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This
double feature disc of grindhouse impresario David F. Friedman's
The Defilers and Scum
Of The Earth is a superb package
jam-packed with a plethora of bonus materials. Too bad the movies
themselves don't really merit such lavish treatment. They're
"roughies": black and white cheesecake flicks with
a bit of violence and sadomasochism thrown in for kicks. When
the wave of bargain basement "nudie cutie" pictures
began to show diminishing returns, Friedman and other independent
producers chucked the supposedly whimsical/farcical elements
(exemplified by Friedman himself, in the audio commentary, as
the sort of comedy picture where a guy invents X-ray glasses
to see beneath women's clothes) in favor of slaps to the kisser
and belt buckles whipped across quivering, naked buttocks.
The Defilers
is the certainly the most mean-spirited — and also more
professionally executed — film of the two. Carl Walker Junior
(Byron Mabe, The Doberman Gang)
and Jamison "Jim" Marsh (Jerome Eden) are two Southern
California twentysomethings who've grown bored with their existence
of drunken parties and endless sexual romps with an ever-changing
assortment of women. (It would take a decade or two for me
to get to that point!) More accurately it's Carl who is
increasingly dissatisfied; the more happy-go-lucky Jim has a
semi-steady girlfriend, Ellen (Carol Dark), but nevertheless
seems in thrall to Carl's every whim. Carl happens to be a real
SOB, by the way. He's the son of a wealthy businessman who constantly
berates him as inadequate. It seems Carl's developed a serious
mean streak as a consequence. Always in search of "kicks",
he enjoys physically abusing women as a form of foreplay. Ellen
rightly thinks her
boyfriend's pal is a Class-A dickweed, and tries to steer Jim
out of the creep's orbit. But Jim and Carl are inseparable.
You'd think that Carl would find some measure
of contentment now that he's met pretty brunette Kathy (Linda
Cochran). Taking her to his private "hideaway" — a
dingy basement room in a closed warehouse owned by his father
— Carl forces himself on her and, when she fights back, strips
off her
panties and administers a savage, sadistic spanking. Screaming
and crying,
Kathy suddenly yields to Carl's brutish desires: "Please...don't
stop." (To paraphrase an old cereal commercial: "Hey,
Carl! She's likes it!") But no, not even a willing partner
for rough sex is enough to satiate this cruel preppie slacker.
He wants something truly exciting, something different. Carl
and Jim's hedonistic lifestyle is about to take a very dark
and dangerous turn.
While visiting their ganja connection, creepy
apartment manager Mrs. Olson, Carl and Jim meet Jane Collins
(first-time actress Mai Jansson), an attractive, naive blonde
from Minnesota who's only just arrived in Hollywood. She's Mrs.
Olson's newest tenant and doesn't know a soul in town. After
he reluctantly gives her a lift to modeling school, Carl hatches
a wicked scheme to get some truly groovy kicks... Why not kidnap
Jane and imprison her in the basement "dungeon"? She
has no friends or family to inquire about her. At their mercy,
she'd act as his and Jim's sex slave. It takes some convincing
by Carl but his initially reluctant comrade agrees. After spying
on her taking a bubble bath, the two lechers not so much kidnap
Jane as trick her into coming to the warehouse. Trapped, stripped
to her undies, degraded and abused, Jane is raped, starved and
beaten by Carl with the increasingly squeamish Jim participating
only in the sexual action. Sadistic lust unrestrained, Carl
eventually goes too far in his thrashing of the pleading captive.
Jim must decide to stand up to his friend — to put a stop to
Jane's brutal defilement — or inevitably find himself an accessory
to murder.
The
Defilers
is sleazy stuff, even nigh on to 40 years after its production.
