Nobody Knows Anything

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. After all, the films of Sergio Leone have something to do with death.

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

The rise of DVD and the success of American television has had an unfortunate side effect. When it comes to widescreen framing for the big screen, directors who’ve worked predominately in television, advertising or music videos simply do not have a clue. JJ Abrams, creator of Alias and Lost, was heavily criticised for his filming of Mission Impossible III (2006) as if it was just another TV show: too many closeups, too many cuts, not the faintest idea that his images would be projected on forty foot wide cinema screens. What a contrast it is to watch Sergio Leone at work, a man with an instinctive feel for composition and shot selection where not a frame is wasted. Leone wasn’t an intellectual or a political filmmaker (except after Leone started to believe his own press), he was an instinctual one, and the effects he achieved reach such a fine pitch of pure visual cinema that it is hard to remember that a lot of the imagery we’ve enjoyed over the last 40 years started here in this low-budget, second-string Italian western.

Eastern Promises (2007) *

In which the Cronenberg project has continued to infect the local multiplex after the success of A History of Violence (2005). There are similar narrative tricks at work in this new film, which a second viewing will highlight. I don’t know whether it’s a result of his Canadian upbringing, but there’s a chilliness of affect Cronenberg brings to his films that’s quite unique. They have an unrelenting quality, a suggestion of inevitability. Things could only turn out the way they turn out because there was no other way they could go. There was an amusing “ban this filth” non-story in The Sunday Times last week, in which quite clearly nobody outside the newspaper had any interest. The simple defence of the violence in this film is this – this is what violence really looks like: nasty, brutal and bloody; utterly unredeeming, utterly unstylised, utterly shocking. Criticising Cronenberg for an honest approach to violence is a dead end, and the so-called Arts Editor who wrote the piece should be sacked for lacking cultural awareness, intelligence, comprehension and film literacy.

No cinema visits this week.

The Truman Show (1998)

The Truman Show fell into that weird gap after DVD had started up in 1997, where film companies weren’t entirely sure about what to do with their new releases in this new home viewing realm. And Paramount have not been that great in realising the potential of the technology. For many years, all that was available in America for this film was a non-anamorphic transfer with a trailer. And even though the Region 2 UK release was anamorphic, I kept holding off buying this title until finally a Special Collector’s Edition with actual extras appeared in 2006. Since I don’t watch television, the whole reality television thing has rather passed me by, thank God, though amusingly I do own a number of movies critical of the genre. There’s nothing new about this in cinema; in the early 1950s with the rise of television, quite a few films had scenes or extended riffs about how terrible TV was in comparison to cinema. In theory, things have changed a bit today, and really interesting TV is being produced in America and, less often, in the UK. But I would still rather watch these productions as DVD boxsets rather than TV transmissions. And in the background to all of this, there is The Truman Show: “You were real. It’s what made you so good to watch.”

Dreamgirls (2006)

Somewhat undervalued at the Oscars, though Jennifer Hudson’s thoroughly justified Best Supporting Actress win made up for a lot of odd omissions, especially recognition for writer/director Bill Condon, who pulled out all of the stops in a notoriously difficult genre to get right. And boy, does Dreamgirls get it right. Strangely, the wrong way to approach this film, I think, is to watch it and think oh that’s why Diana Ross became and that’s what Berry Gordy did; the film is far more successful as a metaphorical exploration of the journey so-called “race music” took from R&B through Motown and Pop to Soul and Disco. The film itself and the film’s music get the details of each era exactly right in a way that those irritating jukebox musicals that are all over musical theatre right now completely fail to do.

Monster House (2006)

Perhaps this was done as a tryout for Beowulf (2007) as a development of what had been learned on The Polar Express (2004), almost as a throwaway. There’s a certain amount of disingenuousness in the DVD supplements about the extent to which performance capture drove the animation in this film. Other DVDs, not least the Lord of the Rings discs, have stressed that performance capture can be a good start, but the animation will more often than not have to be tweaked later, often redone from scratch frame by frame. Having said that, the film’s a lot of fun and actually quite dark in places for an animated feature for, you know, kids.

