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. 

For two movies, Richard Jennings (director and co-writer Michael Findlay, who did the story with his wife Roberta) has attacked women to get back at his now dead wife. Now, however, he is the one being hunted by Steve’s — the dead boyfriend of his dead wife — sister Maria (Uta Erickson, Electric Lover) and her boyfriend Don (Earl Hindman, appearing as Leo Heinz).

All the while, Richard is killing off women like Cleo (Donna Stone), who he beats with a tire iron on a snow-covered beach before torturing her with crab claws before electrocuting her through her earrings, followed by picking up a hitchhiker (Rita Vance) who he burns with a blowtorch and then wraps in blankets and sets on fire. Can that be topped? Well, he also douches another woman with acid and his sperm has become so filthy that it poisons an unlucky woman who swallows his fecund seed.

Maria, Don and her sister and lover Doris (Alice Grant who is also Suzzan Landau, Keyholes Are for Peeping) all conspire to get Richard into their trap, which involves her tying his member to a string connected to the trigger of a gun that will shoot him in his sex if he gets erect while watching her have sex with her boyfriend.

Yes, all of this happens and more. There’s a beach battle where Richard screams “I’ll slice you in two like a piece of cheese!” and Maria inserting beads into Don’s back door, which is even more astounding when you realize that he’s Wilson from Home Improvement. No wonder he never showed his face to that narc, Tim Allen! And I totally forgot that the sisters canoodle while Doris’ girlfriend Moana (Janet Banzet AKA Marie Brent and Pat Barrett; The Amazing Transplant) is recovering from the flu. The morals of this movie, I tell you, of which there are none.

There’s a theory that Findlay was abused by priests while he was a child and a lot of his movies are him working out his issues. “I do a service to all mankind with every Jezebel I kill,” he snarls at one point. Richard has gone from kind of, sort of the hero of the first film in this tragedy, a slasher villain in the second and now a complete lunatic with an eyepatch he may not even need, another crime of playing a doctor to women who don’t need his fingers all over and inside them, and a German accident that goes away as often as the patch he keeps taking off.

This was lost for years until Something Weird found it. I can’t even imagine what raincoaters in 1968 thought when attacked by this movie. For every moment of gorgeous women cavorting, you have Richard yelling, “My poisoned semen should take care of you well enough. So long, sucker!” A roughie made by lunatics, for lunatics and yet one that looks way better than it should.

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