight involving a shotgun and numerous improvised weapons. For those of us rooting for the monster, the ultimate outcome is kind of refreshing; the heroes snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by abiding in the Order of Mother Nature. In other words, Christopher Columbus babbles some jibba-jabba about the infinite possibilities of the ocean, the order of chaos, and the Dismal Tide. And then… well, it’s insane. And the screen goes negative. If you have any theories as to what the last shot signifies, please let us know. If you can make it through without dousing your brain with alcohol, you are either very brave or very stupid.