100 Years of Russ Meyer: Our Recommendations from the Sex Positive Film Maker’s Legacy
“Nothing is obscene providing it is done in bad taste.”
- Russ Meyer
The Self-Confessed ‘King of the Nudie Cuties,’ Russ Meyer was born in 1922, growing up in a single-parent (his father had flown the coop) family, he developed a taste for celluloid following the purchase of an 8MM camera as a teenager. Meyer honed his filmmaking skills during World War 2 as a combat cameraman with the 29th Division. Like Stanley Kubrick, he started out in newsreels. (The footage turns up in Patton). He acquired the technical skills in the army he would utilize in his movies, ensuring success in his film-career: composition, lighting, editing, and choreography would become staples of his cinematic excursions.
Even though he was an independent filmmaker his career doubles as a Hollywood primer. A pioneer of joyous indecency, Meyer has been cited as the reason The King of Hollyweird Lloyd Kaufman discovered masturbation when studying at Yale. The Cramps appropriated the styles of his femme fatale-type characters, The Spice Girls emulated scenes from his movies, and without Meyer, there would be no Divine or Tarantino’s Deadly Viper Sqaud. Oh, and let’s not forget Ernest Hemingway was a friend, introducing the impressionable young man to working girls, who allegedly popped Meyer’s cherry.
“I was healthy enough an hour ago or do people look different to you if they are not horizontal.”
- Varla
Playboy was launched in 1953 and Meyer was there right from the beginning. His first wife Eve Meyer was a frequent collaborator who was killed in the Tenerife airport disaster in 1977. Subsequently, his acceptance into Hollywood dovetailed with the new respectability of Playboy and porn. But like many Hollywood players, he ended up back in the wilderness, but still making movies. As a filmmaker, he forged his own path. Refusing to pander to audience expectations of how action or sexploitaton cinema should look, and what character types should populate its broad, bold, and bloody spectrum. Grindhouse story staples, car-chases, ferocious femmes, kung-fu, big boobs, and acidic camp asisde, Meyer never played it safe or subscribed to an orthodox way of making movies. Racing through so many pop channels, with a constantly mutating identity – at times, his oeuvre could be something of a perverted pastiche, extrapolated from exploitation cinema, soft-core pornography, and taking cues from hardboiled potboilers, Doris Wishman, Fellini, and Herschell Gordon Lewis.
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In terms of sexuality, body-positivity, and ultra-violence in the exploitation canon, it was the taboo-breaking Meyer who broke the mold with his busty brand of independent feminist filmmaking. With action-oriented grindcore sexploitation joints like Vixen, Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill!, and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Meyer’s played fast and loose with genre tropes, satire, and generic hooks, considered one of the first to elevate and celebrate sexuality/body-positivity in sexploitation cinema, delivering it to mainstream audiences.
It would be decades before representational politics, performative feminism, or the prospect of the intersectional narrative entered the socio-pop culture lexicon. Yet, Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, when examined through a modern lens, implicitly embraced the components which characterised the likes of Ms.45, Coffy, and Lady Snowblood. In many of his pseudo-skin (Meyers would never take the Deep Throat route) flicks, feminist, and to a lesser extent, queer sensibilities collided with grindhouse archetypes to titillating effect. With rising sex-negativity, and censorship insidiously gaining traction in URL spheres – these snapshots in time serve to remind us, sex should be playful, humor-laced, and there's an interesting debate to be had concerning his busty brand of feminism, which looks eerily prescient at a time of body/sex-positive culture.
Below are our recommended Meyer flicks from each filmmaking era:
Gothic Period
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
Meyer’s gothic period mirrored a larger appetite for that genre in the period. Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is iconic and we have Tura Santana with her portrayal of Varla, a brutal warrior woman, beyond redemption and pushed to the point of no return, and we wouldn’t want her any other way. Pussycat is a blood-fuelled, old-fashioned heist movie with grindcore sensibilities, a bad-ass fiend in Varla, and lots of blood, neck-breaking and boobs. When a trio of Go-Go Girls, racing cars in the desert get into a scrap with a young couple, Varla fights and kills the boyfriend in combat. Afterwards, they make a pit-stop at a dubious gas-station run by an old man and his son. Varla concocts a plan to take them for all they’ve got. Welcome to violence…
"Beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future."
- John Waters on Faster Pussycat! Kill Kill
Melodrama
Vixen (1969)
Vixen was an Erika Gavin vehicle which on the surface, is really straightforward and easily pigeonholed. But if you dig a little deeper, it’s a self-deprecating deconstruction the porn genre. The salacious plot follows Gavin, who spends her days wandering the woods, scantily-clad, and meeting hard-bodied mountain men for tastefully directed trysts. Her long-suffering husband invites a couple to stay for the weekend and Vixen seduces the husband, the wife and her own brother. It really is wholesome, by today’s standards.
Hollywood
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)
The success of Vixen prompted 20th Century Fox and his first major studio production was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. An unofficial sequel to classic trash Valley of the Dolls by Jaqueline Susann (the studio rejected her script). Meyer penned the script with film writer Roger Ebert and the tale had a similar narrative trajectory (at least in the beginning) to the novel. The film had a satirical edge and encapsulated what was happening in Hollywood at the time. It had a distinctive style, lots of quick editing and cutaways and a kaledicopic candy-colour palette.
The Wilderness
Supervixens (1975)
Supervixens is wish-fulfillment territory for men, women, and anybody who likes sexually-charged nyphomaniacs with big boobs. A husband is accused of murdering his hectoring and wounding (he didn’t) wife and goes on the run. While trying to evade the law, he meets on bosomy bad girl after another while been plagued by the ghost of his ex wife.
Words: Alan Kelly
