The Flesh Trilogy

Richard Jennings returns home from work one day to find his wife Claudia in bed with another man. Furious, Richard – or should that be Dick? – storms out the house and, not looking where he is going when crossing the road, gets run over.

Awakening in hospital badly injured and minus an eye, Jennings decides to extract his revenge on his unfaithful wife and on womankind in general. Checking himself out and adopting an assumed name, he proceeds to torture, mutilate and murder his way through a plethora of sexy young women, using all manner of weaponry…

Other than lashings of female nudity, equal amounts of tame softcore sex and some interminable psychotic monologues from Jennings, that's about it for three films and close on four hours.

Some sequences have a surprising – presumably accidental – artistry, as when the film-makers project their titles on to the naked bodies of the actresses. Overall, however, the Flesh Trilogy seems most notable for the circumstances of its production, the films themselves being likely to send all but the most hardened sleaze fan to sleep away from their odd moments of jaw-dropping depravity, as when Jennings attacks his victims with blowtorch, acidic vaginal douche and – oddest of all – a lobster claw.

The misogyny of Touch…, Curse… and Kiss of Her Flesh might seem difficult to ascribe, at least in part, to a woman. Yet with Roberta Findlay and her husband Michael that is exactly what we have, one or both taking responsibility for the production, direction, cinematography, writing and editing (Julian Marsh being Michael's pseudonym, Anna Riva Roberta's), while Michael also playing Richard Jennings under another assumed name, Robert West, and Roberta the (uncredited) female voice-over for Claudia in the first film.

Moreover, if the Flesh Trilogy and the couple's other 60s "roughies" weren't enough, there's the small matter of Snuff. It was the Findlays who were responsible for taking a little known Argentinean import that had been languishing in the vaults, tacking on a new ending and hyping it up as "The film that could only be made in South America… where life is cheap," thereby giving anti-porn feminists – who perhaps almost wanted it to be true – something new to latch onto for their campaigns.

All told, it might truly be said that the only thing the Findlay failed to exploit was Michael's 1977 decapitation by helicopter blade, as an example of poetic justice seemingly ideal for inclusion on a Faces of Death compilation.

Though less well known than their successor, The Flesh Trilogy ultimately emerge as superior films – even we are talking about the difference between different qualities of shit – and arguably just as shocking and disturbing in their own way.

This Region 1 triple feature DVD from Something Weird represents good value for money in the company's usual manner, cramming three good – or as good and complete as you're ever going to get – transfers onto the one disc along with an assortment of enticing trailers. The only disappointment is the absence of any material shedding light on the Findlays and their deserved position in the pantheon of grindhouse auteurs.