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Short filmTranscript
00:00 It occurred to me that almost a year into this channel I haven't really done a ruffy yet.
00:05 So that changes today.
00:08 I've got my raincoat on.
00:10 That's important.
00:11 Got some darker glasses.
00:13 Let's go to the grindhouse.
00:14 [music]
00:22 Welcome to Exploitation Reviews and me, Rob.
00:24 Today I'm taking a look at the Touch of Her Flesh from 1967.
00:29 A Ruffy, by the way, is a sex film that explores some of the darker sides of sex.
00:35 The nudie cuties, and we've seen plenty of them on this channel, are pretty lighthearted.
00:40 They're basically fun comedies.
00:42 A Ruffy is not a comedy.
00:45 This is a film that explores things like S&M, bondage, some fetishes of the darker variety,
00:56 you know, like debasement, torture, even rape, and in this film in particular, murder.
01:05 Yeah, that's pretty rough.
01:09 This film, The Touch of Her Flesh, comes to us from a married couple that made films together,
01:14 Michael and Roberta Finlay.
01:17 They made a number of films throughout their career, and this one was their first sort
01:21 of breakout hit.
01:23 The Touch of Her Flesh came out in 1967, and it went on to spawn two sequels.
01:29 Pretty uncommon for a film like this.
01:32 So what was the secret that made The Touch of Her Flesh so successful?
01:36 Well, lots of beautiful murdered women.
01:40 Because of how explicit this movie is, I'm probably not going to be able to show you
01:45 very much of it here on YouTube, and I apologize for that, but, you know, this isn't my website.
01:53 We start off with some really cool and creative opening titles.
01:57 They project them onto a naked body.
02:01 According to IMDB, this is actually Roberta Finlay.
02:06 And yeah, I can't show you too much of it, but they're pretty cool.
02:09 I guess it looks like they used maybe an overhead projector and then kind of moved it a bit.
02:14 Yeah, pretty, yeah, it's really awesome.
02:17 I love it.
02:18 Alright, and then we get to the story.
02:20 The director, Michael Finlay, he plays the main character, Richard, and one day on the
02:24 way to a business trip, he realizes he forgot his speech, so he goes back to the apartment
02:30 and he finds his wife in bed with another man.
02:45 Seeing this, of course, is upsetting and distraught, he runs out of the apartment, into the city,
02:51 and is hit by a car.
02:53 He wakes up in the hospital and the doctor informs him that he's lost an eye and he's
02:58 paralyzed from the waist down.
03:00 This paralysis, though, is temporary, he hopes.
03:04 Richard goes to an apartment.
03:06 They don't explain whose apartment this is or how he got it or, you know, forget about
03:12 looking too deeply for plot in a movie like this.
03:15 He's got an apartment, he's drinking a lot, and he's still very angry and he decides it's
03:20 time to get some revenge.
03:22 Well, revenge isn't exactly the right word because he doesn't just blame his wife for
03:28 the infidelity, he blames all beautiful women.
03:31 And so he starts watching and then killing dancers and strippers and prostitutes all
03:38 the while trying to gather some information and work up the requisite rage needed to kill
03:45 his wife.
03:46 And yeah, that's pretty much the plot of the movie.
03:49 So that's enough out of me as far as plot goes.
03:51 Let's talk some highlights.
03:53 This film has a really cool visual style.
03:56 Yeah, it's dark and it's gritty and it just drips with sleaze, but damn if it doesn't
04:03 look cool.
04:05 Roberta Finlay was a cinematographer and, yeah, she really put some thought into some
04:10 interesting compositions.
04:12 The compositions are, of course, helped by the fact that the women in this movie are
04:17 absolutely gorgeous.
04:20 Amazingly beautiful.
04:21 Amazingly.
04:22 And during some of the dance scenes, the music's pretty cool too.
04:27 Some of it sounds familiar, so I better not play any of it here on YouTube because I'm
04:32 sure their AI will pick up on what it is and tell me I'm not allowed to use it.
04:37 One interesting thing about this film is it's basically a slasher.
04:41 Before slashers existed.
04:43 You know, we've got this killer with some sexual hangups and he's targeting beautiful
04:48 women and he even watches them for a while and, you know, it is kind of like a POV shot
04:55 and then we get some pretty creative kills.
04:57 I don't want to spoil the kills for you too much, but there's a scimitar and a crossbow
05:04 and yeah.
05:05 I mean, it's not gory.
05:08 There's a little bit of blood, but yeah, it's basically a slasher film.
05:13 Of course, what we think of as modern slashers, that'll come later, but there were some important
05:19 precursors.
05:20 Probably the most important is Psycho in 1960.
05:25 Also 1960 was the year that Peeping Tom came out and both of these have elements that'll
05:30 be picked up later by slasher films.
05:33 And of course the Italians were inspired by Hitchcock and people like Mario Bava made
05:38 some Giallo films which are also basically slashers, like Mario Bava's Blood and Black
05:44 Lace that came out in 1964.
05:46 And yeah, these are all important parts of the story.
05:49 Interestingly, I don't believe anyone has ever really examined Ruffies as part of the
05:57 slasher story and I'm not quite sure why.
06:00 A lot of the elements from the slashers that will come at the end of the 70s are here in
06:07 The Touch of Her Flesh in 1967.
06:11 That's more than a decade before Halloween, but it is a few years after Hitchcock and
06:16 Bava.
06:17 So there's that.
06:20 So yeah, we've got some amazingly beautiful women, some pretty interesting kills, a kind
06:26 of interesting slasher villain, but the movie's not perfect.
06:34 Like a short stripper having fun with a tail of some sort, this film does have some shortcomings.
06:41 Well, modern audiences might find this film to be a touch slow.
06:46 There's very minimal dialogue here.
06:48 It's just enough to move the plot forward and no more.
06:52 The film spends a lot of its time during the watching phases.
06:57 They're rather long-winded.
06:59 Most of the run time of this film is women taking their clothes off and women dancing
07:05 naked.
07:06 So if watching women take their clothes off and dance naked sounds boring to you, maybe
07:12 skip this one.
07:13 But if you think it's fun to watch a strip show, this is your movie.
07:17 And if you think it's fun to watch some murder, this is definitely your movie.
07:21 The film's pretty short, anyway.
07:23 I think it's an hour and fourteen minutes?
07:26 Hour and eleven minutes?
07:28 It's an easy watch.
07:29 And of course, many people would probably consider this film to be pretty misogynistic.
07:34 I mean, the killer, you know, he internalizes that rage he has for his wife and then turns
07:40 it towards all women, or at least all the beautiful ones.
07:44 So yeah, that's pretty misogynistic, I guess.
07:49 Although he's the bad guy, so...
07:54 I don't know.
07:55 I mean, do we think Halloween is misogynistic?
07:57 I mean, Michael, he targets some babysitters.
08:01 I don't know.
08:02 Anyway, it's up to you.
08:03 But it's probably misogynistic.
08:06 Sure, let's be honest.
08:09 So yeah, I don't really know if I recommend this film.
08:11 I know it's not for everyone.
08:13 Personally, I'd really rather like it.
08:18 So if you're like me and you want a little bit of the history of ruffies and you like
08:25 black and white movies with lots of just drop-dead gorgeous women, then yeah, on my hit scale,
08:31 this is an easy buy.
08:33 But if you're not interested in building a collection of these things, I would still
08:36 recommend streaming it.
08:38 It's only a little bit over an hour.
08:41 You can do that.
08:42 It's an important film.
08:43 Historically an important film.
08:46 At least to people like us.
08:54 [BLANK_AUDIO]