Steven Spielberg’s sharksploitation progenitor Jaws celebrated a 50-year anniversary last year, and the occasion was marked by a wide theatrical re-release, followed by an extensive, interactive exhibition at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. I assume, then, that its most noteworthy porno parody, 1976’s Gums, will be receiving the same 50-year fanfare later this summer. If one is not already in the works, it’s not too late to slap a theatrical re-release together, thanks to the fine folks at the American Genre Film Archive already having a cleaned-up scan of the curio on-hand, ready to roll. Gums is included as a B-side bonus feature on AGFA’s Blu-ray release for Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers, the only other film of note from director Robert J. Kaplan. In a way, Gums does recall that earlier, mightier title by hiring porno queen Terri Hall to swim through an underwater garden of sea cucumbers (i.e., a coral reef composed of gigantic cocks), but it’s overall too restrained and too straight to match the delirious heights of Kaplan’s hippie-NYC masterwork. It’s a straight-up, few-frills Jaws parody with a one-joke premise: What if, instead of a killer shark, a beach town was terrorized by a killer mermaid who bites off men’s penises mid-fellatio. In 1976, there was enough pot smoke in the air to land that kind of novelty in movie theaters across the country, allowing Gums to contribute to Jaws’s legacy in a way that deserves some official acknowledgement, however small.
In the cold-open kill, a young man skinny-dips fully nude instead of a young woman — the camera zooming in on his flaccid penis before it’s castrated via mermaid. Once detached, it then floats to shore as a disembodied dildo. That dildo is the closest thing you’ll see to an onscreen erection in this film, since Gums opted to stick to a softcore rating in order to swim its way into as many theaters is possible, treated more as a campy midnight-movie novelty than a Porno Chic marital aid. Like the shark in Jaws, Terri Hall’s cock-chomping mermaid is mostly hidden from the audience in the first half of the (mercifully short) runtime, leaving the audience to hang out with her horned-up macho victims for far too long. Spending so much downtime with such beloved Jaws-spoofing characters as Deputy Dick, Dr. Smegma, and Captain Clitoris, I was reminded of Roger Ebert’s “First Law of Funny Names,” which declares that “funny names, in general, are a sign of desperation at the screenplay level.” Gums has no clue what to do with itself when not filming Terri Hall swimming between killer blowjobs underwater, as it cannot fill its runtime with hardcore sex without censoring the action with comic book panels of phrases like “Pork!” and “Slurp!” So, it stages a collection of go-nowhere bits, throwing anything it can think of at the audience to reach feature length: stock footage of real-life beavers, a buzzard puppet with a human hard-on, home movies of mating pet dogs, a Mel Brooks-style Nazi spoof, and whatever else got a chuckle from the crew while passing joints around the set. It’s all obnoxious nonsense, but it’s at least constantly surprising obnoxious nonsense. When the non-mermaid main characters are abruptly replaced by puppets in the final scene, there’s no possible reaction other than “Sure, yeah, whatever.”
The only dialogue exchange in Gums that got a genuine laugh out of me, was when Dr. Smegma (the Hooper stand-in) explains to Deputy Dick (the Brody stand-in) that true mermaids don’t have actual fish tails, that their tails are “psychological.” It’s a hilariously labored, unnecessary excuse for the lack of craft in Terri Hall’s costuming, which essentially amounts to some dramatic drag-queen eye makeup and a coral tiara. It’s also one of many instances in which the script seems to be working out its core gimmick in real-time, sometimes even workshopping what the eventual title will be with alternate options like Deep Jaws (in reference to Deep Throat) and Thar She Blows! (which is repeated at top volume ad nauseum). For all of its failed humor and self-censored sensuality, though, Gums does achieve some semblance of arts-and-crafts beauty in its underwater photography, whenever it drops all of the schtick onshore to instead focus on Hall hunting down her next victim. Maybe there’s not enough substance there for it to earn its own year-long Academy Museum spotlight, but maybe it could be included in the ongoing Jaws celebration as a backroom exhibit, hidden behind a red curtain like the porno rooms at the video rental stores of old. All they’d need to add is a few video arcades showing loops of Terri Hall swimming around pantsless in her underwater sea-cucumber garden to demonstrate the kind of effect Jaws had on the wider culture (beyond inventing the summer blockbuster as we know it). Gums doesn’t deserve much, but it at least deserves that.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 