Russ Meyer’s Lorna (1964) revisited

Russ Meyer’s career falls into a number of well-defined phases, with each apparent change of approach actually bringing him ever closer to his mature style. Meyer had invented the nudie-cutie with The Immoral Mr Teas in 1959 but he soon grew bored, and he also felt that audiences would grow bored. So he abandoned colour for black-and-white and plunged into his redneck gothic/southern gothic phase with Lorna in 1964. Lorna has affinities with the roughies that were becoming increasingly dominant in American sexploitation movies but it would be a mistake to class it as a straightforward roughie. Like all of Meyer’s films, it belongs to a particular and distinctive sub-genre of Meyer’s own invention.

Lorna (played by the gorgeous and awesomely well-endowed Lorna Maitland) is married to Jim. Jim is a real nice guy and Lorna was madly in love with him when they got married but he’s just not very exciting in the bedroom. Not exciting enough to give Lorna the sexual pleasure she craves. Poor Jim doesn’t know anything about what turns women on and he doesn’t even know there’s a problem. He innocently assumes that since he enjoys the sex Lorna must enjoy it as well.

Meyer’s films certainly linked sex and violence and most included at lest one rape scene. That might lead one to think that Meyer was some kind of misogynist, but that’s a conclusion that could only be reached by someone who hasn’t actually watched (or at least understood) his movies. Meyer was always interested in and sympathetic to the female point of view. If only Jim had understood a bit more about women, if only he had understood that Lorna’s perfectly natural needs were not being satisfied, if only just once he had asked her what was wrong, all the subsequent disasters could have been avoided.

Because there are going to be subsequent disasters. 

Jim works at the salt mine with Luther and Jonah. Luther is foul-mouthed and dirty-minded and obsessed with sex. He likes to give the impression that he can get as many women as he wants but it’s perfectly obvious that that is true only in his daydreams. At the opening of the film, he tries it on with a girl named Ruthie. Ruthie is very drunk, but she’s not drunk enough to want to sleep with Luther. Luther reacts with rage and beats her up. This is the first appearance in film of a standard Meyer trope - sexually inadequate men who turn to violence against women. Taken on the whole the men in Meyer’s movies are not a very admirable bunch.

Luther is obsessed with Lorna. In his daydreams Lorna would prefer to be with him than be with Jim. In reality Lorna is hardly even aware of Luther’s existence. 

Then an escaped convict enters the picture. He rapes Lorna and she finally experiences the sexual bliss she craves. Lorna thinks she’s found happiness at last. When she takes him home with her it’s reasonable to assume that events are moving towards a climax that is likely to be unpleasant for all concerned.

This movie marked a major departure for Meyer. His nudie-cuties were essentially plotless collections of humour and/or sexy vignettes. Lorna has a very definite plot. It’s a simple plot, but it’s the execution that is interesting. Lorna is structured like a morality play but the fire-and-brimstone preacher who delivers stinging denunciations of immorality at various points is a sure sign that we’re not supposed to take the morality play aspect at face value. The film is more an attack on moralism than on immorality, although in true exploitation movie style it tries to have it both ways. The preacher introduces another Meyer touch - a character playing the rôle of the Greek chorus, commenting on the events of the film.

While Meyer was a quintessentially American film-maker Lorna owes quite a lot to the European art films of the period (especially Italian neorealism). But this is a European art film made in an entirely American way with an entirely American flavour.

Meyer had not yet evolved his full-blown signature style with the machine-gun editing but Lorna is still very much a Meyer film. It’s superbly shot. Meyer was a bit of a technical perfectionist. The idea that in a low-budget movie it doesn’t matter if the occasional shot is out of focus would have appalled Russ Meyer. He liked his movies to look great, and they invariably do look great. He worked quickly but his compositions are well thought out. I don’t think Meyer would have been capable of filming a poorly composed shot.

For the title rôle Meyer cast an actress named Maria Andre but he was not happy with the choice and at the last minute his wife Eve suggested a girl named Barbara Popejoy. Meyer renamed her Lorna Maitland and she’s one of the main reasons for the movie’s success. Apart from her extraordinary breasts (this is a Russ Meyer film so the subject of breasts cannot be avoided) she is perfect in every way, portraying Lorna as a mix of naïvete and seething sexual desire. 

For reasons connected wth the disposition of his estate Meyer’s films have not yet received the treatment they deserve on home video. Much lesser films have had special editions with audio commentaries and various extras and even Blu-Ray releases. For Meyer’s films we still have to rely on fairly basic DVD releases. The Region 2 release pairs Lorna with the equally interesting follow-up movie, Mudhoney, the second of Meyer’s redneck gothic films. Lorna gets a pretty good transfer.

Lorna is a nasty squalid little movie and it revels in its nastiness and squalor. It’s also stylish and absurdly entertaining. It made truckloads of money (Meyer celebrated by buying himself a brand-new Porsche). It’s one of the landmark sexploitation movies of the 60s and it’s highly recommended.

Blacksnake (1973)

Blacksnake is the one Russ Meyer film that nobody seems to like, not even hardcore Meyer fans. It’s nowhere near as bad as it’s usually made out to be but it’s easy enough to see why so many people disliked it.

