If anyone tries to argue with you that director Russ Meyer is anything less than the king of over-sized breasts and eroticized mayhem, that person is irrational and trying to pick a fight with you and should be avoided. Flee, and take refuge in the mammoth,all-engulfing, bouncing cleavage and violent, no-nonsense revenge fantasies contained in the master's masterpieces, six of which are currently available on DVD. From the dawn of the sixties through the decline of the seventies, Meyer produced a string of high-impact,hyper-hot kinetic visual treats that will give fans of tits and violence cause to rejoice from here to eternity.
Meyer's topsy-curvy oeuvre of rocking knockers and ball-busted studs is the stuff of rhapsodic myth among connoisseurs of sexually supercharged,ass-kicking Amazons. Oddly, Mr. Meyer's biologically enhanced epics of jugs conquering thugs are less than universally acclaimed. The cable TV explosion that has offered hundreds of channels of titillation to every home in America has included woefully few Meyer marathons. The leering joy Meyer's camera takes as it tracks the orbit of spinning chest twins or follows the arc of a blunt instrument to an exposed skull defies broadcast standards. Prior to the release of the current batch of DVDs,Meyer titles were available exclusively on VHS, and only directly from the maestro himself. The new discs are widely distributed (as in checkout amazon.com) at a fee that even penny pinchers among big boob devotees will admit is fair and reasonable.
A youthful whiz with a movie camera, boyish Russ Meyer (born Russell Albion Meyer on March 21, 1922, in Oakland, California) had hardly pried his lips from his mother's nips before he won his first film-making award, using a camera given to him by that forward-thinking and (if the wonder racks of her son's stunning works are any indication)well-stacked woman. Young Russ developed his eye for action as a newsreel cameraman in the European theater during World War II. Press releases and fluff bios have long alleged that significant portions of Meyer's raw battle footage (almost as explosive as what he would be shooting later) were spliced into the rousing fight scenes of Oscar winner Patton (1970).
Upon his return from Europe, the suddenly sophisticated veteran - who claimed to have chucked his virginity while overseas at a cathouse on the advice of novelist Ernest Hemingway - tried his hand and eye at industrial films and girlie photography to pay his bills. To his credit,budding Meyer shot some of the earliest Playboy centerfolds.Proof that God is kind, merciful and a boob man lies in the happenstance that Russ Meyer found greater satisfaction in filming skin than in documenting factory safety.
In 1959, the soon-to-be mammary master released his first theatrical film, the ribald "nudie cutie" The Immoral Mr. Teas. Tame bythe standards of lap-dancing, fully nude strip clubs, Mr. Teastells the adventures of a traveling salesman who arrives at the porch of one "well-developed" naked beauty after another. Billed as "a French comedy for unashamed adults," this pioneering exercise in jiggling jug joyousness paid off like a double-D jackpot, netting one millionpre-1960s dollars in profit.
Russ could afford to do whatever he wanted to do, and he wanted to crank out cutting-edge explicit movies at an astounding rate. The Mr.Teas dollars freed the archetypal writer/director/producer to follow no instructions other than those of his own vision of optimized entertainment. The Meyer doctrine includes comic-book plot lines populated by brawny Neanderthals and the top-heavy women who torment them. There are also appetizing helpings of taut female haunches bursting their first-edition hot pants and bed-busting bouts of coitus.
With every new movie, Meyer's narrative style became more frenetic, his female stars more pneumatic, his depiction of sexuality more excessive and carnal. The quick-view editing cuts and flagrant art direction he pioneered during the early 1970s in seminal eye stimulants such asSupervixens (1974) and Up! (1976) has become the cool style of choice for MTV and any number of "edgy" television dramas. None of the imitators matches Meyer's original nerve-twanging immediacy and raw sexual electricity. The double stacked heroines who populate such immorality plays as Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill!(1966) and Mudhoney(1966) wield their chest melons like male-bashing bludgeons. The bitches and boneheads of Meyer's filmic universe are played with the broad overacting common to the caricatures who prance from scene to scene in a John Waters movie. But while the mad antics seen in Vixen! (1968) or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) are consistently camp, the swelling, swaying,life-affirming secondary sexual characteristics that buoy up the Meyer canon ensure that silliness does not cross into gayness.
There is never any question about who is winning the war of the sexes in a Russ Meyer movie. The broads have the upper gland in any gender conflict. Nevertheless, it's a world where any man should be happy to be a loser.