Lee Frost's direction and photography, however, as well as the
acting by the two male leads, is of a much higher caliber than
one expects in this kind of Z-grade exploitation pic. Some of
the straight-faced "Daddy-O" hipster dialog is actually
quite funny. (Carl
Walker Jr., philosopher: "There's
only one thing in this whole crummy square-infested life that
counts. Kicks! Kicks, Jim. Kicks. Dig me?") I also
dug the chintzy jazz/lounge music score that permeates the proceedings
(and compensates for a total lack of sound in numerous scenes)
— expect
explosions of bongo drums at turgid moments. It's nice, too,
to see real, non-surgically enhanced breasts for a change. Still,
the relatively short flick seems to take forever to get going;
Jane isn't trapped in the dungeon until the final 20 minutes
of the movie. Much of what comes before is just blatant padding...
and I'm not talking bras here, folks.
The
disc's 2nd full-length feature is Scum
Of The Earth,
also a Friedman production, directed by the "Godfather
of Gore" himself, Herschell Gordon Lewis (best known for
his films Blood
Feast
and 2000
Maniacs).
No gore in this one —
in fact, there isn't any nudity! There's only a smidgen of physical
violence so it barely even qualifies as a "roughie."
Not having naked women in a sexploitation flick is definitely
a bad sign. This is a stupid, stupid movie.
Non-actress Vickie Miles (who's physically
almost Sherilyn Fenn's döppelganger) is terrible as Kim Sherwood,
a naive, innocent high school senior who has delusions of becoming
a model. Tricked into posing for college money, Kim gets mixed
up with the pornography ring of Mr. Lang, who
blackmails the chaste cutie
into modeling for more "revealing" pictures. (The
ring sells the photos to
high school kids like dope. And we're supposed to believe
this?) The most risqué photo shoot we see poor Kim dragooned
into has her and two other bathing suit-clad models posing with
baseball equipment. The police are eventually called in; in
a hilarious moment the fleeing Lang murders his supposedly teenage
(more like 30 year old) assistant using what is obviously a
cap pistol. With Lang's smut racket smashed, Kim is saved from
a life of sordidness and goes on to happily attend Craxton College.
Yawn.
Cap pistol caper aside, the one true gem
of a moment comes when Mr. Lang (an apoplectic Lawrence Wood)
reads Kim the riot act in a series of progressively tighter
close-ups on his sweating face. ("...You're dirty, do
you hear me? Dirty!") It's so funny, in fact, that
Something Weird uses it to kick off the gonzo compilation clip
that opens each of their DVDs.
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The
company has done a wonderful job presenting these not so wonderful
films. Despite some initial shimmer and one major scratch the
transfer of The
Defilers is very good;
Scum's
picture quality fares worse in comparison but it has never looked
better elsewhere. It's the treasure chest of bonus features that
really make the disc worthwhile. There's a "nudie cutie"
lingerie wrestling
short and a truly bizarre audio spot that drive-ins would play
hawking $1 sex manuals. (For real?) Producer David F. Friedman,
a regular P.T. Barnum of
schlock cinema, participates in a funny, charming audio commentary
over The Defilers.
9 flesh-filled trailers (not counting 2 promos for The
Defilers) are
included for such bottom-feeding sleaze epics as The
Ultimate Degenerate,
Banned,
and Confessions
Of A Psycho Cat.
The trailer for The
Pick-up, which
contains a surprisingly sadistic torture-by-electrocution scene
(I could easily imagine even the raincoat crowd squirming uncomfortably
through this one), runs an astonishing 6 minutes! Anything
left to see in the actual movie, d'ya think? Numerous drive-in
"intermission time" clips are thrown in as well, ironically
to include one promoting religious worship in America!
The piece de resistance of the DVD,
though, has to be the clever Let's Go to the Drive-in!
feature. Access it on the main menu and both movies, with trailers
and drive-in clips presented before and in between, play non-stop
automatically for the next 3 hours. This is a great gimmick I'd
definitely like to see more of.! (I've also heard that there's
a hidden Easter Egg on the disc but I haven't found it yet.)
5/21/01 |