After his brief and less than happy experience trying to make big-budget Hollywood movies Meyer wisely decided to return to independent productions. He also decided to try a dramatic change of genres. This was understandable enough. Once hardcore porn appeared on the scene it was clearly going to be more difficult for Meyer to find an audience for the sorts of movies he liked to make. And Meyer was adamant that he was going to have nothing whatsoever to do with hardcore porn. His solution was to concentrate on violence rather than sex.

Blacksnake was however a departure from the usual Meyer territory in lots of other ways as well. It was his first period picture, and his first foray into the world of blaxploitation. Blacksnake was to be a savage indictment of slavery.

The setting is the West Indian island of San Cristobal in 1835. The British had by this time abolished slavery but somehow Lady Susan Walker (Anouska Hempel) is still getting away with running her plantation with slave labour. To protect her position she has a private army of French-speaking blacks led by Captain Raymond Daladier (Bernard Boston).

Sir Charles Walker (David Warbeck) is intensely interested in Lady Susan’s activities. One of her many husbands was his brother Jonathan who mysteriously vanished and is presumed to be dead. Sir Charles is convinced that Lady Susan murdered him. He manages to get himself a position as Lady Susan’s book-keeper and sets off for the West Indies to discover the truth about his brother.

He soon discovers that San Cristobal is suffering a reign of terror at the hands of Lady Susan and her henchmen, especially the sadistic white overseer Joxer Tierney (Percy Herbert). A slave revolt is in the offing although no-one on San Cristobal can see it coming. Sir Charles uncovers the horrifying truth about his brother and he is also caught up in Lady Susan’s dangerous sexual games. The violence is pretty much non-stop and builds to a frightening crescendo.

One of the major problems with this film is that Meyer seemed to want to make a sincere and serious anti-slavery film but at the same time he was trying to make an exploitation film (which is after all what he was good at). There’s violence in most of Meyer’s movies but it’s always very stylised and very cartoonish and mostly played for laughs. The violence in Blacksnake is the exception to this rule - it’s over-the-top but it’s also horrifyingly realistic. This was obviously a conscious decision by Meyer but it can be a bit jarring since there’s also (as always in Meyer’s films) a fair amount of comedy.

An even bigger problem is that I’m not sure exactly what kind of audience he expected to reach. Fans of his earlier films were not going to like the combination of realistic violence and virtually no sex and nudity. Earnest white liberals who liked message movies such as Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and To Kill a Mockingbird were not going to deal with the sadistic violence. Blaxploitation fans were not going to like it because there’s no black hero to relate to. The one memorable black character is Captain Raymond Daladier, an effeminate French-speaking homosexual. Art-house audiences were not going to go to see a movie by a disreputable exploitation film-maker (Meyer would eventually gain a following among the film school crowd but that was some years in the future). Mainstream audiences were going to be shocked and mystified. So the danger was that it would end up finding no audience at all, which was in fact what happened.

The biggest problem of all is the acting. Percy Herbert gives the sort of performance that would have been perfect in a typical Meyer movie but it doesn’t quite work in this one. David Warbeck is atrocious. He’s both bland and irritating and comes across as a pompous do-gooder. Bernard Boston’s performance is an absolute delight but it’s as if the the major male characters are all characters in entirely different movies.

And then there’s Anouska Hempel. Nobody has a good word for her performance. Personally I don’t think she’s all that bad but again there’s the problem of the movie being unable to decide if it’s going to be serious or campy. Hempel is slightly too over-the-top for her character to be taken seriously but she’s not excessive enough or sufficiently larger-than-life to make Lady Susan work as a cartoon villainess.

Yet another problem is that there is zero sexual heat in this movie. The most successful of all movies in this slavesploitation sub-genre was Mandingo and it was successful because it had lots and lots of sexual heat which made the violence and sadism easier to endure. With all its other faults Blacksnake could have worked if it had had that kind of overheated perverse sexual tension. Anouska Hempel’s performance is however entirely sexless. Even the brief moments of nudity manage to be sexless. I don’t think it was entirely her fault - with a leading man like David Warbeck giving the impression he didn’t even want to touch a woman she had nothing whatever to work with. Many Meyer fans feel that the problem was that she did not have the kinds of physical attributes that one expects from a leading lady in a Russ Meyer film. That may have been a problem in that Meyer thought she was too flat-chested to be sexy and I guess it’s a bit difficult to motivate yourself to convey sexiness if your director thinks you have zero sex appeal. I don’t really think this was the real problem though. She may not have had the bust measurements of a typical Meyer starlet but Anouska Hempel was still a very attractive young woman.

What it comes down to is that for the story to work we have to believe that Lady Susan is the sort of woman who can drive men crazy with lust and the sort of woman who has insatiable lusts of her own and we just don’t believe it. So we have a Russ Meyer movie totally lacking in sexiness and largely lacking in fun.

It’s not a total loss. Blacksnake was shot on location in Barbados and it looks sensational. It’s also very stylish. It’s not quite Meyer’s usual style (there’s not so much emphasis on lightning-fast editing) but it works and he does come up with some very striking (and occasionally very powerful) images.

