In Hot Blood (1968)

In Hot Blood is a wild and crazy 1968 New York-shot sexploitation roughie. 

Nobody seems to be entirely sure of the identity of the director.

It takes a stock-standard exploitation plot line as its basis. It’s a warning of the dangers lying in wait for innocent girls trying to pursue a career in modelling. Such a career inevitably leads to sex, sin and degradation. Innocent young girls should stay on the farm rather than head to the big city in search of fame and fortune.

In this case the innocent girl is named Rita. She quickly finds out that she’ll not only have to take her clothes off, she’ll have to sleep with the photographer. And she’ll have to attend orgies.

Orgy scenes very rarely work since even in the softcore era of the 70s there was a definite limit to what you could show. The orgy scene in this film is quite bizarre. Our heroine spends most of her time eating a banana in what is supposed to be a very suggestive way but the actress just doesn’t seem quite sure how to achieve the intended effect.

The girls try their hands at body painting, a very 60s thing to do. Apparently you get better results if you suck the paintbrush first. Judging by what Rita does to her paintbrush she’s almost certain to create a masterpiece.

It has to be said that Rita doesn’t put up much resistance to temptation. It’s almost as if she enjoys sex and partying and orgies. She makes a couple of friends, Roberta and a black girl named Sandy. These three seem to be a welcome addition to any orgy.

Rita hasn’t realised that Roberta likes girls. She will find out. She doesn’t exactly seem concerned by this revelation. Rita doesn’t seem to be shocked by anything.

There’s also drug-taking at these orgies and that’s what leads to trouble. It leads to some bad craziness.

When danger threatens you’d think Rita and Roberta would take steps to avoid it but instead they take time out for some sapphic love-play. If you’ve ever wondered what lesbians actually do in bed this movie provides the answer. They rub each other’s nipples with ice cubes. It’s one of this movie’s more memorable WTF moments but it’s not the only one.

And then there’s the ending. I definitely didn’t see that coming. I won’t spoil things by even hinting at what happens except to say that it’s pretty wild.

This was 1968, when frontal nudity was still a bit of a rarity in sexploitation movies. That would start to change radically within a year or so. There’s no frontal nudity here but there is a great deal of kinkiness, much of it with an S&M flavour. The kinkiness comes across as bizarre rather than erotic.

The unknown director might not know how to make a coherent movie (or even a technically proficient movie) but he does have a reasonable awareness of how to achieve an atmosphere of decadence. And the movie does have a certain offbeat eroticism. The girls take their clothes off, then they get dressed, then ten seconds later they’re getting undressed again. Because seeing girls undressing is in fact pretty erotic.

There might not be frontal nudity but there’s an abundance of boobs and bare bottoms. The nice thing about this and other 60s sexploitation movies is that what the girls are displaying is what Mother Nature gave them, with (thankfully) no assistance from silicone.

There’s no discernible plot but things keep happening. Those things make no sense but they give the movie a certain crazed energy. Whatever its flaws this movie is not boring.

This movie, like almost all roughies, was shot in black-and-white.

In Hot Blood offers wall-to-wall T&A and some inspired lunacy, and of course it has that wonderful 60s sleaze vibe. It’s pretty entertaining. Highly recommended.

Something Weird released this on a triple-header DVD with The Lusting Hours and Michael Findlay’s The Ultimate Degenerate. The transfer is very good. Happily this DVD is still obtainable (some of those Something Weird discs are now very difficult to find).

Sin Magazine (1965)

Sin Magazine is a rather strange 1965 American sexploitation feature.

It opens with a nightmare sequence. The guy having the nightmare is Ross. He wakes up in bed with his mistress. She’s not very happy. He’s not performing in the bedroom.

We discover that Ross has a double life. He has a wife and a farm in New England and a reasonably respectable existence there, but he also has a mistress and a less respectable existence in Manhattan.

Ross is a writer. Naturally he thought he was going to be a critically acclaimed author, winning literary prizes and being lionised by the literati. Instead he writes for a scandal magazine. He runs the magazine with his two brothers.

The two brothers also live on the New England farm. One of the brothers, Otis, does the photography. The brothers have found commercial success by transforming the magazine into a bit of a girlie magazine.

The domestic arrangements involving Ross, his wife, his brother Bill, Bill’s wife and Otis are tense. Otis is a womaniser of the love ’em and leave ’em variety. Ross does not approve. Otis also has more than a passing interest in Lisa, Bill’s wife.