Hot Fuzz (2007)

Cheered me up a lot this week. Thanks, guys.

Mary Sharp (1935-2007)

I feel it would be wrong of me not to mark the passing of my mother, Mary Sharp, who died this week very suddenly and quite unexpectedly. I inherited my cinephilia from her, a woman with many interests, of which film was the one that brought us most closely together. One of her earliest memories was of being taken by her mother out of school along with her brother to see Gone with the Wind (1939); I’m not sure when this occurred, it was probably for one of the later reissues rather than when she was four years old. My parents also went to see Don’t Look Now (1973) on its original release when it was paired with The Wicker Man (1973), something I would have loved to have experienced, but I was only six. She loved old films, especially old black and white films, especially old black and white films with strong women like Bette Davis in them. She also loved animation, especially Disney, especially the genius of Nick Park, especially Pixar, and was very much looking forward to seeing Ratatouille (2007), which we were planning to see today and which she knew more about than me since she’d been watching the previews on Sky. She didn’t think much of The Truman Show, loved Dreamgirls, would have loved Monster House, and Hot Fuzz probably wouldn’t have been her cup of tea, though you never could tell. She would often start telling me about this wonderful film she’d seen late at night, and it would turn out to be Taxi Driver (1976). I’ll see you at the movies, Mom, I’ll see you at the movies.

No cinema visits this week, but there should have been, oh yes. Unexpected strong language.

the devil wears prada (2006)

What is this chick lit thing and where did it come from? When did men stop buying books, leaving it all up to the women who very clearly now form the majority of book purchasers in this country? One glance at the paperbacks charts in a major chain will tell you that there’s going to be a limited amount of male interest in yet another book about victimhood in which somebody’s bastard parent spent years beating them with a stick with a bunch of nails hammered into it and they lived to tell the tale, hurrah, but they’re now a professional victim unable to progress in their lives, boo. (Watch me mock someone’s deeply felt touchy feely pain.) Back in the 1980s, chick lit was your bonkbuster, they were known as S&F (or Shopping & Fucking for those who don’t know) and they were all written by Jackie Collins, or by a Jackie Collins clone, so you knew where you were with them, and it wasn’t a whole shelf in bookshops like it is now. Interestingly, the film of Lauren Weisberger’s book is more softhearted and more chick lit than the original book, which is nastier and has more swearing and perhaps less obsession with the clothes, the cataloguing of which is the prime constituent of the filmmakers’ audio commentary. And Emily Blunt rules.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)

Before there was Chanel No. 5, there was Patrick Süskind’s unfilmable novel about a nasal-centred 18th Century serial killer obsessed with capturing the essence of virgins. This kind of film is often referred to as the Euro pudding, in which great swathes of money are available from Luxembourg only if Luxembourg’s finest character actor is given a principal part in the film, regardless of their suitability for the role. A lot of Euro puddings are indigestible for this very reason (you may care to look up how many countries put up money to fund Dancer in the Dark (2000) and be amazed that anything resembling a real film was produced at the other end). Freed from any reliance on Hollywood financing, the filmmakers were able to bring their vision to the screen uncompromised by twats in suits in Burbank focus grouping any originality to death, and the film undergoes a sea change into something rich and strange.

Superman Returns (2006)

Apparently, fat nerds in comicbook stores lurking on internet chatrooms obsessed with character continuity could have done a better job with the new Superman film than a professional film director with acclaimed previous success in the field. Right. They would have added more, I dunno, plane crashes and shit. Back in 1978 the tagline of the Superman movie was “You’ll believe a man can fly,” but it really helped if you were only eleven at the time. These days, all I really cared about was how great John Ottman’s orchestration of John Williams’ original themes were (as well as what Ottman himself brought to the music) and how fantastic they sounded over a big cinema sound system. That music and a guy in a cape doing stuff is all I needed from a Superman movie, and this film delivers in spades. This and Batman Begins (2005) gave one hope that someone at Warners knew what they were doing. The challenge for Warner Bros is to stop these franchises turning into shit with the third film in the series, which didn’t happen first time around. Superman III (1983) or Batman Forver (1995), anyone? Thought not.

