Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1970)

From any other filmmaker, the action/sexploitation hybrid Cherry, Harry & Raquel! would seem outrageous, what with the fever-dream editing and incessant closeups of bouncing breasts. From Russ Meyer, the king of mammary movies, it’s tame both in narrative conception and sexual content. Seeing as how Meyer’s appeal stems from his over-the-top aesthetic, the notion of a “restrained” Meyer flick is not appealing. Running just over 70 minutes, the picture tells the story of Harry (Charles Napier), an Arizona sheriff who spends his work hours patrolling the desert by the Mexican border and spends his private hours cohabitating with voluptuous nymphet Cherry (Linda Ashton). He also works for a drug kingpin named Mr. Franklin (Frank Bolger), whose main enterprise involves smuggling weed from Mexico. Franklin tasks Harry with killing Apache (John Milo), who has stolen some of Franklin’s dope. Interspersed with this threadbare story are innumerable sexual encounters, plus weird cuts to an unnamed topless woman (Uschi Digard) wearing an elaborate Indian headdress while gyrating in various settings (e.g., splashing in a swimming pool while flailing a tennis racquet). Most Meyer movies are cheerfully chaotic thanks to an overabundance of plot, but Cherry, Harry & Raquel! suffers the opposite affliction. The paucity of narrative material invites close scrutiny, revealing that most of what happens is grotesque or nonsensical or both. As always with Meyer, the name of the game is getting well-endowed women naked, so a solid 40 percent of the running time comprises nudie shots and/or sex scenes. Most of the remainder comprises brisk but repetitive chase scenes, as well as an epic shootout during which Meyer seems to echo Sam Peckipah’s style of operatic bloodshed (minus the slow motion). Naturally, there’s some weirdly patriotic speechifying mixed into the sleaze, including the rambling text crawl about freedom of speech that opens the movie—a text crawl, it should be noted, that is superimposed over a frenetic montage of breast closeups. Oh, and for those who’ve been longing for a full-frontal nude scene featuring iron-jawed B-movie guy Napier, here’s your chance.

Cherry, Harry & Raquel!: LAME

Black Snake (1973)

          The slavery saga Black Snake represents the end of skin-flick titan Russ Meyer’s brief flirtation with the mainstream. Following the notorious sexcapade Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and the turgid melodrama The Seven Minutes (1971), both of which were made for 20th Century-Fox, Meyer returned to his independent roots to cowrite, produce, and direct Black Snake, which has some aspects of blaxploitation cinema but doesn’t really belong to that genre. Set in the West Indies circa 1835, the film concerns a European fellow who arrives at a Caribbean plantation posing as a new accountant while he searches for his missing brother. The blaxploitaiton elements surface in a subplot about black slaves rebelling against their oppressors, and the title refers to the whips that plantation bosses use against slaves. As for the film’s sexual content, it’s fairly tame. The gay overseer who digs S&M is a kinky character, and Meyer presents ample footage of leading lady Anouska Hempel in various states of undress, but Black Snake lacks Meyer’s usual horndog glee. Whereas Meyer’s sex flicks boast a special blend of chaos, excess, and insanity, Black Snake is comparatively methodical and rational. As happened with The Seven Minutes, the absence of over-the-top gimmickry reveals Meyer to be a mediocre and undisciplined storyteller.

          Bland he-man David Warbeck stars as Sir Charles Walker, the latest arrival at Blackmoor, a plantation run by the cruel Lady Susan Walker (Hempel) and her vicious overseers. While observing various injustices (and availing himself of a slave concubine), Charles looks for his brother. Things get complicated when Susan demands that Charles provide her with sexual services. Meanwhile, slaves become more and more bold in their revolutionary activities, and the whole combustible situation explodes with a violent uprising. Working with veteran Hollywood cinematographer Arthur Ornitz, Meyer conjures one attractive widescreen image after another, exploiting the potential of tropical locations. Yet the shots splice together poorly, resulting in choppy pacing both between and during scenes. Meyer also displays zero control over tone, with nearly every scene pitched at the same level of intensity. At his worst, Meyer films beatings and rapes as if they’re exciting action scenes, then amplifies the inappropriate vibe by setting these scenes to bouncy music; it’s as if he thinks he’s making another one of his signature sexualized comedy/thriller hybrids, instead of a quasi-legitimate melodrama. By the time Meyer ends the film with a ridiculously moralistic epilogue, it’s plain that he is not where he belongs, cinematically speaking.