Ross has a bit of an interest in Lisa as well.

So we have the makings here of a romantic-sexual melodrama and it’s done in an overheated (hysterical might be a better word) style.

The movie also tries to be a portrait of a man (Ross) slowly disintegrating. We get the feeling that Ross has probably never been particularly stable. Now he’s tortured by shame, guilt and resentment because he’s churning out sleaze instead of writing the Great American Novel.

Ross becomes progressively more angry and bitter. He takes out a lot of his resentment on Otis. It’s not just that Otis is a womaniser. Otis is the one who takes the nudie photos. That’s how the magazine makes its money and that’s the money on which Ross lives but he cannot accept that.

He gets even more upset when Lisa starts posing for Otis. Lisa is a bit conflicted. She’s happy to pose for Otis because if she acts as the magazine’s main model it will save money. She does however worry abut the morality of it all. She worries that they’re corrupting their models. After all once a girl has posed topless for a magazine her future can only be a descent into utter degradation. No man is going to marry a girl who has bared her breasts for a magazine.

We know that major trouble is brewing but the over-the-top ending still comes out of left field.

Mostly the acting is what you expect in an ultra low budget movie but the performance of the actor playing Ross is something else again. It starts off totally unhinged and gets progressively more so. It’s not good acting but it sure is memorable.

This seems to be writer-director Al Mitchel’s only credit. He certainly had a different approach to sexploitation.

There’s very little nudity. In fact the lack of nudity makes one wonder exactly what market was being targeted.

Sin Magazine is included in a Something Weird triple-header DVD release which also includes The Sin Syndicate (1965) and the oddly depraved She Came on the Bus (1969). They all fit vaguely into the roughie sub-genre. Sin Magazine gets a fullframe transfer which is quite correct. Image quality isn’t exactly great but it’s acceptable and this is a movie that works better for looking a bit rough.

Sin Magazine is an oddity. In fact all three movies in this set are slightly odd and they’re all pretty scuzzy in their own different ways. All I can say about Sin Magazine is that it isn’t particularly good but it is different and if you like your movies a bit deranged you might well enjoy it.

Heat of Madness (1966)

Heat of Madness is an odd little 1966 New York sexploitation roughie that may not deliver the sexploitation goods but it is a fascinating exercise in slow-burning creepiness and madness.

John Wilright (Kevin Scott) is a photographer. He does mild nudie stuff for calendars and is obviously just getting by. Then Susan (Jennifer Llaird) turns up at the door of his seedy studio. She’s returning some sketches he left at the office where she works. Susan thinks the sketches are really good. She thinks John has real talent.

Susan is the sort of girl who falls for struggling artists, especially  struggling artists who are suffering for their art. She falls for John straight away and she falls hard.

There are so many obvious red flags with this guy that any sensible girl would run a mile. He flies off the handle for no reason. Every time they start getting amorous he gets weird and freezes up and pushes her away. It would be obvious to anyone that John has some serious issues with women but it isn’t obvious to Susan. She thinks it’s part of his artistic temperament. She thinks he’s an undiscovered genius and if he has a few problems that’s OK, her love will overcome those problems.

What John doesn’t know is that Susan is the heiress to a steel fortune. A firm of lawyers is looking after her interests. Bill (Alan Wylie) is one of the partners and his job is to protect her financial interests and to keep an eye on her personal interests as well. Bill thinks that John is obviously trouble and tries to warn Susan but she’s hopelessly in love and she won’t listen.

Things start to get weirder when John gets a new photographic assignment, doing a series of photoshoots for a book about notorious sex murders. He has a group of actors who will play out scenes of violence for his camera.

John is really excited by this assignment. A bit too excited. Even Susan is a bit disturbed, especially when John starts acting out scenes with her. At this point it should be blindingly obvious that he’s a nutter but it all just makes her more determined to save him.

Susan arranges for John to get a really good job where he could put his talents (and he apparently does have genuine talent) to use. It could launch him on a successful respectable art career but John isn’t interested. He’s more and more obsessed wth his great sex murders photoshoots.

There’s obviously a good chance that these photoshoots are going to push John over the edge into out-and-out madness but Susan is convinced that once he finishes this assignment he’ll calm down. No matter how crazy he gets she is determined to stand by her man.

There’s some mild nudity but it really is mild by roughie standards. Some of the nudity is courtesy of June Roberts who will need no introduction to serious fans of the sexploitation genre. There’s also not very much actual violence. Again it’s very tame by roughie standards.