The best thing about Blacksnake is that its failure finally convinced Meyer to forget mainstream audiences and mainstream critics altogether and go back to making the kinds of movies he liked making. It also seems to have convinced him to go back to doing his own cinematography and his own editing. His next movie would be the wonderful Supervixens, which is just about the archetypal Russ Meyer movie. Blacksnake is a failure, although it’s an interesting failure and worth a look if you’re a dedicated Meyer fan.

The Immoral Mr Teas (1959)

Russ Meyer had several claims to fame as a film-maker. He was one of the outstanding combat cameramen of World War 2. He made some of the most legendary outrageous (and innovative) camp classics of postwar cinema, such as Faster, Pusscycat! Kill! Kill! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He directed the movie that made X-rated movies mainstream (Vixen). 

And he invented the nudie-cutie.

The nudie-cutie was a fascinating product of its times. The US Supreme Court had ruled that nudity was not in itself obscene. This opened the door to exploitation film-makers, but they still had to tread warily. They could get away with nudity, but not with sex. 

So the trick was to find a way to make movies that included lots of totally non-sexual nudity.

There were two ways of solving this problem. The first was the nudist camp movie. The problem with these was that people could only take so much volleyball. Even nude volleyball. The nudie-cutie on the other hand combined skin with comedy and relied on finding amusing and ingenious excuses for the display of naked female flesh.

Meyer was probably the person best qualified to invent this genre. He’d been a very successful photographer for magazines such as Playboy. These being the glory days of cheesecake photography when the erotic frisson of such photos depended more on the skill of the photographer than on the explicitness of the images Meyer had had plenty of practice in finding ways to make nude photography interesting, glamorous and imaginative. He applied the same aesthetic to the nudie movie. And since Meyer had (as he was to demonstrate many times later in his career) a knack for visual humour and for corny but genuinely amusing gags it’s not surprising that his first foray into the nudie-cutie genre, The Immoral Mr Teas, went on to make him a truckload of money.

The plot of the film is about as minimalist as you can get. The mild-mannered Mr Teas is so obsessed by the pretty women who seem to be everywhere about him that he can’t help undressing them with his eyes. In fact his obsession has gone so far that they really do appear to him to be naked. This neatly sets up the excuse for the nudity.

The movie starts off rather sedately, with the emphasis being more on the gags than on the skin, and by the halfway point you might well be wondering what all the fuss was about. The pace certainly picks up though, and the second half has enough unclothed female pulchritude to satisfy even someone as obsessed as Mr Teas.

In the 1950s American audiences had flocked to art-house cinemas to see European movies like And God Created Woman. A tantalisingly brief glimpse of Brigitte Bardot’s bare bottom was enough to guarantee a very healthy box-office. There was certainly no doubt about what American audiences wanted to see, and the nudie-cutie became a very profitable genre indeed.

But apart from the copious amounts of nudity, is The Immoral Mr Teas worth seeing for anything other than its historical value? I think it is. Meyer was already a very accomplished cinematographer and there is nothing crude or amateurish about this production. He hadn’t yet developed his distinctive and revolutionary approach to film editing but the movie still manages to be reasonably entertaining. It might not seem to have too much in common with Meyer’s later masterpieces but as with all his movies it’s obvious that it’s been made by someone with a genuine flair for making movies, someone who is considerably more than a mere hack.

It’s not great cinematic art, but it’s good-natured harmless fun. And it does mark the feature film debut of one of America’s most interesting film-making talents (his earlier lost movie French Peep Show was just a burlesque movie, more or less just a filmed burlesque show, so I think it’s reasonable to describe The Immoral Mr Teas as his first real movie.

The Immoral Mr Teas is highly recommended as being the most pure example of the nudie-cutie.

Good Morning... and Goodbye! (1967)

Good Morning... and Goodbye! is one of Russ Meyer’s lesser known films, and while it can’t match movies like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! for style or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls for camp excessiveness it does have its own charms.

The prologue tells us that this is a movie about losers. Of course you could say that about most of Meyer’s films. Especially about the male characters.

The central characters here are Burt Boland (Stuart Lancaster) and his wife Angel (Alaina Capri). As in so many Meyer movies we have a central male character who is impotent and his wife’s unsatisfied sexual needs drive what there is of a plot. Burt has a daughter named Lana by a previous marriage, a troublesome teenager just discovering her sexuality. Angel finds sexual satisfaction in the arms of a macho quarry worker named Stone, and in the arms of any other man who happens to catch her eye. Meanwhile Lana is trying to lose her virginity to Ray, a young man who spouts a good deal of pretentious but amusing dialogue but seem more interested in talk than sex.

Poor Burt drives off into the woods alone to ponder his future and meets a mysterious woman, played by the wonderful Haji. Is she some kind of wood nymph? A witch? Whatever she is she traps Burt and ravishes him and in the process she restores his manhood. Burt can’t wait to get home and try out his new-found sexual prowess on Angel.

Burt and Angel are in the middle of sampling some marital sexual bliss when Lana arrives home and announces that Stone has had his wicked way with her. Now Burt must prove his manhood in another way, by confronting Stone and taking his revenge on him for seducing his daughter and for his sexual dalliances with Burt’s wife.

In a Meyer film you always expect a sudden explosion of violence, and this movie certainly provides one. The violence is all male-on-male violence and follows the usual Meyer pattern where violence is always a marker of sexual inadequacy. While Stone might be a stud in the bedroom he fails to satisfy Angel emotionally so he still qualifies as a loser.

