Findlay Week (August 18 – 24) Husband and wife Michael and Roberta Findlay made mean-spirited films. They collaborated on films like Take Me Naked, The Ultimate Degenerate, and the notorious Flesh Trilogy, plus they actually looked like criminals – walking mug shots! You expect to see them glowering on the cover of one of those tabloids next to a headline like “KIDNAPPER COUPLE COLLECTED VICTIMS FINGERS.” Instead they were pornographers which did make them like criminals in their day. A lot of the filmmakers of their era would claim they only made this kind of movie because there was money in it, but Michael and Roberta were sincere adherents. Even when audience tastes changed and the couple were divorced they continued to make their own films that mixed in elements of kink and cruelty. 

Man, Roberta Findlay made some incredibly scummy movies. This is just another example of her talents, a movie in which Janie (Mary Jane Carpenter, Sex Family Robinson, How to Succeed with Sex, Double Initiation) tells her daddy — who yes, she’s sleeping with — about all the people that she’s killed. After each murder, she makes love to herself as shes covered with blood.

This movie is fuzzy and scuzzy and the audio is all over the place and the music is way too loud and everything looks like a mess and yet, it’s exactly right. Roberta directed most of this, although some credit Jack Bravman (Zombie Nightmare, Night of the Dribbler and the producer of the Findlay’s Snuff).

Everyone has on outfits that Robert Crumb would be crazy for and Roberta does the borderline maniac narration for the nudie cutie gone slasher footage that we watch, where sound rarely matches up with voices. This is a dirty movie with no sex, a film that promises titilation and only delivers strangeness.

I would compare this movie to something else, but there really isn’t anything else like it. Man, Roberta Findlay inspires me more and more with each of her films I see, because she was out there in the 60’s and 70’s making mindbending pieces of trashy art even if she had to use a man’s name to make it happen.

The other night, I had a tooth infection and the only way I could sleep was to lie my face on a heating pad until it felt like it was scalding my flesh and I fell asleep finally, fitfully, and when I awoke I was totally covered in sweat and afraid from the dreams that I had. That’s exactly what watching this movie is like, so beware.