What this movies does have to offer is some serious and effective suspense. We know that John is eventually going to snap and we fear that Susan is potentially in very serious danger. She just goes on refusing to see the warning signs and she keeps seeing John even as it becomes increasingly clear to the viewer that the danger to her is becoming more extreme.

It also offers a genuinely intriguing look at madness and art and the blurring of the line between the two. John’s photoshoots cease to be mere photoshoots. To John they start becoming real. He starts to think he’s shooting real scenes of violence rather than scenes played out by actors.

Kevin Scott’s performance is quite effective. He’s amazingly intense. Jennifer Llaird’s performance is surprisingly also quite competent.

This movie is included on a Something Weird double-header DVD release paired with The Psycho Lover which is a wonderfully strange 1970 roughie with a bit of a giallo flavour. Heat of Madness gets a very good transfer. It’s a great disc, assuming you can find a copy.

Heat of Madness is a disturbing little movie in its unassuming way and it’s recommended.

Tortured Females (1965)

Tortured Females is a very obscure 1965 American sexploitation movie. It’s more or less a roughie, in concept at least.

The great thing about these 60s sexploitation movies is that all you needed was a fair helping of nudity and you’d get distribution. As to what kind of movie you made and how you made it, that was totally up to you. If you could raise a few thousand bucks, or even a few hundred bucks, you could just go ahead and make a movie. It could be in any genre from crime to science fiction to horror. It could be dark and grim, or lighthearted and goofy. And you didn’t have to worry that some suit from the studio front office would show up and tell you how to make your movie. We’re talking total artistic freedom, total artistic control.

Jean-Luc Godard once said that to make a movie all you need is a girl and a gun. To make a 60s sexploitation movie all you needed was a camera and a girl willing to take her clothes off. Sometimes the results were terrible but it’s amazing how many of these movies are pleasingly oddball and incredibly entertaining. Usually much more entertaining and interesting than the average serious art-house movie, and much more entertaining and interesting than the average indie movie of today.

Tortured Females opens with a square-up message assuring us that this is a serious and vitally important warning to innocent young maidens about the ever-present danger of white slavery. Which is certainly guaranteed to whet our appetites.

It takes a long time for the plot to kick in, although the square-up and the prologue have given us a fair idea of what’s coming. The first quarter of the movie is straight nudie-cutie stuff. Two girls get up in the morning and prepare to go out. This provides the opportunity for lots and lots of nudity.

Then Helen (Denine Dubois) heads off to visit a relative in the country (in her awesomely cool T-Bird). The car breaks down and she sets off on foot and she’s in the middle of nowhere and she is hopelessly lost. So what does she do? She takes all her clothes off. So we get lots more nudity.

I should add at this stage that Denine Dubois is very pretty and has a stunning body so being forced to see her naked so often isn’t exactly an ordeal.

Helen thinks her luck has changed when a guy named Chick offers her a lift in his truck. He’ll take her to the ranch house. But first he rapes her.

When she gets to the ranch house she realises she’s been kidnapped by white slavers. She gets beaten up by Carl (he’s the boss) and then thrown into a room where two naked women are chained. And then the monkey man arrives. Yes, the monkey man.

And Helen meets Marga. She’s the obligatory predatory lesbian but she’s seriously weird, with the craziest crazy person eyes you ever saw.

And then, for no reason whatsoever (apart from the fact that the script was almost non-existent and they had to find something to film) some of the girls put on a strip-tease show for Carl. And it’s a strip-tease show that is subtly but disturbingly odd.

The plot (what little there is of it) is a standard roughie plot. What’s fascinating is the execution. Every scene manages to be odder than you expect. Every scene is wrong somehow, but wrong in an interesting way.

At times the movie almost has a David Lynchian feel. It’s like we’ve entered a bizarre alternative universe where dream and reality are all mixed up together. What makes it fascinating is that there’s absolutely no suggestion that this is a dream. There’s no suggestion whatsoever that Helen is imagining all this. It’s just the way the scenes are staged that makes it feel like a drug dream or a mad person’s hallucinatory nightmare.

60s sexploitation movies often look like they were shot in somebody’s spare room, usually because they were shot in somebody’s spare room. That’s the case here but the room (or rooms) is just so stark and bare that it looks incredibly artificial. It’s like a stage set for a puppet show.

I doubt if the director (Arch Hudson) had any such intention but this movie ends up being quite surreal. And even if it’s unintentional surrealism it’s oddly effective subtly unsettling surrealism.