Meyer’s heroines are usually strong characters but in this case Angel is also rather sympathetic. She’s driven to other men’s beds by her need for sex but she’d prefer to have her husband satisfy those needs. She actually does love him. He might be twice her age but he ends up proving himself to be more of a man than Stone.

This is in its own way one of Meyer’s most good-natured movies. All of Meyer’s movies are pro-sex, but this is one of his most pro-love movies.

Stuart Lancaster is always fun in Meyer movies but in this one he gets to do some actual acting. And he acquits himself quite well. Alaina Capri is a joy as Angel. Haji is of course perfectly cast as a kind of forest spirit of sexuality and brings to the role exactly the right combination of weirdness, exotica and sex.

The movie is visually rather restrained by the standards of Meyer movies but the dialogue is deliciously outrageous.

It’s all great fun and while it’s not one of his great movies it’s most definitely worth seeing.

The Arrow all-region PAL DVD is not very impressive but their editions are the only available editions of most of Russ Meyer’s movies.

Eve and the Handyman (1961)

Eve and the Handyman was Russ Meyer’s second feature film, and although it’s not without some charm to be brutally honest it’s probably only going to appeal to Meyer completists. In 1959 Meyer had invented the nudie-cutie genre with his landmark The Immoral Mr Teas. By this time it had become more or less established that nudity on its own would most probably not get a film banned but the nudity had to be presented in as non-sexual a way as possible. The result was the explosion of nudist camp movies in the late 50s. But one can only take so much volleyball, even naked volleyball, and it was obvious that nudie movies had to be made more entertaining. Meyer came up with the solution, by adding a plot (of sorts) and lots of gags. The Immoral Mr Teas made truckloads of money. His follow-up movie was Eve and the Handyman. It more or less utilises the same formula but with a surprising difference. Its a nudie-cutie with almost no nudity. As a consequence it has to rely on the plot and the gags. When Meyer returned to the nudie-cutie genre in 1966 with Mondo Topless his skill as a film-maker had developed to the point where he could dispense with plot entirely and still make an entertaining movie. But Eve and the Handyman doesn’t quite make it. Meyer’s wife at the time, Eve, stars. She’s a private detective of sorts, and she’s shadowing a man. But he’s no big-time criminal, just a humble handyman. Eve Meyer takes numerous other roles as well, appearing as various women encountered by the handyman. He just seems to keep running into these well-endowed and very desirable women. It’s all a gag of course; the handyman really is just a handyman. Even this early in his career Meyer is starting to show signs of his prodigious talent for shot composition and editing. He hasn’t yet evolved the frantic editing pace that characterises his best films but it’s still a well-crafted little movie. Meyer wrote, directed, photograhed and edited the movie. This almost plotless movie doesn’t really require any acting. Meyer was not yet using synchronised dialogue so all the actors really had to do was to look the part and not fall over the furniture. Anthony-James Ryan is suitably gormless as the handyman, and Eve Mayer is suitably glamorous as Eve. She does the voice-over narration as well. Apart from the photography the main reason to watch this one is Eve Meyer who manages to be utterly charming, plus she has that ability to light up the screen. There’s some amusement to be had but one can’t help wondering why Meyer chose to make a nudie-cutie with hardly any nudity. The comedy just doesn’t quite have enough going for it to carry the movie on its own. The Arrow Films Region 0 PAL DVD also includes The Immoral Mr Teas which is somewhat more entertaining. The main interest in these very early Meyer films is that they’re so goofy and good-natured. All this was to change dramatically in 1964 when he made the first of his redneck melodramas, Lorna. With that film he finally found his feet as a film-maker.

Mondo Topless (1966)

While Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is probably Russ Meyer’s best-known film today, and the film on which his reputation as being something more than just another exploitation fim-maker largely rests, the surprising fact is that at the time it was a major commercial disaster. It left Meyer desperately needing a new movie that would make some money, and he needed it fast. His answer to the problem was Mondo Topless.

“Mondo” movies were all the rage, so to Meyer it was evident that what the world needed was a mondo movie about topless go-go dancers. And that’s what he delivered. The movie consists of topless go-go dancing, and topless go-go dancers talking about being topless go-go dancers. But it’s a topless go-go dancing movie shot and edited by Russ Meyer in his own inimitable style, and with the kind of tongue-in-cheek narration you’d expect in such an exercise made by Meyer. And it does have a certain bizarre charm.

Given that the movie was going to be entirely plotless it was going to have to have a fairly short running time and since Meyer already had a lot of footage shot in Europe for an uncompleted project called Europe in the Raw he really didn’t need to do all that much extra filming. And it required no sets, and no props. And no costumes, apart from bikini bottoms! It took four or five days to film, cost virtually nothing, and made lots of money. Apparently the world really did need a topless go-go dancing movie. And who am I to argue with public taste? It put Meyer back on his feet financially and restored his commercial credibility and his confidence.