The Incredibles (2004)

Steve Jobs bought Pixar in 1986. It is the smartest thing he has ever done.

Not only am I late after the Russ Meyer blowout, but I’ve only watched three films this week. I really needed the break. One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. Language may offend.
Death Proof (2007) *

I’m too tired to rehash the whys and wherefores of this film that crept into UK cinemas and out again after two weeks because American audiences are so stupid that they start walking out of Planet Terror (2007) when the credits roll and don’t stick around to see the second feature, which is probably the better film (Planet Terror verdict forthcoming). Duh. Thankfully, what Death Proof has going for it is that rather than being a totally out there breakthrough film, it’s just a cool place to hang out and watch two groups of girls talk and interact before they’re interrupted by some vehicular madness that is some of the best vehicular madness that has ever been filmed by anyone. However even as I’m typing this, I can imagine Tarantino giving an interview in which he talks about the films with far superior car chases he was aiming to emulate but did not succeed. Can you too? The only thing that’s a slight indicator of the beginning of the Tarantino decline (apart from the receding incline of his hairline) is the self-referential phrase that forms this week’s title. It’s really, really not a good idea to be so indulgently quoting yourself 13 years after you made Pulp Fiction (1994). Really, really.

A Good Year (2006)

Would this have been a better film if it had been a Working Title production with Hugh Grant, just like all the reviews said? NO, IT FUCKING WOULDN’T. Oh, I’m sorry, didn’t you hear me at the back? As a man of advancing years, Ridley Scott has been slipping micro productions inbetween his macro films for the last few years before time runs out on him, and this French sorbet, filmed, as Scott says on the audio commentary, all within eight minutes of his own home in Provence, must have come as a welcome change of pace after Kingdom of Heaven (2005). There is a slightness to the project that suits the subject matter perfectly, and people with too ingrained an image of Russell Crowe hacking people to death in the Colosseum only have themselves to blame. Crowe was an actor long before he inadvertently became a movie star, and there are plenty of scenes in this film in which Crowe’s character acts like a total shit that a lesser actor would have had removed from the script before he would even deign to read it. Hugh Grant and his schtick are not welcome here.

Deja Vu (2006)

Meanwhile, brother Tony was busy in New Orleans with this thriller that begins with an explosion (it is a Tony Scott movie, after all), edges into science fiction of the mindbending Twelve Monkeys (1995) kind, and ultimately becomes a unexpected love story. To say more would spoil a treat you know you owe yourself. Meanwhile, brother Tony was busy in New Orleans with this thriller that begins with an explosion (it is a Tony Scott movie, after all), edges into science fiction of the mindbending Twelve Monkeys (1995) kind, and ultimately becomes a unexpected love story. To say more would spoil a treat you know you owe yourself. Wait a minute…

Warning: contains boobies. Lots and lots of boobies. And strong language. Especially as Meyer’s movies become more insane and sexually explicit. Once again, whatever facts about Meyer and his films I may possess are drawn from Jimmy McDonough’s excellent 2005 biography. Buy it here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Bosoms-Square-Jaws-Biography/

Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968)

It starts with a topless go-go dancer jiving out in the salt flats wearing a motorcycle helmet, presumably for reasons of health and safety. Fifteen minutes later, nothing more interesting has happened. It’s unusual to encounter a Russ Meyer movie with a glacial pace and a laboured setup; the departure of long-time screenwriter John Moran may well be responsible. Standing in for his sparky dialogue is an endless scene in which the male lead (he gets naked as well), the manager of a topless go-go joint, has his chest hair shaved by a top-heavy peroxide blonde prostitute reminiscing about her childhood among the Amish. I am not making this up.