Denine Dubois’ acting is rather odd and disconnected. At times when she should be terrified she seems more like a little girl having an adventure. This is yet another aspect to the movie that gives it that slight surrealist feel.

The movie was shot without synchronised sound. We get a continuous voiceover narration from Helen.

Tortured Females was released on a Something Weird triple-header DVD, along with the slightly disappointing but quite interesting Mr Mari's Girls (1967) and Two Girls for a Madman. Tortured Females gets a quite reasonable transfer. It’s a miracle that some of these sexploitation movies survived at all so it would be churlish to complain that the transfer isn’t dazzling and pristine.

I wouldn’t say that Tortured Females is so bad it’s good. I’d say that it’s so subtly off-kilter that it’s good. If you like oddball movies with lots of nude girls it’s highly recommended.

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.

Aroused (1966)

Aroused is a 1966 New York-shot American sexploitation movie belonging to the roughie sub-genre. It was directed by Anton Holden who also co-wrote the screenplay. It’s unusual because it has a somewhat professional feel to it.

The movie opens with the murder of a prostitute named Pat Wilson, and we soon discover that it’s the latest in a series of such murders. We don’t know at first who the murderer is and the cops don’t have much in the way of leads. We do pretty quickly figure out the killer’s identity and that’s where the suspense kicks in.

Johnny (Steve Hollister) is a young Homicide detective and he’s apparently a bit of a hot-head. He’s also not yet hardened to the sight of pretty young women who have been brutally murdered. He’s very keen to catch this killer.

Ginny Smith (Janine Lenon) is a hooker and she and Pat were good friends. She’s hit very hard by Pat’s death and she’d really like to get her hands on the murderer before the police do. If she does she intends to slice him up with a knife and she’s the kind of girl who might well try to do just that.

In typical cop movie style we have an older hardbitten detective who goes by the book because that’s what works, and a rookie who will need to learn that lesson.

Johnny thinks that he and Ginny have come up with a great lan. They’ll use one of Ginny’s hooker friends as bait for the killer. It wouldn’t be a bad plan if Johnny bothered to tell his colleagues on the force so they could arrange proper backup and surveillance to protect the girl. But Johnny is a loose cannon cop who thinks he knows it all and thinks he can crack the case single-handed.

Aroused has an interesting feel. It’s like a reasonably good 1950s police procedural crime B-picture with some film noir tinges but with added sleaze and added nudity. It has an authentically gritty seedy mean streets atmosphere and plenty of hardboiled dialogue. It feels like a low budget movie, but not a zero-budget one. And it gives the impression of being made by people who were trying to make a real movie and taking it fairly seriously.

It doesn’t have any of the weirdness or outrageousness or off-the-wall quality you expect in a sexploitation feature. It’s like a cheap mainstream suspense crime thriller. And it works quite well as a suspense thriller. There are even a couple of not-too-bad action set-pieces (the elevator scene is very well done).

And it’s certainly sleazy and grimy. The killer rapes his victims after he kills them. At a time when Johnny should be concentrating on the case he’s getting a blow job from a hooker. Then he tells the hooker that he loves his wife. He’s not likely to be nominated for Cop of the Year, or Husband of the Year.

Aroused was shot in black-and-white and it looks pretty terrific. It has a classic film noir look. It has some nice night shots of the streets of New York City.

One of the attractions of 1960s American sexploitation is the fact that the women are pretty but they look like real women. There’s nothing surgically enhanced about them. There is a lot less nudity than you would expect.

The acting is quite decent. Many of the cast members give the impression of probably having had at least some actual acting training.

Director Anton Holden made a handful of sexploitation movies in the 60s but he went on to have a reasonably solid mainstream career as a sound editor.

And then there’s the ending, when it suddenly becomes a true sexploitation roughie. The ending is foreshadowed but still comes as a bit of a shock.

This is part of a Something Weird triple-header, along with the excellent Rent-a-Girl and the deliriously wonderful Help Wanted: Female. Which makes this a very strong Something Weird release, in fact pretty much a must-buy.

Aroused is a fascinating hybrid and as such it’s definitely worth seeing. Highly recommended.

The Kiss of Her Flesh (1968)

The Kiss of Her Flesh is an infamous 1968 roughie.

