Review

Husband and wife filmmaking team Michael and Roberta Findlay were among 1960s-70s exploitation cinema’s most prominent auteurs of filmic filth, writing, producing, directing, photographing, and acting in a series of grimy New York City sexploitation movies that have left lasting impressions on cine-sleaze devotees through their misanthropic wit, jaundiced worldview, and increasingly outlandish plot devices. Their filmmaking partnership obviously ended with Michael’s much-publicized fatal helicopter crash in 1977 (the couple had reportedly already parted ways prior to that incident).

The Findlays’ most noteworthy contribution to the world of exploitation cinema is their often astonishing 1967-68 “Flesh” trilogy - Touch of Her Flesh, Curse of Her Flesh and Kiss of Her Flesh - but this release’s double dose of black-and-white sexploitation shockers, 1966’s Take Me Naked and 1968’s A Thousand Pleasures, is also a noteworthy time capsule from the same era that produced the “Flesh” trio (also out on DVD courtesy of Something Weird, who released this double bill onto disc). Truthfully, the first feature, Take Me Naked, is only noteworthy for secondary reasons: the only viewing pleasure one is likely to derive comes from pondering what it must have been like for raincoat-clad middle-aged businessmen to sit through this confrontationally tedious oddity in an “art” theatre back in ’66.

Little more than a disjointed collection of MOS footage accompanied by a mind-numbing bombardment of poetry narration, the film’s slender narrative revolves around a skid row bum’s fetishistic obsession with his neighbor (portrayed by Roberta herself), who is actually a lesbian; one suspects that the Findlays were attempting to create a slyly ironic parody of 60s art film pretensions, but the results are a real bore. However, it’s Naked’s companion feature that makes this disc a worthwhile purchase: Thousand Pleasures is positively hysterical (in every sense of the term), a riotously funny yet genuinely disturbing little roughie with bizarre imagery, a storyline rife with overheated perversions of various sorts, and endlessly quotable dialogue (in contrast to the dull poetry that is used to advance Naked’s narrative, Pleasures benefits greatly from its protagonist’s noir-styled voice-over).

Michael stars as Richard Davis, a wife-murderer who picks up two female hitchhikers and is soon taken by them to a house to meet “Little Baby,” their “daughter” (an adult woman in a diaper); the hitchhikers want a child of their own, and plan on using Davis as a sperm donor, after a little harmless torture, of course. Michael Findlay is quite droll in the lead role, and Pleasures ranks alongside the “Flesh” trilogy as one of the stellar examples of the playfully perverse world of Findlay sexploitation.

 -- Travis Crawford