The female lead, Anne Chapman, has none of the attitude of Alaina Capri, and her charisma-free performance from behind a Botoxesque mask emphasises that for Meyer’s films to work they need the outlandish quality that people like Capri and Tura Satana were able to bring. When it’s missing, no amount of absurdist intercutting in the sex scenes can help (the most notorious here being the footage of a demolition derby that accompanies a swimming pool romp). Eventually the rather tiresome narrative threads that were so painfully set up earlier come together back at the go-go joint, which is subjected to the 60s most incompetent attempted heist. It all ends in a bloodbath shootout and poor old Anne Chapman is sort of assaulted on a pool table; her expression doesn’t change (perhaps it can’t). As a minor note, just prior to this, one of the criminals subjects Chapman to a scene in which he whispers the phrase “Kiss me”, while jabbing a gun into her face. This is so similar to the notorious “Fuck me” scene in Wild at Heart (1990) that I’m convinced David Lynch must have sat through this movie as well. Poor us.

Vixen! (1968)

Oh, Canada! Bush country! What joy Meyer must have felt at finding another willing accomplice in the shape of Erica Gavin. A graduate of The Losers, the same topless bar that employed Haji and Tura Satana, Gavin, who does not underwhelm in the bosom department, was amused at her audition to find herself almost dismissed as not chesty enough for Russ. Fortunately, Meyer recognised her other qualities.

We first meet Vixen (Gavin) bedding a Mountie, which may well have more cultural significance for Canadians than I can appreciate. Vixen is an immoral, incestuous, bisexual, racist, conservative, nymphomaniac troublemaker, so she has more than a few issues to work through; the wonder of Gavin’s performance is that not only does she play all of these attributes so convincingly, but they don’t stop her being fun to watch as she tears through the other characters. Gavin’s up-for-it gameness was signalled early on in the filming when she dangled a freshly-caught fish in her cleavage and then put it in her mouth and sucked on it, making Meyer most happy.

The introduction of sex scenes into Meyer’s movies was gradual (and resisted by his wife, Eve, whom they annoyed because she feared the local censorship battles they would have to fight - and she wasn’t wrong) but here they reach their first peak. Vixen was the first American-made film willingly to adopt the newly-created MPAA rating of X, before the X was permanently sullied by the hardcore pornography that would co-opt the rating in the 1970s. Vixen! was a big hit in 1968, and its breakout into mainstream theatres, and some kind of female audience as well, must have been at least partly due to this: Erica Gavin, or rather Vixen, looks like she really enjoys sex, which is pretty much a first for a Russ Meyer movie. And the lesbian sex scene scored with a saxophone may be responsible for every single saxophone-scored sex scene that’s followed in its wake.

Oh yes, and there are tits on bare wire bedsprings shot from underneath the bed, another bona fide Russ Meyer “what the fuck?” moment (and one which led to complaints from actors who didn’t like the springs digging into their skin; I mean, who would?).

Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1969)

Although there’s an anti-marijuana rap at the start, this film isn’t about marijuana or drug smuggling at all, it’s about a drug kingpin attempting to kill a former associate called Apache, who’s gone into business for himself, by employing the services of a corrupt border patrol guard, Harry (the mighty jawed Charles Napier in the first of many appearances for Meyer) and his friend, Enrique. Mysteriously, this process involves a plethora of sexual encounters between these characters and Cherry (Linda Ashton), Harry’s wife, and Raquel (Larissa Ely), a local prostitute, not to mention a ton of quick cutaways to Uschi Digard (Meyer’s second ethereal character) bouncing around the desert in a variety of guises to pad out the running time.

After Erica Gavin, Ashton and Ely are major disappointments; they serve a purely decorative function and initiate none of the action (except for a gratuitous lesbian scene late on that intercuts with the bloody climax of the plot). If Linda Ashton is English, how come she sounds like an American trying to imitate an English accent? After Vixen! (1968), this is a major disappointment, yet it still proved so absurdly profitable that it caught the attention of 20th Century Fox at a vulnerable time in the history of that company, beset by heavy losses after a number of expensive films had tanked at the box office. They figured that if they could get Russ to do his thing on the cheap for them, they’d be laughing all the way to the bank. This ploy actually worked and Meyer’s first film for them would be a big hit, but it would also embarrass the company so much that they would then spend 20 years in denial pretending that they had never made it in the first place. The film?

