Scum Film Quotes

Punks are nihilists who see no tomorrow at all, and dwell in a culture of death music and death imagery. Appropriately, Return focuses on a group of punks who bear names like Trash, Suicide, and Scum, their very names indicating their lack of respect for the world, and themselves. They see themselves as nothing in a world that doesn't value them, and won't survive an apocalypse.

Here come the characters who comprise the movie vermin, the Hollywood scum, the film slime—the aforementioned “unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity.” Fortunately, they are minor characters, yet so distasteful that their introduction has been delayed as long as possible.

Three guys. No doubt the Maricopa County DA would call them invaders. As in, a home invasion turned tragic tonight, in an exclusive gated community northeast of town. Film at eleven. The cops would call them perpetrators. Their lawyers would call them clients. Politicians would call them scum. Criminologists would call them sociopaths. Sociologists would call them misunderstood. The 110th MP would call them dead men walking.

Then one day this very quote from Epictetus—about everything having two handles—occurred to him. “I took hold now by the other handle,” he related later, “and carried on.” He actually began to have a good time there. He focused on his recovery with real enthusiasm. “I suddenly found it wonderful, strange, and beautiful, to be sober. . . . It was as if a veil, or scum, or film had been stripped from all things visual and auditory.” It’s an experience shared by many addicts when they finally stop doing things their way and actually open themselves to the perspectives and wisdom and lessons of those who have gone before them.

There are several aerial films of the incoming tsunami, but the one that plays and replays in my imagination was shot above the town of Natori, south of the city of Sendai. It begins over land rather than sea, with a view of dun winter paddy fields. Something is moving across the landscape as if it is alive, a brown-snouted animal hungrily bounding over the earth. Its head is a scum of splintered debris; entire cars bob along on its back. It seems to steam and smoke as it moves; its body looks less like water or mud than a kind of solid vapor. And then a large boat can be seen riding it inland, hundreds of yards from the sea, and—unbelievably—blue-tiled houses, still structurally intact, spinning across the inundated fields with orange flames dancing on their roofs. The creature turns a road into a river, then swallows it whole, and then it is raging over more fields and roads towards a village and a highway thick with cars. One driver is accelerating ahead of it, racing to escape—before the car and its occupants are gobbled up by the wave.

I had only been in Medomsley Detention Centre a few days when I confronted the ‘Daddy.’ It was well know that he, the Daddy, was the hardest in the place but now he had a challenger and everyone could sense it in the air that a confrontation or take over bid was on the cards. Any of you that have seen the film Scum, starring the young Ray Winstone, will be aware of what I’m on about. After a works detail in the gardens, I was one of the last back. There was big queue stood behind the Daddy while he was washing all the mud from his wellington boots with a hosepipe, and he looked to be taking his time about it as well; talk about taking the piss. The screws, as usual, were in sight and watching us out of the corner of their eyes. As I got closer, I thought I’m not standing in no fucking queue and walked straight to the front. When I got there, I snatched the hosepipe out of his hand and told him to fuck off and started to clean all the shit off my wellies. He felt humiliated and tried to grab the hose back off me, but I grabbed him by the throat and told him I was going to rip his fucking head off. As this was going down, the screws were straight on the scene and parted us. We never got done for it, which was very surprising. He did say to people that he wanted to fight me, but in reality, when I confronted him, he cocked off and there was a new kid on the block. I was the Daddy.