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