Russ Meyer, who singlehandedly put the sexploitation film on the map in 1959 with his pioneering The Immoral Mr. Tees, was a veritable one-man band. He produced, wrote, directed, shot, and edited his own films, which are instantly recognizable by an inimitable aesthetic dominated by cuts delivered at a stupefyingly rat-a-tat pace. Meyer described his personal tastes as centered on “big bosoms and square jaws” (the tile, incidentally, of Jimmy McDonough’s terrific biography), and his films usually traded in stereotypes pushed to the limits of absurdity and the cartoonish. Meyer’s ability to serve up heaping helpings of unabashed sex laced with withering social satire is virtually unrivaled.
So it was a lamentable loss for lovers of film (smut or otherwise) when Meyer’s work, practically ubiquitous in the VHS era, sank into unavailability at the dawn of the DVD era, with the sole exception of his one major studio production: 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. But now Severin Films has achieved one of home video mavens’ holy grails, resurrecting Meyer’s Vixen trilogy (hopefully with more titles to come), giving the films gorgeous new 4K transfers sourced from original elements, and appending considerable bonus materials.
Vixen!, from 1968, sets the template for the subsequent films. Erica Gavin plays the title character as a voluptuous force of nature, a volcanic man- (and woman-) eater prone to shifting gears from a contemptuous snarl to a tantalizing pout at the drop of a hat. We first see Vixen cavorting in the Canadian woods with a man (Peter Carpenter) who, when he eventually puts his clothes back on, dons the distinctive uniform of a Mountie, proving that, at least in this case, she’s the one who always gets her man. Over the course of Meyer’s film, Vixen proves utterly unfazed at the prospect of serial adultery, let alone, in perhaps the film’s most provocative scene, an incestuous dalliance with her brother, Judd (Jon Evans).
At first, Meyer’s satire focuses on Vixen’s inveterate racist taunts aimed at Judd’s Black biker buddy, Niles (Harrison Page). Niles has fled America to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam War, espousing a variation of Muhammad Ali’s famous quip, “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” That particular epithet proves the dealbreaker when a burly Irishman (Michael Donovan O’Donnell) lets Niles in on his plan to hijack the plane owned by Vixen’s bush pilot husband (Garth Pillsbury) to Cuba. Because it turns out that, just like in America, the powers that be in Havana expect their Black citizens to keep quiet and know their place. If there’s one thing that Meyer hates worse than a racist, it’s a stinking commie stoolpigeon.
It’s a little hard to parse the film’s final scene, where Vixen and Niles tacitly agree that everything is finally all right between them, and Niles lights out for the territories back on American soil. Is Vixen’s ostensible racism nothing more than a hot-take put-down because she can’t stand Niles’s lack of political commitment? She as much as tells him so in the plane. But does that excuse the repugnant virulence of her assertions? Meyer apparently couldn’t care less, since, right after Niles takes off, we witness the arrival of fresh bait for Vixen’s snare, another loving couple where Meyer himself plays the soon-to-be-seduced man.
From 1975, Supervixens pushes past the absurd and straight into the realm of pure surrealism. It’s a picaresque road movie where the put-upon Clint Ramsey (Charles Pitts) encounters a new bosom buddy every 10 minutes or so, each of whose names begin with “Super.” The first of these vixens is the terrifying and ironically named SuperAngel (Shari Eubank). While making this film, Meyer was in the midst of an ugly divorce from actress Edy Williams, so it’s easy to see him channeling all of his anger and resentment into this thoroughly unpleasant character.
In a sly sleight of cinematic hand, Eubank returns at the end of the film, playing the character SuperVixen, whose amiable demeanor is 180 degrees out from SuperAngel’s venom. But before we get there, Meyer introduces us to one Harry Sledge (Charles Napier), a hypermasculine patrolman with an inordinate fondness for stroking his nightstick. When Clint runs off after a particularly vicious fight, Harry moves in, hoping to seduce the comely housewife. Not surprisingly, though, his truncheon is the only hard wood Harry can muster.
In a unexpectedly brutal turn of events, one that rivals Z-Man’s murder spree in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, an enraged Harry stomps SuperAngel nearly to death in the bathtub, before tossing in a radio, as if going in for the coup de grace. The scene is made even more cringeworthy by its protracted length. Meyer has always been interested in testing boundaries, but for some, no doubt, it will be a bridge too far. It’s certainly a far cry from the overtly cartoonish violence that concludes the film. Then again, compared to the films of “Bloody” Sam Peckinpah, it plays like something out of an Esther Williams picture.
After this lashing of ultraviolence, the mood of Supervixens turns jocular, with Clint’s various encounters played for slapstick effect. In most of these scenarios, Cline proves the passive recipient of unwanted female attentions. This is nowhere more apparent than in his forced encounter with SuperSoul (Meyer veteran Uschi Digard), a pigtailed milkmaid looking to supplement her dairy-based diet with a little raw meat. For this long middle stretch, Harry goes missing from the shambolic narrative, only to reappear once Clint takes up with SuperVixen at her rural gas station, when the film morphs into a bizarro love triangle.
In the final confrontation, Harry wants to annihilate SuperVixen with another phallic object: a stick of dynamite, instead of a truncheon. What she needs, he says, is “a long fuse and a big bang,” thus equating sex and violence in a particularly sardonic fashion. The last moments of Supervixens go full bore Looney Tunes, complete with an explicit nod to the Road Runner’s characteristic double beep, and the sight of a naked SuperVixen perched atop a rocky crag informing audiences, with a Porky Piggish wave goodbye, “That’s all folks!”
Three years later, Meyer released his final feature, a hysterical (in every sense of the word) pastiche of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town called Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. Working from a script co-written with Roger Ebert, Meyer ramps up the sex and comedy to such a fever pitch that viewers might just collapse from exhaustion by the time the end credits roll. If Supervixens was made, at least in part, as an act of revenge against a former lover, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens is a cockeyed salute to a new flame, as literally embodied by the pneumatic Kitten Natividad, who stars as the oversexed and hilariously named Lavonia Shedd.
Meyer’s films all seem to occupy the same shared space—call it the Meyerverse—and this film contains a number of callbacks to Supervixens, particularly when it comes to cameo appearances. Stuart Lancaster, who was also partnered with an unfaithful Uschi Digard in the earlier film, serves here as the narrator and analogue for Wilder’s Stage Manager. Henry Rowland reprises his role as Nazi official Martin Bormann, who features in a surreal episode involving coitus in a coffin and a pair of false teeth. (You do the math there.)
Meyer’s satire is fairly scattershot in Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, primarily taking aim at a particularly wacky variety of religious fundamentalism exemplified by radio evangelist Eufaula Roop (Anne Marie), whose idea of purgation through baptism involves a quick bonk in a half-filled bathtub next door to her studio. Like David Lynch, albeit in a vastly different tonal register, Meyer enjoys prodding the sordid underbelly of Small Town, U.S.A., painting its assorted hypocrisies and sexual shenanigans with a truly broad brush.
Though he surely didn’t realize at the time that this would be his final film, Meyer ends Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens with a perfectly realized cinematic farewell, as he turns the camera back on himself and his production equipment. In a joke that’s not terribly far from the truth, he’s the only one there, the rest of his always spartan crew having absconded. In a cheeky echo of Supervixens, Natividad’s Lavonia perches atop a rocky crag, waving goodbye to the audience. As these three releases attest, Russ Meyer made films like no one else: instantly recognizable, consistently provocative, and frequently hilarious.
Vixen!, Supervixens, and Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens are available on January 28 from Severin Films 4K UHD Blu-ray.
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