The roughie was a peculiar feature of the American sexploitation cinema of the mid-60s. It emerged because although you could get away with nudity you could not get away with very much at all in terms of actual sexual content. There was however virtually no limit to what you could get away with in terms of violence. The obvious way to spice up nudie movies was to add lots of violence. Some roughies were more extreme than others. Some were much more extreme. And then there were the roughies of husband-and-wife film-making team Michael and Roberta Findlay.

It wasn’t so much the violence that made their work distinctive (although there was plenty of violence). Their films were just positively bizarre and twisted. Their most celebrated achievement was the notorious Flesh trilogy, beginning with The Touch of Her Flesh (1967), continuing with The Curse of Her Flesh (1968) and culminating with The Kiss of Her Flesh (also 1968). I’ve already reviewed the first two movies in the trilogy. It is The Kiss of Her Flesh with which we are now concerned.

Michael Findlay directed and edited, Roberta did the cinematography and the music and they share the writing and producing credits.

Richard Jennings, the psycho killer of the first two films, is back and he’s still intending to take revenge on all women, because his wife betrayed him. But for Jennings it’s not enough to kill. He has to kill in bizarre and imaginative ways. His first murder in this film is by electrocution but he has other much weirder methods up his sleeve.

Maria (Uta Erickson) hears the news that her sister’s best friend has been murdered and she just knows that Richard Jennings was responsible. She hurries to her sister’s house so they can make plans to kill Jennings. But before doing that they take time off to have sex. Then Maria returns to her hotel.

Meanwhile Jennings strikes. Posing as a doctor he commits two murders, one employing a method that is certainly original - poisoned semen. The other woman is disposed of by means of an acidified douche.

And oh yeah, he also commits murder by blowtorch. There’s also torture by lobster.

Maria is now determined to stop Jennings by any means necessary.

The content sounds disturbing and misogynistic but oddly enough it isn’t really offensive. Partly that’s because it’s so cartoonish. It’s also a bit like Russ Meyer’s movies in which men think they have the upper hand but actually they don’t. All their violence really does is to establish their powerlessness. No matter what Jennings does he’s still a loser.

Like Meyer the Findlays seem to be enjoying themselves, constantly trying to top their own outrageousness. There’s some deliciously campy dialogue (and it’s obviously deliberately campy) which constantly undercuts the violence. We’re not expected to be horrified, we’re expected to be amused and amazed. Which we are.

As in the previous two films Michael Findlay plays Richard Jennings, with trade-mark eye patch and maniacal laughter.

The Findlays were also quite technically competent, much more so than many sexploitation film-makers. They are genuinely trying to make things visually interesting. They don’t just shoot a sex scene, they use things like mirrors and key holes. These were the days when the better film-makers in the genre were still actually trying to make movies.

As with the other movies in the Flesh trilogy the opening credits are clever, with the credits on lip-shaped pieces of paper placed strategically on a woman’s naked body.

There’s a lot of nudity and it’s far more explicit than in the previous films but the overall effect is high camp rather than titillation.

And there are in-jokes that only cult movie fans would pick up on, such as Jennings masquerading as Dr Esumab (which is of course Mabuse spelt backwards).

Something Weird’s DVD release includes all three movies in the trilogy, with the transfers ranging from pretty good to excellent. You can check out my reviews of The Touch of Her Flesh and The Curse of Her Flesh.

I’d describe the movies in the Flesh trilogy as bizarre black comedies rather than proto-slasher movies. The Findlay roughies, like Russ Meyer’s movies, exist in a weird cartoon universe of their own. That was the great thing about the sexploitation genre. There were no studio execs telling film-makers they couldn’t do things because they were too weird or too silly. If you had a vision you could put it on film. And the Findlays had a vision. You might like it or not like it but it was strangely compelling. If you take it seriously you’ll probably hate. If you just go with the sleazy outrageousness you might well enjoy it. Recommended.

Russ Meyer’s Lorna (1964) revisited

Russ Meyer’s career falls into a number of well-defined phases, with each apparent change of approach actually bringing him ever closer to his mature style. Meyer had invented the nudie-cutie with The Immoral Mr Teas in 1959 but he soon grew bored, and he also felt that audiences would grow bored. So he abandoned colour for black-and-white and plunged into his redneck gothic/southern gothic phase with Lorna in 1964. Lorna has affinities with the roughies that were becoming increasingly dominant in American sexploitation movies but it would be a mistake to class it as a straightforward roughie. Like all of Meyer’s films, it belongs to a particular and distinctive sub-genre of Meyer’s own invention.

