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. 

There are tons of Bigfoot films to watch. Trust us, we know. We have an entire Letterboxd list packed with the ones we’ve made it through. And we know that Scarecrow has an even larger section in the store that’s all Yeti, skunkape and Sasquatch-based.

We decided to go back to the classics and rewatch this 1974 Michael Findlay film, in which Professor Ernst Prell takes four of his graduate students — Keith Henshaw, Karen Hunter, Tom Nash and Lynn Kelly — into the woods to discover if the Yeti really does exist.

Despite a mysterious dinner the night before — their dish of gin sung is broken up by a drunken former student and his wife who loudly proclaim that the last trip to see a Bigfoot got everyone killed — everyone decides that going into the brush to find the beast is a dandy idea.

As if that isn’t enough, that lout keeps drinking and decides to cut his wife’s throat with an electric turkey knife before she responds in kind by dumping a toaster into the bloody bathwater as he tries to clean himself up.

When the students get to Boot Island, they have more gin sung, meet a mute Native American named Laughing Crow and listen to Tom strum a little tune he wrote about the Yeti, who liked that song so much that he rips Tom apart, leaving only his leg as evidence.

The professor isn’t someone I’d like to have as a teacher, as he’s willing to use that leg and the body of another of the students, Lynn, as bait to catch his white whale. Or white Yeti, you get the allusion.

That said, the reveal of this all — spoiler warning for a 46-year-old movie — is that there’s no Bigfoot at all, but a big society of cannibals looking for either victims to be fresh meat or those willing to help them consume the flesh of their fellow man.

If you’re a big film geek like me — seeing as how you’re reading about a Sasquatch film from the last century when you could be doing something much more productive, I get the feeling that you are — you’ll wonder, did the print Sam saw have Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” in the soundtrack? Yes. It did. It sure did.

In 1982, if you were lucky enough to still have a drive-in around ou, chances are you could have seen this movie as part of an event named 5 Deranged Features. Don’t be fooled by some of these titles, as you may have seen them all before! They’re Coming to Get You is not All the Colors of the Dark, but instead Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein. House of Torture is The Wizard of Gore. Night of the Howling Beast is The Corpse Grinders. And Creature from Black Lake wasn’t so lucky as to get a name change.

Here’s a drink to enjoy while watching this.

Yeti

• 1 1/2 oz. gin
• 1/2 oz. blue Curaçao
• 3 oz. lemonade (you can make it yourself or just go off the shelf)
• Club soda
• Lemon wedges

1. Combine gin and the lemonade in a glass with ice.
2. Add blue Curaçao and top with club soda. Stir using a mixing spoon and garnish with lemon wedges.

Watch it on Tubi.

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. 

You know, I find myself loving the films of Roberta Findlay more and more. They never have a great budget. They rarely have anything even approaching bad acting. And yet every time, I stick with them because she knows how to make a cheap exploitation movie. Isn’t that what it should all be about?

This movie has a Pieces style opening, as a young boy is called a pervert because he doesn’t have a dad. What he does have is a prostitute for a mother who lives in a big mansion with plenty of other ladies of ill repute. Moments after we process that, our friend the little boy walks in on his mom making money-assisted love to one of her johns before they both get shotgun blasted and we fast-forward ten years and change.

I’m in. You did it again, Roberta.

Now, that very same house is supposedly haunted and the girls of an Edmonson College sorority must enter it as part of a scavenger hunt. This is when, you guessed it, people start dying.

Before that, it takes a long time to get there, but Findlay pulls off that rare trick of making us learn and believe in these characters instead of rushing them into the gaping maw of death, you know? Pretty neat for a movie she made just to pay her taxes.

Amy Brentano, who plays one of the girls named Linda, also shows up in Findlay’s even better Prime Evil. Shannon McMahon, who is Alice, is also in Screwballs and Pledge Night. McMahon would go on to direct her own film, 2016’s Waking the Wild Colonial, which had Brentano in the cast.

Speaking of filmmakers, Larry is played by John Fasano, the man that made two of the most metal movies ever, Black Roses and Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare.

Of all the lessons that Findlay can teach us of how to make a great small time horror film. perhaps the best is that she certainly knows how to hire the right poster artist.

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. 

Roberta Findlay knows how to make movies that entertain me and here, she takes a possession movie, sets it during the holidays and fills it with berserk set pieces and man, this movie got me through the day before all the family Christmas craziness begins and you know, Roberta has never let me down with a single thing she’s made.

Parker Brothers wouldn’t let this movie use Ouija, so there’s a stone hand that writes from the spirit world but who cares? This is so many times better than the Ouija films that got made by Hasbro years later and that’s because this is so strange. Jennifer (Caroline Capers Powers, in the only movie she ever made) and her husband Ray (Roger Neil) have moved into the apartment of a dead psychic who has left behind that fortune telling object which allows Jennifer to be taken over by industrialist William Graham who gets her to figure out who killed him.

