A Thousand Pleasures (1968)

I think most people would agree that when it comes to sexploitation roughies Michael and Roberta Findlay’s films pushed the edge of the envelope as far as it would go. Nobody made movies more scuzzy and disreputable and depraved than the Findlays but their movies are fascinating and hypnotic. They were true low-budget auteurs and visionaries. A Thousand Pleasures, made in 1968, was one of their last collaborations.

Richard Davis (Michael Findlay) is growing tired of his shrewish wife making his life a misery. One day he decides he can’t take it any more and he grabs a carving knife and kills her.

Now he has to dispose of the body. It’s in the back of his station wagon. He stops to give two girl hitchhikers a lift. Probably not a great idea when you have a dead body in the car. One of the two girls seems very friendly. She unzips his fly and shows him just how friendly she can be. Davis doesn’t know it but his nightmare is about to begin. The car gets bogged but the girls tell him he can go to their house to make a phone call.

He realises it’s a rather strange household when he meets Baby. Baby is in her crib sucking her thumb and making baby noises. Nothing unusual about that, except that Baby is a gorgeous young woman in her early twenties. And she’s not wearing any clothes.

The two hitchhikers are Maggie and Jackie (played by sexploitation legends Uta Erickson and Linda Boyce). They’re lesbians, but they insist that they’re Real Lesbians. They take lesbianism very seriously indeed. They seem to have plans to breed a race of amazon warriors. They want Davis to impregnate them both so they can have daughters of their own to raise in the true lesbian faith. They don’t intend to allow Davis to have sex with them, they just intend to get hold of some of his sperm.

There are several other members of the household. There’s Belle, who seems to regard baby as her child. Belle is obviously quite mad, possibly because she’s not regarded as being serious enough about being a lesbian. There’s also a very buxom lass (whom Davis christens Booberella) who doesn’t seem to take her lesbianism seriously at all. And there’s the one male member of the household, Bruno (John Amero), who acts as a kind of manservant/bodyguard.

It doesn’t take long for Davis to decide he needs to get out of this crazy house, and Booberella seems inclined to help him. But Maggie and Jackie aren’t going to let him go until he has helped them to create their new race of super-lesbians.

Along the way there is a great deal of weirdness. Real full-blown Findlay weirdness. We learn a few things as well. Don’t assume that a woman is unarmed just because she’s naked. Boobs can be deadly weapons.

There’s an extraordinary amount of frontal nudity. Sexploitation movies in 1968 were a lot raunchier than they’d been a couple of years earlier. There’s also plenty of kinkiness, including the standard kinks (such as whipping) and kinks you’ve probably never even imagined. I won’t tell you any details - part of the fun of a Michael and Roberta Findlay movie is not knowing what weirdness they’ll throw at you next.

It’s completely pointless to worry about questions like misogyny in a movie like this. All the characters, male and female, are crazy and evil. And the Findlays are being deliberately outrageous and provocative. If the movie makes you uncomfortable, well that’s exactly what they were hoping to achieve.

So why do the scuzzy movies of the Findlays matter? They matter for the same reason that any unconventional movies (which can include everything from art-house movies to sexploitation to all sorts of weird and wonderful low-budget oddities) matter. They matter because they break the rules. They don’t give a damn about narrative cohesion or realism or conventional characterisation. Most movies (including almost all mainstream Hollywood movies) are stiflingly conventional. Mainstream movies are wedded to the tedious idea that movies should be realistic.

The really interesting movies are the ones that toss conventional ideas about realism out the window. Whether they’re art movies like Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour or bizarre eurocult movies like the movies of Jean Rollin or delirious low-budget schlock like Russ Meyer’s movies they’re movies that take place in a kind of alternate universe or dreamworld in which the rules are different. In Meyer’s movies the rules of everyday logic are replaced by cartoon logic. In Rollin’s films and Buñuel’s the rules of reality are displaced by the rules of surrealism.

And the films of the Findlays fall into this category. Nobody is expected for one moment to consider these films as having any connection to the real world. They take place in Findlay World, a crazy fever dream world that has its own internal consistency. Findlay movies like Take Me Naked, A Thousand Pleasures and the Flesh trilogy take place in what is recognisably the same alternate universe. It’s a universe of twisted thwarted frustrated sexual desire which inevitably leads to bizarre acts of violence. It might not be a pleasant world but it’s a world which exists in the darker corners of the human psyche. And the world of the mind, of the unconscious, is a lot more interesting than the everyday world and it tells us more about ourselves, even if it sometimes it tells us things we’d rather not know.

This movie was released by Image Entertainment as a Something Weird double-header DVD, paired with the early Findlay movie Take Me Naked (1966). The transfer is extremely good (like most roughies the film was shot in 1.37:1 and in black-and-white).

If you’re a fan of the Findlay’s Flesh trilogy you’ll love this one. It’s a movie for seasoned roughie fans but if you fall into that category then it’s very highly recommended.