Black Snake: FUNKY

The Seven Minutes (1971)

          For skin-flick maven Russ Meyer, making Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) at Twentieth Century-Fox was a singular moment—with all the resources of a major studio at his disposal, he got to indulge his fancies for gonzo editing, in-your-face imagery, outrageous sex scenes, and voluptuous women like never before. For his follow-up, however, Meyer had to keep it in his pants, metaphorically speaking. Although The Seven Minutes tells a story that’s all about sex, the presentation is decidedly chaste. And while Meyer’s films are often hard to follow given his fragmented narrative approach, The Seven Minutes is downright murky—adapted from a novel by Irving Wallace, the picture throws so many characters and plot twists at the audience that it’s challenging to track what’s happening until the extended courtroom sequence that serves as the film’s climax. And even then, one-dimensional characterizations and wooden performances render the people in the movie nearly interchangeable.

          The film’s main thrust, exploring how communities define pornography, should have been a natural fit for Meyer, but it turns out the filmmaker was more skilled at creating actual smut than generating cerebral melodrama about smut. Without getting into the tiresome specifics, the story revolves around a novel called The Seven Minutes, written by a mysterious author named J.J. Jadway. Once banned, the sexually graphic book is reprinted by an enterprising publisher, which leads to the arrest of a California bookseller. Then a disturbed young man commits a rape, and investigators suspect he was driven into a sexual frenzy by reading The Seven Minutes. Politicians pounce on the situation for opportunistic reasons. Eventually, an intrepid attorney scours the globe for clues about Jadway in order to exonerate the book and to strike a blow against censorship.

          Thanks to the weird combination of lifeless acting and lurid subject matter, The Seven Minutes feels like a sexed-up episode of Dragnet. People deliver speeches instead of dialogue, and nearly every “mainstream” character is presented as a grotesque. Therefore, whenever Meyer lets his freak flag fly—for instance, intercutting a sexual assault with a Wolfman Jack radio performance—it feels like part of some other, transgressive movie accidentally got mixed in with the straight stuff. The mostly undistinguished cast includes aging movie queen Yvonne De Carlo and then-unknown Tom Selleck, as well as Meyer regulars including Charles Napier and Edy Williams. All of them seem adrift, because The Seven Minutes is neither sufficiently disciplined to work as a proper drama nor sufficiently wild to qualify as a counterculture statement. After The Seven Minutes crashed and burned, Meyer wisely returned to the realm of independently made skin flicks.

The Seven Minutes: LAME

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)

          The last proper movie directed by skin-flick legend Russ Meyer, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens is a tacky and tedious story about a voluptuous woman trying to cure her boyfriend of a predilection for anal sex. In Meyer’s simultaneously moralistic and perverse cinematic realm, there’s nothing worse than a stud who can’t “look a good fuck in the eye.” Were Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens not so sleazy, the theme of a lover craving intimacy would almost seem sweet. Cowritten by Meyer and frequent collaborator Roger Ebert, Beyond the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens is about as close to full-on pornography as Meyer ever got, thanks so lingering close-ups of erect phalli, peekaboo shots that almost-kinda-sorta depict genital penetration, and endless scenes of couples grinding against each other. The movie features many tropes that fans of Meyer’s movies enjoy—including frenzied editing, satirical characterizations, and whimsical narration. It also has a few decent jokes. On the whole, however, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Fixens seems like the work of a filmmaker at a professional crossroads. Presumably, Meyer realized that the days in which his strange brand of comical softcore commanded a specific market niche were rapidly passing.

          After a weird opening scene that mashes together allusions to Nazism and necrophilia with gospel music and videogames—to say nothing of energetic sex—the movie introduces “The Man from Small Town U.S.A.” (Stuart Lancaster), a plain-talkin’ fella who speaks to the camera and then narrates the story, providing judgmental color commentary. He introduces viewers to troubled couple Lamar (Ken Kerr) and Lavonia (Kitten Navidad). She’s a horny housewife, but she hates Lamar’s preferred position. Both embark on trysts with others, and Lavonia assumes the second identity of Lola Langusta (“hotter than a Mexican’s lunch,” according to the narrator), in order to make Lamar jealous enough to change his ways. When that doesn't work, Lamar seeks the ministrations of voluptuous radio hostess Sister Eufaula Roop (Ann Marie), who delivers gospel-style broadcasts about sexual satisfaction.

