A white-trash travelogue through the scabies-infested underwear of the crusty underworld of destitute hell, Gummo is the overpriced souvenir photo you get the world’s worst gift shop.

Featuring budding sociopaths, disabled sex fiends and freshly killed pets, the rancid smell of this movie is a combination of rotting trash, decayed carcasses and dirty jean shorts. Filmed in a cinéma vérité-style anti-style somewhat within the boundless boundaries of the supposed Dogme 95 movement, it’s an art film for the perpetually artless.

In the ruins of Xenia, Ohio, a traumatic tornado has decimated the mostly white population and their malformed brethren in a drastic cycle of abject poverty, serious non-education and, for the most part, death metal. Gummo starts with an emaciated boy in dingy bunny ears, spitting and urinating from an overpass. From this first minute, things get progressively worse with the mostly amateur cast of jobless ne’er-do-wells excreting the most anti-social behavior.

In small, disparate sections, a kid feeds glass-riddled food to stray cats, platinum blondes with puffy nipples dance on a bed, skinhead brothers engage in bareknuckle horseplay, a pair of foulmouthed youngsters shoot cap guns, director Harmony Korine sexually assaults a gay little person, and, in the most suitable section of the film, the world championship of chair wrestling goes down.

Even with all that, Gummo has a through line of two junior delinquents like to huff glue, score with an underage prostitute, murder a comatose granny, drown numerous kittens and, worst of all, take baths in the foulest green water while eating sparse spaghetti.

Known for his shock-based indie features like Spring Breakers, Korine has assembled a stellar cast of the worst possible losers, users and in the case of Chloe Sevigny, poseurs. It’s a remarkably pathetic time at the movies — and one that is infinitely watchable.

It’s a totally class-based scare film about that one house on the block whose residents drunkenly play their music too loud at 3 a.m. and then pistol-whip you for complaining. You know the one!

Some people think Gummo is truly destitute outsider art — actually, most of Korine’s work is like that, but that’s a whole other thing — leading me to wonder if this is an actual narrative film or a documentary of the most homeless order.

Or both?

Either way, it’s that type of movie that will make you claw deeper into your white-bread Christian worldview of opioid-addicted sinners or expand your holy subconscious into venereal medicines usually administered though the penis. —Louis Fowler

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Mistakenly thinking they were the glam-rock band Sweet (the passionate ones, oh yeah!, according to “Ballroom Blitz”), I now realize the musically similar band Slade is, of course, the glam-rock band Slade. (But no disrespect to Sweet!)

Known for their kinda-sorta bottom-tier glam-slams in the ’70s, Slade had a few hits like “Mama Weer All Crazee Now,” “Cum on Feel the Noize” and that one festive Christmas song that everyone in Britain seems to like. In America, they are incorrectly known as a Quiet Riot cover band.

In 1975, at the height of polyester-uniform infamy, the band was an overseas hit machine that somehow starred in the rabble-rousing, rags-to-riches fable Slade in Flame. They play the fictional band Flame, a working-class combo that starts from the bottom and, in a drastic move, stays there.

The movie, with the benefit of hindsight, goes nowhere but down, down, down.

After being the backing musicians for a tepid wedding singer with a lounge act that really is terrible, the guys — Dave Hill, Jim Lee, Don Powell and Noddy Holder — drop all their pretensions and precognitions and become the band Flame, a very popular (I guess) but volatile musical act.

But this is no A Hard Day’s Night, as Flame burns out with stuffy money men, wanton groupies and a seemingly terrorist organization that takes down pirate radio stations of the middle of an estuary — the brightest spot in the movie, referencing Radio Caroline — as they all tire of fame and stardom, disbanding after a (pretty good) show.

As expected, the members of Slade are semi-passable as working-class musicians and real ne’er-do-wells. With footage of the screaming audience passing around Flame merchandise, banners and signs, I was led to feel that the act was truly real.

And that’s great, but the one thing that should work here is the soundtrack. Sadly, it’s ho-hum, reworking Slade’s already formulaic music that already doesn’t do much, except go in one ear and out the other. A band with their own movie should have some real rippers, but instead they had to concentrate on their acting. And scene!

Though Slade in Flame has been rediscovered by a minute cult audience over the past decade, there are so many other gems in the rock era to cover. While the real Slade is a serviceable band that can rest on their laurels; much like the wholly fictional Flame, they should go their separate ways with no reunion tour. —Louis Fowler

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Lance Kerwin, God rest his soul, was the master of losing his virginity on prime-time TV: first on a controversial episode of the celebrated James at 15 series, then again in the rightly uncelebrated telepic Side Show. (Did he ball a vampire in Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot? My memory’s not what it used to be.)

With an open mouth forever stuck on flabbergasted mode, Kerwin plays Nick, a 16-year-old runaway and puppeteer with a killer Jimmy Durante impression right down to the last “ha-cha-cha-cha.” Back when those were marketable skills, that’s enough to earn him a spot in the traveling circus. In the freak show tent of the traveling circus, that is, but a job’s a job — and then some, with the fringe benefit of seduction by the luscious, post-Scorchy (and grown adult) Connie Stevens!