A visit to Meyer's website (mfilms.com) proves that, even at 80 years old, the Fellini of the sex industry remains virile and productive. The site features a gallery of classic girlie photography, but the artist's primary endeavor is marketing Russ Meyer products. Slathering on words such as rotundity, orbicularity andglobosity, the ever-creative pitchman hawks videos of his super-sized body of work, limited edition prints of his glamor photos,T-shirts, movie posters and a three-volume, decade-in-the-making autobiography titled A Clean Breast. The magnum opus is purported to feature more than 2,500 "personally selected" photos. There commended best buy on the "orbicular" site are the DVDs. Buy them all,then hope and beg Mr. Meyer to hurry up and transfer the bulk of his great hits to digital disc.
MONDO TOPLESS (1966)
A precursor to HBO's stripper documentary series, Mondo Topless takes the viewer on a Russ Meyer-guided tour of San Francisco's world-renowned peeler circuit, circa 1966. Actresses portraying top-heavy ecdysiasts of the day flaunt their globes and regale the camera with chatty anecdotes regarding their work, the bras required to contain their considerable melons and what kind of groovy guy has the best chance to take those ta-tas home. Sweet sight sensations Babette Bardot (Picture: 1 - 2) as Bouncy, Pat Barrington (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3) asBumptious and Darla Paris (Picture: 1 - 2) as Delicious keep audience members unblinking and alert.
VIXEN! (1968)
As a prolific, idiosyncratic movie director, Russ Meyer's enthused veneration of the idealized, boobier-than-life female form has done more to advance the cause of female empowerment than all the seminars of gender-protectionist academia rolled into one. One of his early undisputed masterpieces, Vixen!, is a film that should be studied in feminist think tanks worldwide, but not for the reasons the pinch-faced spoilsports might anticipate. Looking for a strong,individualized role model for women who yearn to take command of their destinies? Who suffer no man to stand between them and the fulfillment of their every urge, be it for intellectual stimulation or multiple orgasm? Search no further than "Vixen Palmer," the ultra-titular heroine of Vixen!, as brought to life by dark-haired, top-shelf fire breather Erica Gavin (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4). If more women would follow in Erica's bra cups, we would live in a more bountiful, elastic world today.
CHERRY, HARRY & RAQUEL (1969)
In a tale that could be ripped from today's tabloids, sheriff and pot profiteer Harry (Charles Napier) and his Mexican sidekick are in pursuit of a disgruntled Indian who plans to undermine Harry's marijuana-smuggling operation. Inexplicably, but to great effect, Harry pauses from his manhunt to have sex with a hooker named Raquel(Larissa Ely) (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6) and a nurse called Cherry (Linda Ashton) (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5).The sister of mercy and the sister of the streets also make the four-breasted beast between themselves. Buxom Swedish sex queen Uschi Digard (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3) prances across the sand-scape in her customary lack of costume, which presents an instance of something good coming from nothing.
SUPERVIXENS (1975)
Super is the perfect adjective for what many academics in the field of Russ Meyer studies consider to be the epitome of the super master's super-violent, super-sexy style and substance - Supervixens. A gas station attendant thinks he has troubles just because his super-stacked, super-sexed, but nagging, wife Superangel (as played to super perfection by Shari Eubank) (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - ) is dissatisfied with the trashy creature comforts he is able to provide. The couple squabbles and sexes at a super volume that brings police interference. The cop falls under Superangel's super spell and returns while hubby is at the gas station,but is afflicted with a super-disappointing case of impotence and gruesomely murders Superangel in the bathtub. Now the gas station attendant has real troubles, super ones.
UP! (1976)
Written in conjunction with rotund film critic Roger Ebert, this example of Meyer's convoluted latter-day output requires an inhumanly buoyant Kitten Natividad) to burst breasts-first into the frame from time to time to explain what the hell is going on. The action starts with a shadowy Hitleresque character being assassinated by the method of a piranha tossed into his bathtub. The plot becomes more irrelevant from there. Margo Winchester (Raven De La Croix)arrives on the scene to investigate and absorbs all viewer attention by revealing her goddess-worthy torso. Silly, campy and 100-percent heterosexual chaos rules from there on in!
BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA-VIXENS (1979)
Written by Roger Ebert (under the pseudonym R. Hyde), Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens is a film about boobs in all their guises, but only in the super-plus sizes. Lamar (Ken Kerr) is a hillbilly boob who works in a junkyard owned by Junkyard Sal (Jane Mack), a black woman whose boobs are only beaten in size by her outrageous butt cleavage. Two lesser hillbilly boobs also work for Sal and they persecute the Lamar boob because his duties include screwing Junkyard Sal between wrecking cars. Lamar's girlfriend (bigger-is-betterboob owner Kitten Natividad) (Picture: - - - - - - ) likes shedding her clothes and having sex, but not in the rear-entry way Lamar craves. This conflict guarantees a resolution dripping in gratification.