          Once in a while, Meyer lands an ingenious verbal or visual joke, as when “The Man from Small Town U.S.A.” drills a hole through a wall so he can watch the action upon which he’s commenting—very meta. Yet Ebert also suffocates the film with wall-to-wall word soup. Consider this oppressive chunk of narration: “Then there is Beau Badger and his faithful sidekick, Tyrone. Beau is a redneck, lean and mean. Tyrone is a racist—crude, rude, and tattooed. Dropouts from the rat race of life. Human flotsam. Useless roadblocks in the avenue of progress. Bitterly envious of the lower classes. Rejected by the volunteer Army. Their choice in life is simple: the drunk tank or the scrap heap.” Like the dialogue, the sex in the movie is undercut by overkill. And when the “good parts” of a sexploitation romp aren’t that good, what’s the point?

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vizens: FUNKY

Up! (1976)

          To create the fever-dream narrative of Up!, unlikely collaborators Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer—forever bonded by their mutual fascination with gigantic breasts—reteamed for the first time since Ebert wrote and Meyer directed the notorious big-studio flop Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). This time around, Ebert wisely used an alias to avoid tarnishing his status as a Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic. Since the crazy plot of Up! is riddled with tropes that Meyer put into nearly all of his movies, including satirical jabs at the Third Reich and vicious portrayals of duplicitous women, one suspects that Ebert’s primary contribution was the nonstop barrage of whimsically overwritten dialogue. (One character is referred to as “Gwendolyn, holy champion of fornication,” and a lurid piece of narration teases viewers thusly: “But where does the killer lurk still? Recall the clues, for there are no more.”)

          Beyond the movie’s weird approach to language, distinguishing characteristics of Up! represent pure Meyer excess—frenetic editing that renders coherence and logic nearly irrelevant; outrageously excessive close-ups of bouncing breasts and female pubic hair; lyrically composed nature tableaux that are really just tarted-up peeping-tom angles of happily humping humans; and, most importantly of all, a playfully perverse melding of sex and violence. Oh, and lest anyone miss the phallic meaning of the title, check out the way the right-side serif of the letter “U” is styled in the movie’s logo. Meyer was a man who embraced his pleasures wholeheartedly, so Up! was clearly designed as a compendium of things that got him off, whether that comprised ogling a pair of massive mammaries or portraying a Hilter-like character as a grotesque bisexual who pays men and women to abuse him. (Brace yourself for the sound effects during the rear-entry scene in “Adolph Schwartz’s” sex dungeon.)

          The weird storyline of Up! begins with the murder of the Hitler character by a masked assailant, and then tracks the adventures of buxom drifter Margo Winchester (Raven De La Croix). After being raped and left for dead, Margo gets a job at a diner run by closeted lesbian Sweet Li’l Alice (Janet Wood) and her put-upon boyfriend, Paul (Robert McLane). Soon, Margo becomes lovers with both Paul and corrupt local sheriff Homer Johnson (Monty Bane), even as the identity of the masked killer remains unknown. While the movie’s  narrative is really just a slender clothesline on which Meyer hangs lots of softcore sex scenes, the story also includes bizarre interludes of ultraviolence. In the strangest such passage, not one but two different men recover from massive axe wounds during a brawl that occurs simultaneously with a gang rape.

          Even at his best, Meyer’s crude and maniacal comic sensibility was hard to take, and Up! does not reflect Meyer at his peak. Rather, the picture arrived near the end of his long run as an exploitation kingpin, since he only made one more fictional feature before retiring his stockpile of dildos and Nazi paraphernalia. Although Meyer displays enough skin for even the most depraved viewer, complete with periodic appearances by famed stripper Kitten Navidad as the film’s nude hostess/narrator, Up! can’t muster the zing of prior Meyer epics. Except for brief interludes of surreal glee, the movie is grotesque instead of irreverent, and trashy instead of titillating. Even the climactic nude knife fight between two bodacious ladies in a riverbed fails to generate the cheap thrills that it should.

Up!: FREAKY

Supervixens (1975)

          Russ Meyer, the mad genius of skin flicks, was operating at the height of his singular powers when he made Supervixens, an exuberant combination of action, comedy, romance, and satire. Fast, filthy, and fun, the movie is a joyous celebration of one man’s fetishes, so even though Supervixens is heinous from the standpoint of gender politics, it’s so breezy and silly and upbeat that it’s difficult not to get a contact high. Plus, like all the best Meyer movies, it’s completely batshit insane.
          After cranking out dozens of exploitation flicks in the ’50s and ’60s, including the signature works Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and Vixen (1968), Meyer briefly dabbled in mainstream cinema, making the crazed Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and the more sedate The Seven Minutes (1971) for Fox. It wasn’t until Supervixens, however, that Meyer truly returned to his comfort zone of independently produced sextravaganzas. Supervixens takes place in a violent alternate universe of Meyer’s own imagining, so every woman is a buxom, insatiable beauty with the word “Super” affixed to her first name. Yet the alternate universe is also morally just, in a twisted sort of way, since bad people pay for their villainy while true love wins in the end. More or less.