Lorna (played by the gorgeous and awesomely well-endowed Lorna Maitland) is married to Jim. Jim is a real nice guy and Lorna was madly in love with him when they got married but he’s just not very exciting in the bedroom. Not exciting enough to give Lorna the sexual pleasure she craves. Poor Jim doesn’t know anything about what turns women on and he doesn’t even know there’s a problem. He innocently assumes that since he enjoys the sex Lorna must enjoy it as well.

Meyer’s films certainly linked sex and violence and most included at lest one rape scene. That might lead one to think that Meyer was some kind of misogynist, but that’s a conclusion that could only be reached by someone who hasn’t actually watched (or at least understood) his movies. Meyer was always interested in and sympathetic to the female point of view. If only Jim had understood a bit more about women, if only he had understood that Lorna’s perfectly natural needs were not being satisfied, if only just once he had asked her what was wrong, all the subsequent disasters could have been avoided.

Because there are going to be subsequent disasters. 

Jim works at the salt mine with Luther and Jonah. Luther is foul-mouthed and dirty-minded and obsessed with sex. He likes to give the impression that he can get as many women as he wants but it’s perfectly obvious that that is true only in his daydreams. At the opening of the film, he tries it on with a girl named Ruthie. Ruthie is very drunk, but she’s not drunk enough to want to sleep with Luther. Luther reacts with rage and beats her up. This is the first appearance in film of a standard Meyer trope - sexually inadequate men who turn to violence against women. Taken on the whole the men in Meyer’s movies are not a very admirable bunch.

Luther is obsessed with Lorna. In his daydreams Lorna would prefer to be with him than be with Jim. In reality Lorna is hardly even aware of Luther’s existence. 

Then an escaped convict enters the picture. He rapes Lorna and she finally experiences the sexual bliss she craves. Lorna thinks she’s found happiness at last. When she takes him home with her it’s reasonable to assume that events are moving towards a climax that is likely to be unpleasant for all concerned.

This movie marked a major departure for Meyer. His nudie-cuties were essentially plotless collections of humour and/or sexy vignettes. Lorna has a very definite plot. It’s a simple plot, but it’s the execution that is interesting. Lorna is structured like a morality play but the fire-and-brimstone preacher who delivers stinging denunciations of immorality at various points is a sure sign that we’re not supposed to take the morality play aspect at face value. The film is more an attack on moralism than on immorality, although in true exploitation movie style it tries to have it both ways. The preacher introduces another Meyer touch - a character playing the rôle of the Greek chorus, commenting on the events of the film.

While Meyer was a quintessentially American film-maker Lorna owes quite a lot to the European art films of the period (especially Italian neorealism). But this is a European art film made in an entirely American way with an entirely American flavour.

Meyer had not yet evolved his full-blown signature style with the machine-gun editing but Lorna is still very much a Meyer film. It’s superbly shot. Meyer was a bit of a technical perfectionist. The idea that in a low-budget movie it doesn’t matter if the occasional shot is out of focus would have appalled Russ Meyer. He liked his movies to look great, and they invariably do look great. He worked quickly but his compositions are well thought out. I don’t think Meyer would have been capable of filming a poorly composed shot.

For the title rôle Meyer cast an actress named Maria Andre but he was not happy with the choice and at the last minute his wife Eve suggested a girl named Barbara Popejoy. Meyer renamed her Lorna Maitland and she’s one of the main reasons for the movie’s success. Apart from her extraordinary breasts (this is a Russ Meyer film so the subject of breasts cannot be avoided) she is perfect in every way, portraying Lorna as a mix of naïvete and seething sexual desire. 

For reasons connected wth the disposition of his estate Meyer’s films have not yet received the treatment they deserve on home video. Much lesser films have had special editions with audio commentaries and various extras and even Blu-Ray releases. For Meyer’s films we still have to rely on fairly basic DVD releases. The Region 2 release pairs Lorna with the equally interesting follow-up movie, Mudhoney, the second of Meyer’s redneck gothic films. Lorna gets a pretty good transfer.

Lorna is a nasty squalid little movie and it revels in its nastiness and squalor. It’s also stylish and absurdly entertaining. It made truckloads of money (Meyer celebrated by buying himself a brand-new Porsche). It’s one of the landmark sexploitation movies of the 60s and it’s highly recommended.

