Scum of the Earth

The same year Herschell Gordon Lewis poured the first bucket of on-screen gore into Blood Feast, he and producer David Friedman shot this, generally fingered as the first roughie. Where the nudie-cuties were sunlit and giggly, this is black and white and mean: a racket coerces and blackmails young women into posing for dirty pictures, and the film swaps nudity for a sour atmosphere of menace without a drop of blood in it. It is cheap, ugly and hard-faced, trading the leer of the pin-up film for something closer to a threat. Not much fun to sit through, and impossible to leave off the shelf, since half the nasty little films that followed trace straight back to it. Historically load-bearing, dramatically inert.