It was in many ways a return to the type of movie that launched Meyer’s film-making career, the nudie-cutie. This was a genre he more or less invented. In the late 50s the US Supreme Court had ruled that nudity was not, in itself, obscene. This opened the door to the nudist camp movie boom. As long as the nudity wasn’t specifically sexual the film-makers were on reasonably safe legal ground. But it quickly became apparent that one could only take so much of nude volleyball. Meyer’s breakthrough idea was to add a simple plot and some good-natured humour, and when combined with lots of naked ladies the result was the first nudie-cutie, The Immoral Mr Teas. It was released in 1959, and it made a mint.

Mondo Topless lacks any plot at all, but it does have a kind of theme (the dancing) and it has the same feel that The Immoral Mr Teas had. It’s a good-natured movie that celebrates the female form without ever feeling exploitative or tacky.

As you might expect, most of the ladies are very well-endowed. Perhaps too well-endowed for most tastes, although surprisingly enough several of the models don’t have the spectacular assets that generally caught Meyer’s attention.

The appeal of the movie today is mostly its time capsule quality. It has a classic 60s vibe to it. It not only captures the spirit of the golden age of go-go dancing, but the footage from Europe in the Raw preserves the spirit of what could be seen as the last golden age of live adult entertainment.

It has to be admitted that this is really a movie for Russ Meyer completists only, although fans of camp and of 60s culture in general may find it rewarding.

It’s not exactly Citizen Kane, but Meyer’s approach to his subject is refreshingly shameless and light-hearted. Meyer made some bona fide classic movies in his time but this isn’t one of them. On the other hand it doesn’t have any of the mean-spiritedness or nasty sleaziness of so much modern porn. It’s just a fun movie about boobs basically and Meyer doesn’t even pretend that it’s anything more than that.

Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer

Big Bosoms and Square Jaws is Jimmy McDonough’s biography of cult movie legend Russ Meyer. You couldn’t write a boring book about Meyer, and while the definitive biography has probably yet to be written this one is certainly worth reading if you’re a fan.

You only need to look at his movies to realise that Meyer was a strange guy. McDonough at times seems to me to be just a little judgmental, especially in regard to Meyer’s attitude towards women. Clearly he had issues in this area, but on the other hand most of the women who starred in his films seem to remember the man with considerable affection, and seemed to be happy to accept him even with his many sexual idiosyncracies.

McDonough does offer some interesting insights into Meyer’s childhood and his very odd relationship with his and his sister (who tragically ended her life in a mental hospital). I don’t think he really explains what made this complex and fascinating man tick, but it’s a good starting point.

The best part of the book is the account of the making of the movies. Meyer’s film-making method sounds like a mixture of endurance test and organised chaos. There’s also quite a bit on his early career as a photographer for men’s magazines such as Playboy.

And of course there are the wonderful women who played such an important part in his life and work. They were every bit as delightfully strange as Meyer himself, which is probably why they were able to work with him! You can’t help falling in love with women like Haji and Kitten Natividad. Now I want to watch all his movies all over again!

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, released in 1979, effectively marked the end of Russ Meyer’s career as a film-maker. This movie doesn’t have a great reputation even among Meyer aficionados but I was very pleasantly surprised by it.

The movie was a modest commercial success but changes in movie distribution, the emergence of hardcore sex movies, the introduction of home video and the rise of the multiplex cinema made it more and more difficult for movies such as Meyer’s to be financially viable.

It has much of the inspired insanity of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Supervixens but it’s by far the least violent of his later movies. In fact it’s a remarkably good-natured movie. It’s the most sexually graphic of Meyer’s movies but it’s all done in a spirit of fun. This was the third Meyer movie to be scripted by Roger Ebert, and it’s really very funny.

The setting is a small town in the USA called Small Town, USA. Meyer regular Stuart Lancaster acts as our guide and narrator and introduces us to the outrageous sex lives of the locals. Most outrageous of all is Lavonia (Kitten Natividad). Her problem is that her husband Lamar’s sexual tastes aren’t entirely to her liking. He’s a “rear window man” while Lavonia prefers the exclusive use of the front entrance so to speak. Lavonia seeks solace in the arms of the town’s refuse collector Mr Peterbuilt. Meanwhile Lamar valiantly but unsuccessfully fends off the advances of his boss, the spectacularly endowed Junk Yard Sal.

Lavonia tries to awaken Lamar’s interest in more conventional sexual practices by moonlighting as stripper Lola Langusta, where she slips the unsuspecting Lamar a Mickey Finn and then tries to get the unconscious Lamar to satisfy her needs. You might think that no woman could get any action out of a completely unconscious man, but Lavonia is no ordinary woman, and she succeeds. But can she persuade him to satisfy her properly when he’s awake? Marriage counselling with proves a mixed blessing, with the male marriage counsellor attempting to seduce Lamar while Nurse Flovilla Thatch very successfully seduces Lavonia. In desperation Lamar turns to radio evangelist Eufaula Roop (played by the more than spectacularly endowed Ann Marie). Ann Marie is anxious to offer succour to the unfortunate Lamar, and she succours him with considerable success and impressive energy.

Kitten Natividad is absolutely delightful, a powerhouse of manic and totally demented sexual excess, and with an innocent and infectious joy in her sexuality. Ann Marie is fabulously bizarre as the sexually obsessed evangelist of the airwaves. Stuart Lancaster’s narration is a joy. All the actors are perfect for the movie and for the roles they play and it all works together very nicely indeed. The very brief cameo by cult movie legend Uschi Digard is also worth a mention (and Ms Digard also acted as associate producer and general-purpose crew member on the movie).