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

Let the games begin. If you’ve made it through Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966) and you want a second point of entry to the Meyer oeuvre, look no further than this, the first of Meyer’s collaborations with Roger Ebert, but don’t bogart the joint, man. In the tradition of Head (1968), this film starts where it ends with murder in the dark and a gun suggestively inserted into Erica Gavin’s mouth. There’s then a quick rewind to earlier times and a high school prom performance from The Kelly Affair (later to be renamed The Carrie Nations by Z-Man), a manufactured pop group who knock the Monkees into a cocked hat. There is no sense in which Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers and Marcia McBroom remotely resemble proper musicians, which only makes their performances even better. And the songs are terrific too, Mamas and the Papas knockoffs that sound better than the real thing (I’m listening to them now).

The pace of the opening twenty minutes is astonishing with a prologue, a band gig, a journey to LA and a scene at a fashion studio, all rendered in insanely quick cuts with breakneck dialogue and so completely disorienting that you either abandon the film before the first party scene or give your body to the ritual. There are kind of two plots at work here, the first is an Inheritance Plot involving Dolly Read and her fashion designer aunt that just stops before it’s resolved, which is when the Other Plot kicks in: a demented series of narrative threads that climax in a costume party with murders, couplings and marriages at Z-Man’s clifftop mansion. They were heavy. Beyond is an absurdist melodrama that reaches peaks of satire, hysteria and poor taste like no film before or since, it’s the ultimate contact high. It signals the end of the 1960s as effectively as the breakup of the Beatles, the Charles Manson-inspired Tate/LaBianca massacre or the on-camera murder at Altamont in Gimme Shelter (1970). Gentle will be all your steps as you walk beyond this valley. Hang cool, teddy bear. This is my happening and it freaks me out.

You’re a groovy boy, I’d like to strap you on sometime. Why did Meyer think it was a good idea to marry Edy Williams? Or make another film for Fox, The Seven Minutes (1971), an apparently disappointing anti-censorship film that satisfied no one? Meyer had snuck into Hollywood by the back door, but it was just as quick to show him out the same way when it suited them.

Black Snake (1973)

In an act of desperation, or stupidity, Meyer thought it would be a really good idea to hitch himself to the blaxploitation bandwagon of the early 1970s, take a number of English actors inherited from Hammer Films to Barbados, and cast flat-chested Anouska Hempel in the lead after his original choice dropped out (but fear not, Hempel is body doubled by a bustier actress in her sex scene). Interestingly, Meyer’s film precedes Mandingo (1975) by a couple of years, but it’s no more successful at recreating a twisted phase in history. Are plantation films an excuse to wallow in offensiveness and racism, exploitation films in a nastier sense, or are they the indictment of racism and slavery that they ought to be?

Black Snake is full of white people whipping racial slurs at black people, when they’re not whipping them in actuality. I don’t think that because these roles are reversed by the end of the film and the nasty white people get their comeuppance in the same way, that this then justifies all the unpleasant sadism. Meyer was too far out of his element and not in sufficient control of the material. He has quite clearly not thought this through and stepped into a minefield he would have better avoided. There is a slightly interesting Martin Luther King/Malcolm X dialectic at work among the slaves, and there are intended parallels drawn with the French Revolution. This doesn’t rescue the movie. It’s just not much fun.

Supervixens (1975)

Fun that was put back on the agenda by Meyer’s next film, a return to the desert and a return to what he does best but also what he’s done before. As a sidenote here, I’ve called these Meyer pieces On Repeat, but I’ve actually found the films to be a lot more different from each other and a lot less repetitive than harsher critics would acknowledge. There remains a sense that the films aren’t really about anything except the bust sizes of their leading actresses, but quite frankly you could say that about The Outlaw (1943), The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) and One Million Years B.C. (1966) as well, to name but a few. The only difference with Meyer is that this might be what all of his films are about.