Directed by actor William Conrad after his long run on Cannon, Side Show offers little for viewers to grasp between the murder occurring in the final stretch and Nick’s intro (via Red Buttons, When Time Ran Out …) to his co-workers: the tall lady, the fat lady, the snake lady, the tattooed lady, the sword swallower, the man with no face and a little-people couple with the last name Tiny. With respect to the latter, the movie’s big conflict is whether Nick can finagle a reunion with their normal-sized son so the Tinys can meet their granddaughter. Can your nerves stand it?

Pay no attention to the entirely misleading VHS box art that sells this particularly low-wattage melodramatic number as some kind of slasher. Its horrors are, at best, the clowns, trained chimps and Stevens’ soon-abandoned Hungarian accent. Still, in concept, Side Show gives producers Sid and Marty Krofft their version of Freaks. Just don’t expect the brothers to employ their usual brand of Saturday-psychedelia disturbia, ladies and gentlemen — neither the encephalitic H.R. Pufnstuf nor the monstrosities of D.C. Follies. —Rod Lott

I am very fearful of today’s punk youths, mostly because they will strangle me with their tight jeans, swollen lip rings and stylishly tousled hair, taking me down without a moment of regret or misunderstood bloodshed. As a matter of fact, their rakish behavior makes one yearn for the semi-tuff kids in 1979’s well-acted, oversexed and non-complex teen drama, Over the Edge.

Besides tucking their shirttails, smoking in designated areas, and knowing the proper word for “urination,” the lower-level, white-trash kids of Edge take down the entire high school system with only some bottle rockets, some dirt bikes and, of course, total pubescent angst.

As the title crawl tells — against some serious power-chord action, natch — kids under 15 are horrible miscreants and this primo story is based on this nonexistent fact. We’re introduced to the suburb of New Grenada and their unofficial teen leader, Richie (Matt Dillon), and his buddy, Carl (Michael Kramer).

They and their friends brag about small-time vandalism, attempted date rapes and other minor crimes, not to mention going to see Kiss in their Dynasty disco era (wowza!) at the well-to-do youth center. For the most part, for youth of the 1970s, they’re pretty civil, a little douchey and most vaguely docile.

But when the community center is temporarily closed by some rootin’-tootin’ Texas land developers, do Richie and the gang try to save it by learning breakdancing? No, they go and tear apart a police car. Eventually, they come across a gun and things really get bad when Richie is shot by the cops. So, of course, Carl and his friends come together to take down not only the cops, but also their parents, teachers and teacher’s pets — the whole damn system, man!

Like The Warriors or Rock ’n’ Roll High School,  Over the Edge is an antisocial wish-fulfillment fantasy directed by Jonathan Kaplan, one of Roger Corman’s enfants terribles. With the total power of hard rock, hard times and hard crime, Kaplan does a commendable job here, with most kids tired of the Afterschool Special themes normally crammed down their throats.

The scenes of Greeley, Colorado — a hop, skip and jump from my former home, Fort Collins — and other nearby locales are pretty staid with washed-out suburban colors, but it beats, say, Los Angeles and other California dreams. Even better, the soundtrack featuring the Ramones, Cheap Trick and early Van Halen — I want my ’70s stereophonic headphones now! Turn it up, man!

Over the Edge is a late ’70s picture of classic teen alienation and vintage youth rebellion, with the teenagers waving their stolen shotguns in a true celebration of fist-pumping uprising and personal dirtball freedom.

So take a swig of this 50/50 as I blow up this car … but, please don’t do any of this if my parents are home! *gulp* —Louis Fowler

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When I was a kid and didn’t know any better, I was enthralled with Texas-area, Texas-born wrestlers the Von Erichs and their contribution to the (fake) sport of pro wrestling. Back in the day, you could actually believe in their superheroic leaps and bounds, no matter how trashily presented.

In our small town in Blooming Grove, my father would buy The Dallas Morning News on Sundays, when the sports section had posters on the last page, giving us prime opportunities for experiencing the Saturday night fights, all without pay-per-view. To hell with the WWF!

I had switched to watching Saturday Night Live and its comical ephemera around ’86 or ’87, around the time the brawny Von Erich brothers had some “trouble” in the extreme sense of the word. They and, for the most part, wrestling became a Lone Star-sized blip on the cathode tube, never to be seen again.

Now, some 40 years later, The Iron Claw brings those memories flooding back.

The biopic sets us sometime in the early 1980s, with the thudding boom of the small-time wrestling Von Erich family. The depressive Kevin (a very buff Zac Efron) leads his equally fit brothers to total takedown victories in the ring — only for all it to be taken by cruel fate, which comes for each of them in the saddest way possible.

Besides sparring with the family’s own demons, their dad is former wrester/then-current WCCW owner Fritz (Holt McCallany). Emotionally abusive, he grinds his sons into the dirt, saying their shortcomings are for their “own good.”

While I knew about the Von Erichs’ mythical stories when their dynasty ruled, I wasn’t privy to much of what’s detailed in the film. From drunken amputations to shame-based suicides, it’s a truly sad story that director Sean Durkin peacefully delivers.

As shown in the epilogue, Kevin was able to break through and turn his life around; for that, I am happier. While some people need to know the whole story, warts and all, The Iron Claw does the legend justice. Even better, I don’t need to watch wrestling again to know it. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.