Scum of the Earth! | |
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Directed by | Herschell Gordon Lewis |
Produced by | David F. Friedman |
Written by | Herschell Gordon Lewis |
Starring | William Kerwin Allison Louise Downe Lawrence J. Aberwood |
Music by | Manuel Ortiz |
Cinematography | Herschell Gordon Lewis |
Edited by | Patrick Murphy |
Distributed by | Box Office Spectaculars |
Release date
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Running time
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73 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $75,000 |
Scum of the Earth! (also known as Sam Flynn) is a 1963 American exploitation film directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis and produced by David F. Friedman. It is credited as being the first film in the "roughie" genre.
An innocent college student, Kim Sherwood (Downe), is lured into doing "glamour" poses to earn money for tuition. Once she has done this work she is blackmailed by the photographers into doing more and more explicit posing. Various forms of implied sexual violence follow until the girl is rescued from her desperate situation.
In his autobiography, David F. Friedman wrote that Scum of the Earth was shot in six days, just two weeks after filming on Blood Feast had ended and was filmed in most of the same Miami and Miami Beach locations as in the previous film. It was filmed in black-and-white not to save money, but to intentionally give it a dirty look, "like an old, scratched 16 mm stag film." Friedman had the idea of promoting the film a week before its showing by giving theater audiences comic books of the story.
Allmovie wrote, "Unintentionally funny and poorly photographed, this film certainly has its moments for connoisseurs of bad cinema, but others will find it tawdry and dull."
Something Weird Video released Scum of the Earth on DVD with The Defilers (1964) on 20 February 2001.