The sexual heat generated onscreen was apparently matched by the sexual heat offscreen between Meyer and Kitten Natividad, and they spent so much time indulging in extra-curricular bedroom activities it’s a wonder they had time to make a movie. They clearly enjoyed themselves though, and perhaps that’s why the movie is so light-hearted and so much fun. There’s a truly stupendous amount of nudity and sex in this movie.

While it’s not quite in the same league as Meyer masterpieces like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls , Supervixens or Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! this one still offers classic Russ Meyer high camp madness.

Common Law Cabin (1967)

Even by the standards of Russ Meyer films Common-Law Cabin is a strange one. It’s a kind of transitionary film, between the dark and violent weirdness of movies like Mudhoney and Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and the more colourful and rather lighter surreal sex comedies like Vixen.

Dewey Hoople runs a tourist resort on the Colorado River. It’s actually not really a resort; more a tourist trap. In fact it’s just a cabin in the middle of nowhere! Unsuspecting travellers are lured there to be fleeced by his partner, a drunken old sailor. Once there they are sold over-priced booze, and treated to some truly bizarre entertainment - there’s a kind of wild woman act by his scantily clad and very well-endowed housekeeper Babette, and a floor show provided by his equally well-endowed daughter Coral.

Coral’s go go dancing is proving increasingly disturbing for her father given that she’s a rather well-developed girl, and her go go dancing costume leaves little of her charms to the imagination. His housekeeper certainly thinks he takes far much too much interest in those very womanly charms!

A fairly unhealthy situation gets a lot more unhealthy when the latest party of suckers arrives. There’s a slightly sinister individual who for some inexplicable reason decides to wants to buy Hoople’s place, and there’s an obviously not very happily married doctor and his very well-endowed wife (yes, this is a Russ Meyer movie, and there are the usual outrageously ample bosoms).

As usual in a Meyer movie, the mood gradually darkens as it emerges that one of the tourists is most definitely up to no good, and events build towards a violent and bizarre climax. But again as usual in a Meyer movie, the violence is very much cartoon-style and is much too outlandish to be offensive or really disturbing.

This movie also marks a change away from the black-and-white cinematography of the film that preceded it, and the colour photography has the bright vibrant feel of his later movies.

Common-Law Cabin may be Meyer’s most underrated movie. Definitely not his best, but it’s most emphatically worth a look if you’re a Meyer fan.

Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1970)

Cherry, Harry & Raquel!, released in 1970, is a fairly typical Russ Meyer movie of that era. It’s very similar in feel to Supervixens . Which is no bad thing!

Harry is a sheriff’s deputy in a one-horse town in Arizona. He’s been involved in a drug-smuggling racket, and now it’s time to close down the operation and eliminate the witnesses. But Harry and his crime boss aren’t as smart as they thought they ere, and their plans go badly awry.

Cherry is Harry’s live-in English nurse girlfriend. But that doesn’t stop him from having is off with Raquel, who is also having it off with pretty much every other character in the film. Including Cherry. It’s the usual Meyer mix of outrageous cartoonish violence and outrageous cartoonish sex. There are the usual surreal touches, with characters who keep appearing but they’re not really in the film at all, but they’re used to comment on the action (like Kitten Natividad as the Greek Chorus in Up!), or maybe they’re just there because they have very large breasts and Russ thought the movie really needed more actresses with enormous busts. But they add to the strangeness.

The movie has all the visual style and energy and the manic editing we expect from Meyer. Charles Napier is terrific as Harry (and went on to give an even better performance in Supervixens ). There’s not much to say about the plot, which is more or less non-existent, which matters not at all.

Cherry, Harry & Raquel! isn’t quite in the top rank of Meyer movies but it’s still undeniably a terrific romp.

Motor Psycho (1965)

Russ Meyer’s Motor Psycho, made earlier the same year, can be seen as a kind of dry run for his 1965 masterpiece Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The formula is more or less the same, but with the genders reversed.

Three drifters on motorcycles suddenly appear, and begin terrorising the locals in a remote desert community. After raping a vet’s wife they encounter an old guy in a truck, accompanied by his new young bride Ruby (played by Meyer regular Haji). As the violence continues to escalate, Ruby and the vet find themselves in pursuit of the three drifters.

It has very much the feel of a western, with motorcycles and trucks in place of horses and covered wagons. The desolate setting is used very effectively. There’s the usual Meyer mix of insanely overheated lust and violence, of men resorting to violence to cover up their personal inadequacies, of melodrama and weirdness. The movie has a similar look to Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! but with a slightly less frenetic editing style.

Like most of Meyer’s movies it features sudden outbursts of extreme violence, as lusts and repressions and resentments build up to create a pressure cooker that must inevitably explode. And like most of his films, it has interesting and confronting things to say about the violence of the society it depicts. It’s also notable for being one of the first films to deal with the dark side of the US involvement in Vietnam, with the leader of the hoodlums being a psychotic Vietnam vet spiralling ever downwards into increasing madness, still waiting for the choppers that will never arrive.