          When the story begins, studly everyman Clint Ramsey (Charles Pitts) works at a gas station run by Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland), a nice guy who may or may not be the same Martin Bormann who spent World War II working as Hitler’s secretary. Clint’s girlfriend is SuperAngel (Shari Eubank), a sex-crazed housewife who treats Clint like garbage. One day, while Clint is passed out drunk after a fight with SuperAngel, she seduces a policeman named Harry Sledge (Charles Napier). When Harry proves impotent, he becomes enraged and murders SuperAngel in an epic scene that’s simultaneously funny and grotesque. Once Clint sobers up and learns what happened, he realizes he’s the likely suspect for SuperAngel’s murder, so he hits the road and begins a series of erotic misadventures. He gets robbed by a male-female criminal duo, he finds refuge at a farm until the farmer’s mail-order bride cheerfully rapes Clint, and he falls victim to the charms of a motel proprietor’s deaf daughter. Eventually, Clint meets and falls in love with SuperVixen (also played by Eubank), who is the quasi-reincarnation of SuperAngel, but is as kind as SuperAngel was treacherous. Predictably, Mean Old Harry Sledge turns up to cause more trouble—leading to a surreal climax involving lots of dynamite.

          Also thrown into the mix are flash cuts of nude women writhing on imaginary beds, and such weird musical flourishes as the use of German marching-band music, “Dixie,” and snippets of classical compositions for punctuation during random moments. This being a Meyer movie, the most important recurring stylistic elements are enormous breasts—closeups of cleavage, long shots of women running and bouncing, claustrophobic angles of men’s faces being smothered with massive mammaries, and so on.

          Meyer, who wrote, produced, directed, shot, and edited the movie, executes all of this stuff with a cartoonish kind of high style, creating frenetic rhythms and something very closely resembling dramatic tension. The actresses in the movie are generally quite awful, though Eubank has spunk, because Meyer cast for physical attributes rather than talent. Pitts is merely okay, doing best in scenes where he communicates exasperation. Therefore the heavy lifting falls to Meyer regular Napier. He’s a stone riot in Supervixens, incarnating one of the most gleefully demented rednecks in screen history. By the time his character devolves into the live-action equivalent of a Looney Tune at the end of Supervixens, he’s personified everything from giddiness to psychosis with gusto. Plus, like Meyer, Napier seems totally hip to the self-referential joke at the heart of Supervixens.

Supervixens: FREAKY

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

Solidly secured in the cinematic firmament as one of the most insane movies ever made, director Russ Meyer’s not-really-a-sequel to the sexy soap opera Valley of the Dolls (1967) is the only rock-and-roll musical ever made about corporate intrigue, homosexuality, mutilation, Nazis, rape, and homicidal transsexuals. It’s also one of the most feverishly edited films you’ll ever see, cramming a miniseries’ worth of overheated plotting into 109 mondo-bizarro minutes. The storyline concerns the travails of all-girl rock group the Carrie Nations in late-’60s L.A., their music career ascending even as their interconnected personal lives spiral into debauchery and tragedy. The narrative, however, is really just a means for Meyer and screenwriter Roger Ebert (yes, Roger Ebert!) to present scene after scene about their favorite fixation: breasts. The movie’s cast is filled with buxom young women surrounded by swarthy old men, horny young men, and predatory lesbians, all of whom are driven wild by their craving for mammaries. (Even the script’s predominant gay man worships the bulging pectoral muscles of the Adonis he desires.) The movie unspools as a manically paced phantasmagoria of screeching arguments, trippy musical numbers, lurid party scenes, and deranged violence; it’s a symphony of cinematic excess. There’s a remote possibility that Meyer and Ebert were after some sort of histrionic statement about the extremes of the psychedelic era, but the joyful hedonism of their endeavor is best expressed by the exclamation, “It’s my happening, and it freaks me out!” That line was later repurposed by Mike Myers in one of his Austin Powers joints, but even with his mojo workin’, Austin never grooved on any happenings as supremely weird as the deranged climax of BVD, which weaves together a whacked-out Third Reich refugee, a tender girl-on-girl love scene, and a gender-bending murder spree.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: FREAKY