The Sin Syndicate (1965)

With nudie-cuties obviously getting perilously close to being past their use-by date (nude volleyball could no longer be guaranteed to drag in the customers) American exploitation film-makers came up with a new genre, the roughie. Roughies were invariably shot in black-and-white and ranged from moderately sleazy to very sleazy indeed. They didn’t come much sleazier than Michael Findlay’s films. The Sin Syndicate, from 1965) is one of his earliest efforts.

The plot (and I’m stretching things to call it a plot) concerns four young women who tell us, in flashbacks that occupy almost the entire 70-minute running time, how they ended up as zero girls. Zero girls are hookers for the Syndicate. They provide sexual favours to anyone for whom the Syndicate thinks it’s in their interests to provide such favours. We’re told that being a zero girl is the end of the line.

There’s some vague gangster stuff with Syndicate big wheel Lansing testifying in front of a Senate committee. These scenes are entirely unnecessary and completely irrelevant. They pad out the running time but at the cost of extreme tedium since this subplot goes nowhere at all.

Dolores had been a dance in Cuba before the Revolution. The violence of the Revolution and the coming to power of Castro meant it was time to leave Cuba. Lorna (Judy Adler) and Candy (June Roberts) had been born in wartime England while Monica (Darlene Bennett) hailed from small town USA. The flashbacks include lots of stock footage of wartime bombings and other horrors. It’s possible that Findlay was suggesting that these experiences of war left the girls damaged and facilitated their slide down the slippery slope of sexual degradation. Or maybe he just liked the war footage. Or maybe he just wanted to pad the film out. Having seen the film I would hesitate to claim that I have any real idea what Findlay thought he was doing.

The women drift in erotic dancing and then prostitution the way such things usually happen - they’re tempted by the thought of easy money. Working for the Syndicate certainly means money but easy it’s not. The Syndicate’s policy with new girls is to break their spirit. They find that a few days of non-stop rape and beatings invariably achieves this objective. They then have suitably docile employees who no longer have any sexual inhibitions because they don’t care any more.

Findlay is often thought of as being one of the more overtly misogynistic sexploitation film-makers and his infamous Flesh trilogy would seem to provide ample evidence for this. Curiously The Sin Syndicate provides plenty of evidence pointing in the opposite direction. The girls have really been guilty of nothing more than naïvete. We’re clearly expected to be sympathetic towards them, and we are. The men in the film on the other hand are total sleazebag scum. I suspect that the explanation is simple. Michael Findlay didn’t hate women at all. He regarded the entire human race with equal contempt. This is a very very dark movie.

Roughies can at times be a bit confronting, and this one is particularly so. We have four young women who are harmless and even likeable. But roughies were sexploitation movies and their primary purpose was to provide sexual titillation, which was mostly provided by scenes of women being subjected to violence and degradation. In this movie a stark illustration is provided by the rape scene on the truck. The Syndicate disciplines its girls by having them repeatedly raped and beaten. Lorna gets her dose of this discipline in the back of a moving truck. We can’t help being horrified by her terror. On the other hand the scene is clearly intended to be a thrilling blend of violence and eroticism. And it has to be said that the scene is executed in an extraordinarily effective manner. So can we enjoy the scene and be horrified at the same time?

Findlay pulls some clever surprises, one of them being the shower scene. Now when one of the girls is taking a shower and one of the other girls asks if she can join her we know we’re in for the obligatory lesbian sex scene. But it doesn’t happen. What we get is two girls who are emotionally starved displaying physical affection. It’s done in a way that makes it crystal clear that there is nothing even remotely sexual going on and that there is not a trace of sexual attraction between the two women. The lesbian sex content is zero. You’d think this would be a big mistake in a sexploitation movie, but oddly enough the scene is very erotic and quite touching at the same time. It’s the fact that there’s emotional hunger combined with affectionate playfulness rather than sexual hunger on display makes us feel immense sympathy which perhaps in a strange way makes the scene more arousing. The fact that the two girls are extremely hot doesn’t hurt.

You can’t judge the acting in movies like this by conventional standards. In a Michael Findlay film you probably can’t say anything at all about the acting one way or the other although in the rape scene mentioned earlier the actress convey’s the character’s terror and desperation well enough. The actresses include June Roberts and Darlene Bennett, familiar faces to devotees of this genre.

Of course in a Findlay film the eroticism is dulled by the relentless air of hopelessness, desolation and degradation. If you do find parts of his movies erotic you always end up feeling that perhaps you shouldn’t have. There’s eroticism on offer but it sure ain’t healthy.

