The Touch of Her Flesh (1967) / The Curse of Her Flesh (1968) / The Kiss of Her Flesh (1968) R1 / NTSC DVD
Something Weird Video / 2003
Directed by Michael Findlay
Written by Michael Findlay & Roberta Findlay
Cast: Michael Findlay, Angelique, John Amero & Uta Erickson
Review by James Garfield
A trilogy of films about the exploits of misogynistic crazy man Richard Jennings. The Touch of Her Flesh shows how Jennings got that way: he arrived home from a business trip one evening to find his wife Claudia (yes, she’s named Claudia Jennings; the real-life actress/Playmate of the same name would have been about 17 when this was released) having sex with another man. Distraught, he ran out into the street, down a few blocks, and got struck by a car. He revived in a hospital to learn he was temporarily crippled and had lost an eye. He blamed the entire female gender (or at least the sexy ones) for his condition
, and swore revenge against them all. He goes on to kill an assortment of sex workers (strippers, prostitutes) in sometimes very creative fashion. One stripper receives a rose with poisoned thorns from him. Another gets a poison-tipped blow dart while up on stage performing. Finally, he pursues his wife and her friend Janet; while Claudia doesn’t make it, Janet manages to nail Jennings in the stomach with a crossbow.
The Curse of Her Flesh reveals that Jennings survived that incident, and is now focusing on his late wife’s lover Steve while still finding time to bump off promiscuous females on the side, thanks to his new occupation as owner of a burlesque house specializing in Sapphic stage shows. (Kinda self-destructive to kill off your own staff, but anyway…) Jennings’s methods this time include coating a cat’s claws in poison and loading a dildo with a spring-knife. He finally gets the better of Steve in a fight in the bed of a truck as it drives down the road. In The Kiss of Her Flesh, Jennings can now devote himself full-time to murdering sexy women; he accesses victims this time by impersonating a doctor. His weapons include an acid douche and his own “poisoned semen”. But his wife’s sister Maria and her boyfriend Don are determined to stop him, and perhaps give him a taste of his own medicine.
Four decades later, the Flesh trilogy remains pretty damn outrageous. Unbelievably, it’s the work of a husband-and-wife team, Michael and Roberta Findlay; director Michael plays the demented Jennings. Technically, the films are quite shabby, having been shot mostly silent and having some pretty bad post-dubbing added. In the first film, actors are framed so we don’t see their lips as they talk; by the last film, we get to see lips moving, with poor synchronization. The first two films have a lot of padding in the form of strip sequences, with the accompanying tunes often played twice in a row as the act drags on. The low budgets did conjure some inventiveness up from the filmmakers; Roberta’s noir-ish lighting and cinematography are excellent, and an apparent lack of access to optical printing leads to some very creative opening credits sequences (words projected onto female torsos, bathroom graffiti). The whole “creative kill” format anticipates both the Omen trilogy and the slasher-film boom; but the sexual nature of many of the methods makes these movies truly demented.
Ahead of its time, but still basically unequalled in its imaginative nastiness, the Flesh trilogy is essential for sexploitation historians; mainstream viewers will be repulsed by the low production values, if not the murder scenes. The lack of extras is unfortunate, but as with a lot of Something Weird’s releases, these movies have been rescued from certain oblivion, so we should count ourselves lucky just to have them.
