About

reelscum is a database and a magazine about exploitation cinema: the films made fast, sold hard, and shown at drive-ins, grindhouses and on rental shelves to audiences who had already decided what they wanted.

What this is

Popular culture history, written by people who like the material. These cycles are among the best-documented evidence we have of what audiences actually paid for, what censors actually feared, and how fast a film industry moves when nobody is regulating it. Most of it has never been written up properly because the respectable film press spent forty years pretending it did not exist.

Entries here are pitches rather than plot summaries. Each one tells you why you might spend ninety minutes on a film, or why you probably will not. Where something in a film is likely to change whether you want to watch it, real animal deaths being the usual case, it gets stated as a fact rather than buried.

The five axes

A single star rating is useless here. The reason to watch a Jess Franco film has nothing in common with the reason to watch Ms. 45, so films are rated on five separate scales instead:

• Sleaze: How much of this is here to get you in the seat? (chaste to raincoat)
• Gore: Volume and enthusiasm of the red stuff. (bloodless to arterial)
• Camp: Is it in on the joke, and does that help? (deadly earnest to high camp)
• Pacing: Does it move, or is it 40 minutes of driving? (narcoleptic to relentless)
• Rewatch: Would you put it on again with company? (once was plenty to annual ritual)

A 5 for gore is not praise and a 1 is not criticism. They are measurements, and what you do with them is your business.

What's not here

• Spoilers. Each entry is a pitch, not a plot summary. Where a film is legally streamable we say so, on the film's own page, but the write-up is there to tell you whether to bother.
• Completeness. A few hundred entries you can actually navigate beat ten thousand stubs. The database grows deliberately, and submissions are read by a person.
• Scolding. Content notes appear in the blurb, as information, because knowing a film kills a real animal is something you might reasonably want in advance.

Sources

Film metadata comes from Wikidata; poster artwork, trailers and backdrops from TMDB and Wikipedia, all community-maintained and imperfect. Runtimes vary by cut, and for these films there are often four cuts. Editorial copy, subgenre tagging and the glossary are written here. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

Spot an error? Tell us. Corrections are the cheapest useful thing anyone can contribute.

Sister site

reelscum has a sibling: goreledger, a horror film ledger running 1931 to now. Same people, wider net. goreledger keeps the whole horror shelf; reelscum keeps the disreputable end of it.