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. 

Richard Jennings (director Michael Findlay) is a weapons book author — yes, really — who catches his exotic dancer wife Claudia (Angelique Pettyjohn) in bed with another man (Ron Skideri). Unable to handle it, he runs into the street and gets hit by a car so hard that his eyeball pops out. This traumatic incident convinces him that all woman of loose morals must die by his hand.

And so begins The Flesh Trilogy.

After watching the credits projected on a nude female body and the incident that destroys Richard’s life, we watch as he alternately views near-pneumatic New York City women, from exotic dancers to street walkers, and then kills them with poisoned thorns, a dart gun or a crossbow. It’s rough and raw and later installments would become more technically proficient while nevertheless being even more sadistic and just plain scummy. I do not say these words in a bad way.

Meanwhile, Richard is barking out dialogue like “Once a man’s locked within the hot vice of love that is their thighs, he can never escape.” and grabbing his wife’s chest before trying to kill her, sputtering “Let me see them again and feel them again before they die!” Sure, he starts as a victim and he’s castrated in a way by being trapped in a wheelchair for much of the film, sadly wheeling down 42nd Street, chugging bourbon as he exclaims stuff like “I will slash open the very core of your perversion! Your blood will be testimony of your depravity!” And then he attempts to escape the very sexual vortex of the female being, which sounds very high falutin but keep in mind that as gorgeously grungry as so much of this black and white film looks, there are also people who definitely masturbated in theaters to this.

The credits claim that this was directed by Julian Marsh,which is the name of the character in 42nd Street who is directing the show. Suzanne Marre is final girl Janet, Vivian Del Rio and Sally Farb are two of the dancers and Peggy Steffans (AKA Cleo Nova) appears. That final girl thought is appropriate, as this is as much a slasher as it is a roughie. Actually, it’s such a slasher that Richard dies at the end of it and comes back for the sequel.

Speaking of those James Bond-ish projected credits, that’s Roberta Findlay lying there. And from what I heard, this is where Claudia Jennings got her stage name, transforming from Mary Eileen Chesterton from suburban Illinois into the type of “soft pink trap” that would terrify Richard.

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