Russ Meyer - vo.rs

Russ Meyer: The Satirist of the Drive-In

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The easiest thing to say about Russ Meyer is the thing that lets you dismiss him, so let us get it out of the way. Yes, he built an entire filmography around one physical obsession, promoted it with the shamelessness of a carnival barker, and called himself “King Leer” without a trace of embarrassment. Stop there and you miss the actual story, which is stranger and more American than the caricature: a self-taught combat cameraman turned the cheapest corner of exploitation cinema into a personal signature so distinct that Roger Ebert wrote for him, museums retrospect him, and directors from John Waters to the makers of music videos have been quietly stealing his cutting for fifty years. Meyer is the case study in how far pure craft and pure attitude can carry material that everyone agreed was disposable.

The Sexploitation Canon: The Historically Essential Ten

Fri, 02 May 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Before hardcore pornography went mainstream in the early 1970s, there was a long, strange, commercially vital middle ground: sexploitation. These were films made to show more skin than Hollywood dared, released through a shadow distribution system of drive-ins, grindhouses and “art” cinemas, and often far more ambitious than the label suggests. The best of them smuggled real craft, real satire and real ideas past audiences who had come for the nudity — and a handful of the film-makers were genuine artists working in the only market that would have them.

Russ Meyer and the Satire Under the Sleaze

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Russ Meyer sold sex to American men for four decades and spent most of that time laughing at them. This is the fact people miss when they file him under smut. The films are stuffed with the buxom women that made his name and his fortune, and they are also, watched with any attention, savage cartoons about male appetite — its greed, its violence, its comic impotence. Meyer is one of the genuine independent auteurs of American cinema, a man who wrote, shot, edited, produced and distributed his own pictures and owned every frame, and the satire that runs under the sleaze is the thing that has kept the work alive long after the shock wore off.

Vixen!: The Film That Made Softcore Respectable at the Box Office

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 12:00:00 +0000

The number is the story. Vixen! cost Russ Meyer somewhere in the region of seventy-six thousand dollars to make in 1968 and went on to earn millions — estimates run past six or seven million, a return so lopsided that it changed the arithmetic of an entire industry. Hollywood had assumed that sex on screen belonged to the disreputable margins, to the raincoat crowd and the fleapit. Meyer proved it could play to couples, turn a colossal profit, and get itself reviewed in respectable papers. Everything that followed in mainstream erotic cinema owes a debt to this modest, garish, self-financed picture.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: Meyer and Ebert's Studio Fever Dream

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in 1969, a major Hollywood studio looked at its balance sheet, panicked, and made a decision so out of character that the film it produced still reads as a glitch in the system. Reeling from expensive flops and desperate to reach the youth audience it no longer understood, 20th Century Fox hired Russ Meyer — a self-financed smut auteur with no studio track record — and let him make almost anything he wanted. He brought along a young Chicago film critic named Roger Ebert to write it. The result, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, is the most gloriously deranged thing a major studio ever put its name to, a parody with the budget of the prestige pictures it was mocking.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!: Russ Meyer's Desert Blast of Attitude

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Three sports cars tear across a dry lake bed while a narrator warns us, in the voice of a carnival barker gone to seed, about the violence lurking in the modern American woman. That prologue promises exploitation. What follows is stranger and better: a lean, monochrome roughie shot in the Mojave in 1965 by Russ Meyer, a man famous for putting flesh on screen, in which almost nobody takes their clothes off. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! trades Meyer’s usual currency for something rarer in the genre — pure attitude, cut into the shape of an action picture.