It’s not quite as successful as Pussycat but it’s still very much worth seeing. These two films, along with Lorna and the very underrated Mudhoney, complete Meyer’s early cycle of films dealing with repression and violence. The Region 2 DVD pairs Motor Psycho with Good Morning... and Goodbye! The transfer looks wonderful, and does ample justice to Meyer’s stunning black-and-white cinematography.

Russ Meyer’s Up! (1976)

If you’re familiar with Russ Meyer’s movies then you’ll pretty much know what to expect from Up!, and if you like his movies there’s real no reason not to like this one. It’s very much in the style of his previous movie, Supervixens, and like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls it was scripted by Roger Ebert (yes, that Roger Ebert). It has a totally insane plot, involving Nazis and a murder mystery. It has plenty of cartoon-style violence, lots of rednecks, and a host of women with extraordinarily large breasts.

It has even more sex and nudity than his earlier films, but like the violence the sex is done in a very tongue-in-cheek manner. It’s easy to make sex look ridiculous, but very few people have had Meyer’s talent for making sex funny. I can’t imagine anyone actually finding this movie titillating – it’s too silly and too funny. The plot involves an old guy with a German accent who looks like an elderly version of a certain well-known 20th century dictator, an old guy who is murdered by the time-honoured method of dropping a hungry piranha into his bathtub. We are then introduced to the spectacularly well-endowed Margo Winchester (Raven de la Croix), who quickly demonstrates that she’s not a woman to be trifled with when she kills a would-be rapist. She soon finds herself working in the local diner, and becoming involved with the sheriff. We also discover that any one of the townspeople may have been the murderer of the elderly German gentleman who lived in the gothic castle just outside of town, or indeed it may have been one of the young ladies with whom he shared the castle (and with whom he indulged in a variety of kinky sexual practices).

To help us keep track of the plot we have the Greek Chorus, in the form of a very naked Kitten Natividad. The resolution of the plot is as delightfully demented as you’d expect, coming from the director/screenwriter team who gave us Beyond the Valley of the Dolls . It’s all great fun. The Region 4 DVD includes interviews with Kitten Natividad and Raven de la Croix, a charming lady with a host of amusing anecdotes about the making of the movie.

If you’re new to the insanely bizarre world of Russ Meyer Up! provides a reasonable introduction, although I’d really recommend starting with some of his earlier films like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! or Vixen! They truly don’t make movies like this any more, and I happen to think that’s rather sad. Modern cinema could do with a few eccentric mavericks like Russ Meyer.

Mudhoney (1964)

If you’re only familiar with Russ Meyer from movies like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or Supervixens then his 1965 movie Mudhoney is going to come as quite a surprise. It has the sudden eruptions of violence that also feature in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! but it’s much darker, and much grimmer. Yes, it has huge-breasted women, and some nudity, and some of the characteristic and rather black and bizarre Russ Meyer humour, but mostly it’s an unrelentingly serious and very disturbing movie. Set in a small town during the Depression, it tells the story of an ex-convict called Calif who takes a job as a farm hand. His employer is a woman named Hannah, who lives on the farm with her kindly father and her violent alcoholic husband. The husband spends most of his time at the local whorehouse. He’s just waiting for dear old dad to die so he can sell the farm from under his wife and take off with the money. When Calif falls in love with Hannah a train of violence and madness is set in motion, partially fuelled by an hysterical and almost certainly insane preacher who has decided that both Hannah and Calif are adulterous spawn of Satan.

This is one of the most savage and uncompromisingly negative portrayals of American small town life in movie history. It has the lot – small-minded townsfolk, a bigoted preacher, mindless violence, drunkenness, lynchings, rape, mob violence and more inbred rednecks than you’ve ever seen in one movie. As usual in a Russ Meyer movie, the most sympathetic characters are the women – there’s Clara Belle, a good-natured and fun-loving whore; her mute sister Eula, also a whore; and Hannah herself, a typical strong and very sexual Meter woman. Apart from Calif, the men are mostly violent or ineffectual or both. Or, in the case of the preacher, crazed as well. To me the movie seems like a classic example of American gothic at its best. Meyer’s satire is rarely subtle, but it’s undeniably effective. Hal Hopper is superb as the drunken husband. It’s a savage little movie that still packs a punch, and I highly recommend it.

Russ Meyer’s Lorna (1964)

Russ Meyer’s Lorna, made in 1964, lacks the extreme campness of later Meyer films. It’s actually rather dark in tone, a tale of lust, jealousy and sexual frustration in the boondocks. Lorna has been married for a year. Her husband Jim is a decent sort of guy, and he’s studying at night to try to better himself. Unfortunately his studies only leave him enough energy to satisfy his own sexual needs, and not Lorna’s, and young Jim doesn’t seem to realise that women actually have sexual needs. So when a good-looking bad boy comes along it’s not surprising that Lorna is tempted to stray from the path of marital fidelity. Although darker than his later films it has most of the Meyer trademarks. The men are either sexually inadequate or they’re violent morons, or both. The women want more out of life than their men are offering them, and they take steps to get it. The women have, of course, the physical attributes you expect from the women in a Russ Meyer film, and those physical attributes are freely displayed. There’s nudity, there’s sex, there’s violence, and there’s also humour (much of this coming from the fire-and-brimstone preacher man who introduces the story and provides the postscript to it). As with all of Meyer’s movies it’s difficult to take offence at any of the content – Meyer’s sympathies are so clearly with his female characters, and the violence is so clearly shown as being the result of male inadequacies and fears and lack of understanding of women. Meyer had the gift of being able to make highly successful softcore sex movies that gleefully subvert and mock the whole concept of that type of movie. And as usual the camerawork and editing are amazingly energetic and imaginative – Meyer could make low-budget movies that just looked so terrific, and still look terrific even today. If you’ve only seen his later movies then Lorna is worth seeking out – it’s a wonderfully overheated saga of backwoods sleaze and passions running amok. Very entertaining.

