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. 

Who destroyed Richard Jennings’ (Michael Findlay) life? Was it his wife Claudia (Angelique Pettyjohn)? Or Steve (Ron Scardera), the lover she cheated on her husband with? Does it even matter to Richard any more? After all, he’s returned from the dead, like a demented 42nd Street grindhouse Jason Vorhees, How do you get over being stabbed in the heart? Well, maybe when your heart has been broken, you just go on.

After watching credits quite literally written on a bathroom wall and hear Roberta Findlay’s voice on the radio, recounting everything from the first movie, but never explaining how Richard came to own an art theater that presents live sex on stage and screens movies like Squash Crazy that is, to borrow a phrase from Pieces, exactly what you think it is.

He’s also become a degenerate Dr. Phibes, inventing all manner of weapons to kill his those on his perceived enemies list, like a dildo that kills and poisoned g strings. Richard also doesn’t need the eyepatch, in the same way that Dr. Doom really doesn’t need his mask, if we follow the ideas of Kirby over Lee . It appears and reappears at will, whether that’s a statement or just Findlay not caring about continuity when he has so much female flesh to show and a machete fight in a moving truck that ends with a castration to entertain you.

As if this is a proto-MCU movie, this even teases more over the end credits: “Will This End the Bloody Career of Richard Jennings? Has His Lust for the Blood of Naked Girls Been Satisfied?? Don’t Fail to See The Kiss of Her Flesh Coming Soon to This Theatre.”

As “The Right Kind” by The Jaybirds keeps playing on the soundtrack, this only gets more depraved. I know that fans of this movie like me romanticize the terrifying real life nature of what New York City was at this time, but who cares? It gave birth to this movie, in which a nude woman holds a cat over her sex and Richard hits her with this pillow talk: “Yes, this little pussy is really a primordial, carnivorous beast waiting to tear apart anything it can touch.”

You can get all three of these movies in one set from Vinegar Syndrome.