For no reason, all of the women in the film are called SuperSomething. As a “treat” for any female patrons who may come across the movie, Meyer introduces a two foot dildo called Wilbur that is “attached” to the film’s male characters and would go on to play almost a featured role in Up! (1976). So that’s considerate of him. Unfortunately, Supervixens is blighted by the murder of SuperAngel (Shari Eubank), perhaps the most extreme of Meyer’s bitchy villainesses, a bad girl provocateur intent on demeaning men until they’re ready to satisfy her insatiable sexual needs (possibly). Charles Napier, playing another nasty psychopathic cop, Harry Sledge, stomps SuperAngel to death in a bathtub as part of Meyer’s revenge on Edy Williams, with whom he was going through an unpleasant divorce at the time. Meyer giving full vent to his psychosis and bitter feelings may have been good for him, but it’s still no fun for us to watch and impossible to defend.

SuperAngel’s husband, Clint, then goes on the run as Sledge has framed him for his wife’s murder and the movie’s tone lightens appreciably into a series of on the road style vignettes that recall Homer’s Odyssey, only with high speed car chases and big tits. No one, I repeat, no one milks a cow like Uschi Digard. The Digard/Lancaster stopoff features a funny, exuberant outdoor sex montage that is Meyer at his best, it’s crazy healthy sex done tongue in cheek. Shari Eubank returns as SuperVixen, a good girl garage owner dressed in white, but Clint is too dumb to notice the resemblance to his ex-wife. It reaches a mad climax in the deep desert that is deliberately reminiscent of Warner Bros’ Roadrunner cartoons.

Up! (1976)

no fairy tale…this! Meyer’s third ethereal actress, Francesca “Kitten” Natividad, kicks off the proceedings of his most unhinged film yet. It begins with a lightly-bearded man dressed in a Puritan costume with our old friend Wilbur attached to him whipping the bare backside of one Adolf Schwartz who has his head buried between the outsize (and not entirely real) breasts of Mary Gavin aka Candy Samples who sports a zipped bondage gimp mask while in the background the naked female Ethiopian Chef with an Afro stirs an oversize cauldron. And then it gets really weird, climaxing in Adolf’s murder (after other climaxes, naturally).

“Murder most foul”, as Kitten claims, so who done it? Might it be “the least likely suspect”? Might they not have a bizarre and unusual motive they will only reveal in a torrent of insane dialogue while running naked through the woods at night clutching a knife? Oh yes. Up! is about the murder suspects, in as much as it is about anything (and it might not even be about this). The Digard/Lancaster stopoff from Supervixens (1975) has become the model for all of the sex scenes in Up! and the sex scenes have taken over the film entirely, interspersed with violence. Baring the brunt of the brutality is the hapless Raven De La Croix as Margo Winchester, channelling the spirit of Mae West, who is raped while lying unconscious in a riverbed, but it’s okay because she kills the rapist afterwards. Do you see what he did there?

I think when critics focus on the crazy repetition of Meyer, they’re taking most of their evidence from his last three real films, where the quick cut sex scenes dominate the mise en scène, as the French like to say. It’s fun to watch, but none of it is especially erotic because it’s so off the wall.

Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens (1979)

So, then, what is Meyer’s last real film about? Well, “Kitten” Natividad, who has by now become Meyer’s girlfriend, plays dual roles as Livonia, another in the long line of Meyer’s frustrated hausfraus, and Lola Langusta, a crazy Mexican stripper, though Kitten would like us to point out that this is one woman and Lola is just Livonia’s alterego, and an excuse to moonlight at a stripjoint called The Other Ball, something I know we’ve all considered ourselves from time to time. So why is Livonia frustrated? Her husband, Lamar, another of Meyer’s dumbass losers, has “rear window tendencies,” which Livonia wants to redirect to “good straight sex and no funny stuff”.