You can’t destroy that hand. A garbage man tries and strange creatures appear all over his body and he ends up stabbing himself in a scene that kind of destroyed my mind and when Ray tries later, he literally loses his head. All this happens while Findlay shoots in the New York City apartments that could be next door to The Sentinel or Inferno and certainly have the Argento lightning style intact from that movie. Plus there’s a gender switching killer played by Pam LaTesta on the loose like a John Waters character in a Bill Lustig movie and there’s even a scene set in the legendary occult store The Magickal Childe.

I realize that Roberta hates her own movies but I won’t hold that against her. I always find something to enjoy, like how the heroine has the wildest clothes, all berets and puffed-out sleeves and even a pair of red overalls. She dresses like a lunatic and it’s frankly charming, plus she screams nearly as much as a woman in a Juan López Moctezuma movie.

There are people who will say that this movie is trash and boring and those are people you want nothing at all to do with. Yes, this is trash, but it’s glorious. It’s the kind of movie I leave on when people come over and hope they ask me what it’s all about so I can talk about it with them. Just writing about it now I want to go back and watch it again. Will you sit down and check it out with me?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Here’s a drink recipe!

Princess of Moscow (from the book Tarot of Cocktails)

• 3 oz. ginger beer
• 1.5 oz. vodka
• .25 oz. lime juice
• 1 scoop lime sherbert

1. Pour ginger beer, vodka and lime juice in a glass and stir.
2. Add the sherbert and enjoy your fortune.

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. 

I’m still trying to figure out what to call the genre where a woman goes back to her childhood home or has a memory from her past or who inherits some family plot or goes away on a vacation to find herself and always, always, always runs directly into the supernatural.

This is one more to add the the list.

When Cathy (Christine Moore, Prime Evil) was young, her mother murdered her father right in front of her. Now, her life is dominated by the nightmares of that memory, which leads her back to her childhood home.

Cathy has no idea, but her boyfriend Bob got into her life just to lure her back to the apartment building that she grew up in so that he and his friends can shove her off the building to die. That’s because Vathy’s old home really is Hell and everyone born there must be destroyed and come back as a spiritual being referred to as a lurker. And once Bob has a new woman, can Cathy save her?

Man, Roberta Findlay movies have really been a theme this week, but that’s just because every one I’ve seen has totally entertained me. This one seems to pull from her bad childhood, which she also referenced in Tenement. This is a dark film in the most entertaining of ways.

You can get this on a double blu ray set from Vinegar Syndrome. You also get Prime Evil, which is so close to this that you can consider them spiritual sequels to one another.

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. 

One of the few movies to be rated X for just plain violence, Tenement reminds me of exactly why I love Roberta Findlay. I’m not expecting high art. I’m expecting sheer spectacle and entertainment, which this movie overdelivers.

Also known as Game of Survival and Slaughter in the South Bronx, this movie is another that didn’t need a budget, just a Bronx high rise and a cast willing to do whatever it takes to make the movie, which involves rampant, bloody and over the top destruction of human beings.

A gang starts making their way from floor to floor of the building, acting like they’re the bad guys in a John Carpenter-style defend our home turf film. Imagine of the sad sacks in Death Wish 3 didn’t have Paul Kersey on their side to shoot people for stealing his camera.

Writers Joel Bender (Gas Pump Girls) and Rick Marx (Wanda Whips Wall Street, Warrior Queen, Gor, Doom Asylum) bring the sleaze, Findlay brings the sleaze, the actors bring the sleaze, man, everyone is on their highest volume and it just works.

The poster for this is by John Fasano, who was all over the place when it came to talent. In addition to art directing the magazines Muscle and Beauty, Race Car & Driver, Wrestling Power and OUI, he rewrote and appeared in Findlay’s Nightmare Sisters, directed Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare and Black Roses, and wrote  and script doctored movies like Another 48 Hrs., Tombstone, Color of Night and the Brian Trenchard-Smith directed Megiddo: The Omega Code 2.

Findlay has referred to this movie as a revisualization of her childhood, which is beyond wild. Man, Findlay is something else, doing everything from working in adult as a cinematographer under the name Robert Norman (she worked on CJ Laing’s ‘Sweet Punkin’ I Love You…. which she also wrote), photographed Shriek of the Mutilated and Invasion of the Blood Farmers (using the name Frederick Douglass), acted in several films as Anna Riva, provided Claudia Jennings’ voice in The Touch of Her Flesh and even composed music as Harold Hindgrind and the Cosmic Seven and Robin Aden. She rivals Aristide Massaccesi for alternate names!

You can watch this on Tubi.