Having completed his Touch of Her Flesh trilogy, New York City writer/ director/producer/editor/perv Michael Findlay attempted to top his horndog histrionics with The Ultimate Degenerate. He failed. Watching it, if you can get through all of its 72 minutes, you may find yourself wishing some women would get murdered — not because you have something against the superior gender, but because the film needs something to liven it up. Nudity should not be so dull, even when accounting for black-and-white budgets.

Frequent Findlay skin-starlet Uta Erickson has zero inhibitions as Maria, a close-cropped blonde nympho with a thing for putting on window shows for an elderly neighbor. (As in Findlay fashion — one where moving mouths rarely match dialogue — viewers never see this old man.) Such exhibitionism sickens her live-in lover (Donna Stone, A Thousand Pleasures‘ Boobarella), so Maria answers a sex ad for a three-week gig that promises $500 per.

Said “job” is in the home of Spencer (Findlay), a wheelchair-bound man who pays various lovelies to bring his seemingly endless sexual kinks to life; to that end, he injects them with “a harmless aphrodisiac of my own creation.” Spencer’s right-hand man is played by Earl Hindman, who co-starred as Wilson on the long-running family sitcom Home Improvement. Remember how you never saw his face on that show? Well, sometimes you don’t see it here, either, but that’s because instead of being concealed by a backyard fence, it’s buried in whores’ crotches. #nomnomnom

Several of Spencer’s twisted games rely on dairy products sprayed from an aerosol can. On one occasion, “games” becomes literal, when a fully nude body becomes a board for whipped-cream tic-tac-toe. One might expect the scene in which Spencer pesters a rope-tied woman with a metal clamp to be the flick’s cruelest, but nope — my vote is cast for the extended one involving about a dozen cobs of corn. You may never eat this vegetable again … but if you do, may you be unable to think of anything but this sequence. More butter, friend? —Rod Lott

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Before Russ Meyer found his groove exercising his autonomy across a well-built body of work, he took on the for-hire job of adapting John Cleland’s notorious erotic novel of the mid-1700s for the silver screen of the mid-1960s. The result, Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, is far more faithful to its source material than to what we today consider the Meyer aesthetic.

At least the black-and-white period piece opens with a hint of That Meyer Touch, drawn in broad brushes of suggestive humor such as a fish landing in the cleavage of our heroine. The mayhem that ensues in this slapstick sequence would do Mack Sennett proud — a nod to him exists on the street’s “Pie Maker” sign — yet as if the film already tired itself out, it settles into an extended stay of conversation.

Orphaned teen Fanny (Letícia Román, The Girl Who Knew Too Much) falls into work at a curiously idle brothel run by the matronly Mrs. Brown (Miriam Hopkins, 1932’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Not only is the place staffed with girls not up to up to Meyer’s minimum standards of pulchritude, but Fanny is amateurish to the point of virginal. That hymen won’t stay intact forever.

Being a sex comedy with no sex shown is one of many reasons this version of Fanny Hill remains noteworthy. Others include Fanny’s true love being played by future Boogey Man director Ulli Lommel, and that the pushy producer is Albert Zugsmith (Touch of Evil). For all those asterisks, however, the movie isn’t any good — just a largely lifeless farce that would be all tease if it contained a libidinal pulse. It’s for Meyer completists only, and even that’s questionable. —Rod Lott

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Big girls? They don’t cry-yi-yi; it’s just an alibi. But what about bad girls? Oh, they totally do, as would you if you became a daytime whore.

Sally Downs (former burlesque star Misty Ayres) is just a small-town girl living in a lonely world, aka the big city to which she’s moved. Clothes start to shed before the film hits the three-minute mark, as Sally strips to her undies to don her “best ‘get a job’ dress.” It works, because in the next scene, she’s behind a diner counter, tending to a customer who encourages the naive girl to become a “model”; naturally, he happens to know a guy.

Being a dumb blonde, Sally immediately decides to pursue this line of “work,” only to find herself making a negative career move from slingin’ hash to slingin’ leg. Yes, Sally has become a professional prostitute at a bona fide whorehouse — or, from the looks of the two rooms in which most of the hour-long movie takes place, the living area and master bedroom of someone involved in the production.

In those two spots, the ladies lounge on the couch, dance and wrestle, sometimes in lingerie. Ayres’ beauty was a Marilyn Monroe-esque one, but the similarities did not extend to talent. In that aspect, Ayres is in great company, for Bad Girls Do Cry is full of performances and other things that fail to reach even mediocrity. The directorial debut (and next-to-last effort) of character actor Sid Melton (1951’s Lost Continent) and shot a decade earlier than its release, the drama has nothing to it but a time-capsule look at ladies’ undergarments. Its highest stakes arrive when a drunk hooker unknowingly takes a big swig of spoiled milk. —Rod Lott

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Boasts slut slayer Richard Jennings at the beginning of The Kiss of Her Flesh, “I do a service to all mankind with each jezebel I kill!” Essentially, the exclamation could double as a plot summary for Kiss, the final chapter of Michael Findlay’s depraved, shake-and-ache trilogy. How depraved? We hear the above while he helps himself to the bare breasts of the woman he’s just tire-ironed into strippable submission. But that’s nothing.

After the credits sequence, in which the titles are handwritten on pieces of paper cut into lip shapes and placed over a nude female body, Jennings (Findlay himself) resumes his misogynist mission of murder, slaughtering every lady who reminds him of his cheating wife, which is every lady. That includes the one who:
• is tied up in a kitchen and menaced with a lobster claw;
• receives a house call from a “doctor” (Jennings in his “master of disguise” thing) who performs a “thorough examination” on the tooth marks surrounding her no-no hole and prescribes a morning douche, which he’s spiked with acid;
• hitchhikes her way into Jennings’ station wagon, only to be blowtorched for her troubles; and
• performs oral stimulation on Jennings as ordered, which proves deadly because … well, let’s him tell us: “My poisoned semen should take care of you well enough. So long, sucker!”

Jennings is nothing if not quick with the quips. Topping the simple “Burn, slut!” and the “I will slice you in two like a piece of cheese!” threat is this baffler spoken to the aforementioned seafood victim: “We’ll cut away these underpants to more easily get at the sauce!”

The Kiss of Her Flesh kinda sorta attempts a story, with Jennings being pursued by angry Maria (Uta Erickson, The Ultimate Degenerate) after he offs the best friend of her (incestuous) sister. Maria begins this trip of vengeance directly after introducing her boyfriend (Earl Hindman, aka Wilson of TV’s Home Improvement) to the pleasures of anal beads, because you’ve gotta have priorities. Findlay clearly did: Work out his twisted fantasies on film, at the risk of lucidity and other narrative crutches preferred by moviegoers — or at least those not wearing raincoats. —Rod Lott

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Even at just over an hour, the erotic comedy Silk n’ Sabotage proves unwatchable. A dim-bulb blonde with surgically enhance girlie features (Julia Kruis) has created a computer game that an iron-jawed lothario steals while seducing her.

And if you can believe that setup — especially when our heroine looks as if she lacks the skills required to turn a computer on — then, quite frankly, you’re a fucking idiot.

Since that plot leaves the film ripe with endless possibilities, virgin director Joe Cauley throws in a roommate who holds lingerie parties four nights a week, another roomie whose pastime is writhing in front of a mirror and a couple of guys who break into the girls’ house on a near-nightly basis for sexual congress.

Edited with the subtlety of a Louisville Slugger and most assuredly scripted by monkeys, Silk n’ Sabotage is both maddening n’ moronic. —Rod Lott

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