We wonder if anyone ever found a moment of genuine arousal in Meyer's feverishly staged and edited melodramas like "Faster Pussycat Kill Kill"........true enough, he populated his overheated pulp with gorgeous, huge-breasted women........and if you didn't blink through Meyer's frenzied camera shots which rarely lasted more than 2 seconds, you might catch fleeting glimpses of them naked......_
20th Century Fox understood that Meyer was far more of a pulp fictioneer than a pornographer........and handed him the reigns of what would become one of Fox's two attempts to make a mainstream, X-rated movie......(the other being the catastrophic "Myra Breckinridge", of which we'll post later).....
So by the time the summer of 1970 rolled around, Fox prepared to unleash not one, but two big budget WTF movies........before anyone ever thought of screaming out "WTF!" at major studio film.
(As you might expect, the passage of time has turned the "X" rating of Meyer's film into a mild, breakfast-blend R...….especially when compared to what goes in today's movies...….)
While 'Myra' turned into a gruesome trainwreck, "Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls" was every inch a Russ Meyer movie, with a wink-wink over-the-top screenplay by no less than film critic Roger Ebert.....
To avoid the legal wrath threatened by 'Valley Of The Dolls' author Jacqueline Susann, Ebert and Meyer concocted a cartoonish, funhouse-mirror version of Susann's premise (3 girls done in by evil Hollywood)......... which nobody would ever mistake for the novel or the mediocre, junky movie made from it in 1967.....
No mopey starlets who think they can act show up in this movie to slow things down.......the 3 girls here are all stunning Playboy Playmates with the usual Meyer-mandated spectacular cleavage.......
The men surrounding them? A grotesque parade of posers, pretty-boys, heavily muscled studs,leering sleazes and lunatic hermaphrodites. But bless their little hearts, Roger Ebert supplies them with endlessly quotable lines.....(...."You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance...") You can practically hear him laughing as he typed this stuff.
Roger 'n Russ wrap this all up with a Manson-style massacre and a startlingly funny closing narration that sounds like an Evangelical de-briefing of all the sex, sin and carnage we've just watched as we drooled with guilty pleasure.....
We could sit around forever debating the merits and flaws of this movie.........(including Meyer's penchant for restless, lightning fast editing......he would have been right at home directing "Transformers" movies)........but the best thing to do.......sit back and drink it all in, every nutty demented minute of it.........
The textbook definition of a one-of-a-kind movie.......a perfect satirical storm whipped up by a guy who made movies like nobody else. For a movie that more than earns its WTF status, 3 stars (***)........you're guaranteed never to see anything like it....
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