Findlay does manage to pull off the occasional moments of visual near-inspiration. They are of course mixed in with much more frequent moments of out-and-out cinematic chaos and/or tedium and/or incomprehensible weirdness.

But give the guy his due, whatever his faults Michael Findlay had a style. His movies are instantly recognisable. He had a vision, even if it was a vision most people would be happy not to share. And they have a weird and unsettling fascination. The intriguing thing about The Sin Syndicate is that what you actually see on the screen is mostly incredibly tame. The violence and the sex are either offscreen or they’re shown in an indirect manner or at the very least they’re shot so you see no details. In the case of Lorna’s rape, content-wise it’s a very tame scene but the mood builds to an utterly maniacal fever pitch of intensity. But it’s the responses of the women coupled with what you know they must be feeling that  will leave most viewers feeling decidedly uneasy.

Something Weird’s release includes two other films, Sin Magazine (about which I know nothing) and She Came on the Bus (which is just as sleazy and chaotic as The Sin Syndicate). This triple-feature is not for the faint-hearted.

The Sin Syndicate is one for dedicated fans of sleaze only, but they’ll find it more than interesting.

The Alley Tramp (1968)

The Alley Tramp is a good girl gone bad 1968 sexploitation flick directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. The credits list Armand Parys as the director (and give every member of the cast and crew a phony French name) in a desperate attempt to give the impression that this is a classy French production. But it’s neither classy nor French and H.G. Lewis was indeed the director.

Lewis was an important figure in exploitation cinema in the 60s but somehow I’ve always found his movies to be not quite as much fun as they sound like they’re going to be. The Alley Tramp is no exception. The threadbare plot isn’t a problem. Plenty of sexploitation film-makers could have taken such a flimsy idea and made a highly entertaining film out of it. Lewis’s approach just seems lifeless, as if he just wanted to get it over and done with.

The plot revolves around young Marie Barker (Julie Ames). Marie is sixteen, but she’s not exactly sweet sixteen. Her mother has always feared that one day she’d run wild and now she’s convinced that those fears have turned out to be well-founded. What sets Marie off is the sight of her parents having sex (which is apparently a very rare occurrence in the Barker household). As everyone knows this is a sight that can trigger nymphomania in teenage girls, and Marie is soon running amok sexually.

Her first target is her good-natured third cousin, Phil. Phil is a decent enough young man but he is utterly unable to resist Marie’s very determined advances.

Marie’s mother Lily (Amy Heath), already suffering from extreme sexual frustration, suspects that her husband is having an affair (which he is, with his secretary) and since her chances of ever getting any marital sex seem remote she decides to have an affair as well. She picks Herbie as a good prospect, or at least a good prospect for a woman who likes it rough (as Lily does).

Inevitably things get complicated, with Marie seducing Herbie. After having an abortion and then seducing the doctor in the hospital Marie is packed off to a mental institution. But all is not lost. Her parents are assured that nymphomania is a treatable medical condition.

The sex scenes are pretty much what you expect in a 60s sexploitation feature, the sex mostly taking place under the bedclothes with the men keeping their jockey shorts on at all times. There is however plenty of nudity, including frontal nudity, and including at least one remarkably explicit shot that Lewis presumably hoped (rightly as it turned out) that he could get away with. Or perhaps he was so uninterested he didn’t notice it himself.

Julia Ames and Amy Heath are both quite attractive (with Amy Heath looking rather young to be the mother of a sixteen-year-old) and they both spend plenty of time naked.

This film features some of the worst acting you will ever come across. That turns out to be its saving grace. Julia Ames is atrocious but she’s enormous fun especially when she goes completely over-the-top in the scene in which Marie finally snaps and lets her mother know exactly how things are going to be from now on. It’s a gloriously epic piece of overacting. Amy Heath is no slouch in the overacting department either. Between the two of them they turn what could have been a dull film into a deliciously entertaining exercise in bad but thoroughly enjoyable film-making.

There is also a brief go-go dancing scene. More go-go dancing would have helped but we have to be grateful for what we get.

Something Weird paired this one with another sexploitation film, Over 18…And Ready! (which I haven’t watched yet). The Alley Tramp looks terrific. There’s the usual array of Something Weird extras.

The Alley Tramp is I suppose a borderline roughie, although it lacks the edge to qualify as a fully-fledged member of that species.

It has to be admitted that this is far from being a classic of the genre but it is a must-see movie for true connoisseurs of excruciatingly bad acting. If you’re a H.G. Lewis completist you’ll also be interested.