Russ Meyer’s Vixen! (1968)

Russ Meyer’s Vixen! was one of the movie sensations of 1968. Although banned in many parts of the US it went on to make a truckload of money, and its massive commercial success led 20th Century Fox to sign the notorious sexploitation director to make big-budget mainstream movies for them. Or at least they thought they were going to get mainstream movies from him, which shows just how charmingly naïve movie studio executives could be. The eponymous heroine Vixen! is married to a pilot somewhere in the wilds of Canada. She loves her husband, but one man just isn’t enough for Vixen. Her sexual escapades lead to the sorts of bizarre adventures that only happen in Russ Meyer films. It might be superficially sexploitation, but it has those characteristic qualities that actually make it something else quite different and strange and unique. Firstly, it has Meyer’s wonderfully energetic and off-kilter visual style. Secondly it has something you just don’t get in a porno film – it’s funny. In fact it’s extremely funny, and the sex scenes are particularly funny. Thirdly, it has lots of weirdness. I don’t mean kinky sex weirdness, I mean Russ Meyer weirdness, which is a whole different thing. It also has a refreshing and delightful sense of both fun and innocence. Vixen might be insatiable, but her attitude towards the pleasures of the flesh is honest, open and healthy. No wonder it upset so many people. And it deals with sex and politics, just to make sure that it upsets even more people. Erica Gavin is Vixen, and she’s sensational. She has so much vitality, so much joie de vivre. Perhaps not a great actress in a conventional sense, but an odd, unique and exhilarating talent. If you hate Russ Meyer’s movies this one probably won’t change your opinion, but if you do enjoy the strange charms of the work of this most singular of American film-makers then you’ll find Vixen! a great deal of fun. And the scene with Vixen and the fish has to be seen to be believed.

Supervixens (1975)

Russ Meyer’s Supervixens - what can one say about this movie? It’s a Russ Meyer movie. It has lots of sex, lots of women with very large breasts, some very disturbing violence, it’s bizarre and it’s funny. The interesting thing about the violence is that it’s explicitly linked to fear of female sexuality – the macho tough guy cop beats up women because he’s sexually inadequate. The most sexually repressed people are the most screwed-up people in this movie, which kind of makes one nostalgic for the 70s in a way. Remember hen sex was supposed to be good for you? I’m not sure to what extent Meyer intended his movies as a satire on American culture, but they can be read that way. Obsessions with cars and violence certainly figure largely in the three Meyer movies I’ve seen so far. It’s basically a road movie. The hero, Clint, leaves the gas station he works at (run by a certain Martin Bormann, ex-war criminal but now nice guy) and sets off on a journey into a weird wasteland of deserts and rural Americana after he finds himself the prime suspect in a murder. He has a series of adventures, sexual and otherwise. He encounters Superlorna, Supercherry and Supersoul, and finally meets the Supervixen. She’s kind of a nice girl version of his old girlfriend, Superangel. It’s all done in typical Meyer style. The insane chase through the desert involving a souped-up Volkswagen and a dune buggy containing Clint and SuperEula is particularly bizarre. As for the ending, it’s so strange that really words fail me. The cast includes plenty of Meyer regulars, including John Lazar (Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell from Beyond the Valley of Dolls) and Haji from Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (who is now Superhaji). Overall, bizarre but entertaining. It’s over-the-top, but it lacks the extreme over-the-topness of Beyond the Valley of Dolls, which remains my favourite Meyer film.

8 out of 10

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Russ Meyer’s 1965 opus Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is another of those movies I’ve been meaning to see for a long time. It’s the story of three bad girls in fast cars. After one of them commits a murder they end up at a deserted farm inhabited by an appalling old man and his two sons. The girls are hoping to get their hands on the money they believe the old man has stashed away. General mayhem results.

I think one of the reasons this movie has stood the test of time is that for all its trashiness it’s extremely well-made trash. In a cheap exploitation movie you expect grainy washed-out photography and uninspired direction. In Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! you get black-and-white cinematography that looks crisp and fabulous and imaginative and lively direction. The action sequences and the fight scenes have a real vitality to them. As for the acting – it may be bad, but it’s interesting bad. The dialogue, like that of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, comes from no specific sub-culture that ever existed but from an imaginary world of Russ Meyer’s. It’s a very funny movie and it’s camp to a degree that is truly awe-inspiring. It’s also remarkably stylish – Meyer had a very individual visual imagination. The camera angles and the editing are actually rather arty. The movie is very Pop Art. The Go! Pussycat! Go! featurette included on the DVD is a very worthwhile extra, and the DVD (the Region 4 one anyway) also includes two commentary tracks – one by Russ Meyer and one by the pussycats themselves. I loved this movie.