It could be argued that this isn’t a large enough subject on which to base an entire film, and I think you’d be right. The first attempt falls to Lola Langusta, who slips Lamar a Mickey Finn at the stripjoint and has him transported upstairs to her bedroom where she intends to carry out her cunning plan: “The black sock never fails.” But it does. Next is a visit to the world’s worst dentist and marriage counsellor, Dr Lavender, an awful camp stereotype. There is much nonsense with Lamar being trapped in Lavender’s closet while Livonia is treated by Lavender’s nurse to a seventeen inch double-ended dildo in a clear contravention of the safety at work rules, especially in the field of dentistry. Finally, radio evangelist Eufaula Roop succeeds through laying her healing hands (and other body parts) on Lamar in a bathtub and Lamar is returned to “the straight and narrow” via the miracle of Jesus.

So if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, you’ll know what to do. The film doesn’t know when to stop. Its crazy fast sex scenes are more akin to extreme calisthenics than reality. According to him, Meyer’s own penis turns up in closeup (nice), though Kitten maintains that it’s Jim Ryan’s. It has at least three endings in which the characters’ lives are resolved, one with Stuart Lancaster narrating offscreen, another with him onscreen and another with Meyer himself onscreen, though his voice has been dubbed. The final image of Meyer’s last real film is a coffin on a mountain swaying because there are two people inside having sex. That’s all, folks. Except there would be one postscript.

Pandora Peaks (2000)

Ultravixens was Meyer’s last real film but his brand of mad erotica had ceased to be financially viable by 1979. Why would anyone pay to see Meyer’s nearly hardcore hijinks when they could slink into the XXX theatres which had established themselves in American towns and cities during the 1970s or rent real hardcore on video, which was clearly the coming thing?

Throughout the last twenty years of his life, it was well known, mostly because Meyer talked it up himself, that he was working on an eight hour, autobiographical film about himself called The Breast of Russ Meyer (that’s if you don’t accept that Meyer’s films as a whole don’t already fulfill this function, which they do). A snippet turned up in Jonathan Ross’ interview with Meyer in 1988, and some of the material would be used in Meyer’s last work, a straight to video production in which real breasts have been abandoned and replaced with silicone. It’s all very sad.

Empty and useless, Pandora Peaks is a return to the dry well that produced Mondo Topless (1966). There are endless cutaways from the redoubtable Ms Peaks, who would appear to be in complete denial as to the verisimilitude of her plastic breasts and is subjected to “hilarious” boingy, whistly sound effects as various bits of her body pop into view, to Tundi, a German woman Meyer shot for Playboy in the early 1990s, who spends most of her time in the bath or playing with net curtains, and whose breasts, though large, seem to be genuine. Unfortunately, Tundi’s footage is drenched in an appalling, mammary-obsessed monologue voiced by Uschi Digard.

For no reason whatsoever, these two basically unattractive women and their oversized charms are intercut with a terrible public information film about Palm Desert and the Mojave and places in Germany, in which Meyer and a few of his chums wander around aimlessly and leer at the women, footage of whom are cut into this, and so on, and so on, for 71 endless minutes. And the music’s shit as well. Considering this has its basis in autobiography, Meyer reveals nothing personal about himself, except that he likes large breasts, which it’s safe to say we already know.

What have I learned from 19 Russ Meyer films:

1. There is such a thing as too much topless.

2. No one better represents the schizophrenia of American popular culture towards sex than Russ Meyer and his films.

3. At his best, Meyer makes sex fun, and this is not a criminal offence.

4. At his worst, Meyer makes nudity boring, and this is.

5. Meyer was ahead of his time, in tune with his time, and then behind his time, a fate that beckons us all.

6. I really, really want to get back to watching proper films.

I’m going to leave you with the words of Russ Meyer himself, from page 319 of Jimmy McDonough’s biography: “If I wasn’t so into tits I probably could’ve been a great filmmaker.” There’s a lesson there for us all.