Not even three minutes of Poor White Trash Part II tick by before an unseen ax murderer kills one of our two presumed main characters — newlyweds on a log-cabin honeymoon, no less! With her new hubby freshly dead, insta-widow Helen (Norman Moore, Problem Child) runs for her life into the woods — and all to the tune of an inappropriately upbeat score, complete with rubber-band instruments.
Helen soon finds safety — relatively speaking — when she bumps into possum-hunting redneck Odis Pickett (Gene Ross, The Legend of Boggy Creek), who lives nearby with his son (Charlie Dell, 1986’s Invaders from Mars), daughter (Camilla Carr, A Bullet for Pretty Boy) and pregnant wife (Ann Stafford, Keep My Grave Open). “Lookie here what I done brung home for supper,” Odis tells them, and he doesn’t mean possum.
If you read Odis’ quote as a leering threat of nonconsensual sexual congress, pat yourself on the back. When it comes to Helen, who shore is purty, every overstrained syllable that manages to escape the uneducated man’s mouth crackles with electricity. Unfortunately for her, it’s like the kind of electricity generated by the exposed ends of frayed cords used for misogynist methods of torture as depicted on the covers of pulp detective mags: unwanted.
Or, as his daughter says best, “I know what kind of privates you got in mind: same ones you been pokin’ in me since I’s goin’ on 12!”
Welcome to Deliverance as a family sitcom. Yessiree, this here Trash comes scooped and dumped by the Arkansas-born/Texas-dead director of the public-domain fright favorite Don’t Look in the Basement, S.F. Brownrigg.
Poor White Trash Part II has jack-squat to do with the original-recipe Poor White Trash, except the nekkid pursuit of a quick-and-easy buck. Seeing how the plain ol’ Poor White Trash was a shrewd and profitable retitling of 1957’s Bayou for the drive-in market, why not see if White lightning could strike twice? Trash Part II first entered the world with the none-too-subtle title of Scum of the Earth … but should not be confused with the 1963 Scum of the Earth, a sexploitation serving dished out by Herschell Gordon Lewis.
However, you are forgiven for any confuzzlement, because Brownrigg’s picture owes quite the debt to Lewis’ pioneering gore films (as well as his hicks-in-the-sticks flicks, e.g., Moonshine Mountain). With its shock scenes — tame by today’s standards, natch — of killbilly kapers, it also prefigures the slasher subgenre that would propagate like inbred offspring across drive-in screens by decade’s end.
Call it what you wish. Brownrigg’s blood-strewn streak of soap-opera camp makes Poor White Trash Part II tough to take seriously, but easy to take in. —Rod Lott
Ray Dennis Steckler, the backyard multihyphenate whose psychotronic efforts have dealt famously with two-bit superheroes (
Prophetically titled, 
It is hard to believe there was a time in this country when Americans shelled out thousands of dollars not just to drive vans as a primary mode of transportation, but to emblazon them with airbrushed fantasies of mermaids and Mickey Mouse and more, all of which look to have been dictated to a slumming Frank Frazetta by a toddler who forgot to take his Ritalin that morning. And yet here, to serve as historical record (and little else) is proof: 
