Give Russ Meyer $70,000 and he will give you everything.

Take it from Roger Ebert: “Meyer’s ability to keep his movies light and farcical took the edge off the sex for people seeing their first skin-flick. By the time he made Vixen, Meyer had developed a directing style so open, direct and good-humored that it dominated his material. He was willing to use dialogue so ridiculous… situations so obviously tongue-in-cheek, characters so incredibly stereotyped and larger than life, that even his most torrid scenes usually managed to get outside themselves. Vixen was not only a good skin-flick, but a merciless satire on the whole genre.”

It was also the first movie to get an X-rating for its sex scenes, which I’d consider a compliment because, after all, it’s softcore.

Vixen Palmer (Erica Gavin, who danced at The Losers, the same topless bar where Meyer women Haji and Tura Satana also once bewitched men; she’s also in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Caged Heat, Erika’s Hot Summer — a Gary Graver film which was once another movie and then edited around her after this movie became a box office success — and Godmonster of Indian Flats) lives with her husband Tom (Garth Pillsbury, who also shows up in If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!!, Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses?, Malibu High and The Loch Ness Horror) up in the woods of British Columbia, running a tourist resort.

She’s quite literally always on the make — the tagline “Is she woman…or animal?” is more than lived up to — as she seduces a Mountie (Peter Carpenter) the moment her husband flies out to pick up the next couple staying with them for a fishing vacation. Days — maybe hours — after they arrive, she sleeps with the husband, Dave (Robert Aiken, speaking of Gary Graver, Aiken wrote his movie Moon In Scorpio) and then his wife, Janet (Vincene Wallace, what does it say about me that I instantly knew she was in the Harry Novak produced The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet?) just as quickly. Hell, give her time and she’ll even sleep with her brother Judd (Jon Evans), despite his protest “We decided to stop doing this when we were 12.”

The only man or woman she won’t touch seems to be Niles (Harrison Page, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), an African American Vietnam War deserter who is friends with Judd. He’s in Canada hiding from the draft, as he sees the war as a racist endeavor. Mr. O’Bannion (Michael Donovan O’Donnell) wants to pay to fly him to back to America, but he soon tries to hijack the plane and force everyone to Cuba. Luckily, Tom and Niles stop this and get away from the authorities, too, which means that Vixen has to get over her racist feelings toward Niles.

Meyer started this without a leading lady, which some would think is a bad idea. He told Ebert in Film Comment, “Bravely I went up to the location for Vixen without a leading lady and left a couple of my henchmen to try to find somebody. It’s always difficult. But Erica had a curious quality about her. She didn’t have the greatest body, you know. She didn’t have the up-thrust breasts like the others.”

Side note: Of course Russ Meyer would think that such a gorgeous woman was lacking in the breast department. Then again, I’ve said for years that I never notice breasts and nearly every long term relationship I’ve had has been with women who were blessed with curves like a Russ actress, so maybe I have watched too many of his movies. I also don’t see that as a bad thing. I agree with Gavin as to why Meyer’s movies just work: “His films came from a different direction than porno. Basically he was not looking through a camera; he was looking through a peephole. I think that’s why his films were so good. He was a true voyeur.”

In the book that would be my early quite to psychotronic films, Incredibly Strange Films, Meyer was able to see that Gavin was one of the main reasons why this was a success. He thought that the scene between her and Judd was one of the best he ever shot, saying that it “…was the best of them all. She really displayed an animal quality that I’ve never been able to achieve before – the way she grunted and hung in there and did her lines. It was a really remarkable job… I’ve done a lot of jokey screwing but there’s something about Erica and her brother that was just remarkable… it really represents the way I like to screw.”

It had to terrify people upon watching this just how much Vixen is a non-stop engine of passion. I always laugh when people say that they want a woman like her yet they’d probably be mentally unable — not to mention physically challenged — to keep her. By the end, the title “The end?” suggests that she’ll never be able to stop seducing. And who would want her to?

Well…maybe some folks in Ohio.

Thanks to Charles Keating, who was busted in the savings and loan scandal of the late 1980s, this movie is still banned in Cincinnati. The financial expert obtained an injunction preventing it being shown on the grounds that it was obscene and the cops seized the print the first day itw as shown. It didn’t get to play in Ohio and cost Meyer $250,000 to defend the movie.

Keating said Meyer had done more to undermine morals in the nation than anyone else.

Meyer responded, “I was glad to do it.”

After watching this movie on VHS for years, the Severin blu ray is a revelation. The colors, muted in the past, are now a memory, replaced by a lush rainbow of joy. Things are sharper, no long fuzzy, looking as they would in my dreams. I don’t know how to say thank you enough to everyone who worked on this.

Extras including an archival audio commentary by director/co-writer/producer/cinematographer/co-Editor Russ Meyer; the Censor Prologue from the 1981 theatrical re-release); an audio commentary by Gavin; archival interviews with Gavin And Harrison Page; David Del Valle’s The Sinister Image with guests Russ Meyer and Yvette Vickers; Entertainment… Or Obscenity? – Marc Edward Heuck on the film’s historic Cincinnati censorship battles and a trailer.

You can get this from Severin.

The original elements for this film gad been stored in less-than-optimal conditions. As a culture and, well, let’s get hyperbolic and say as a people, we’re so blessed that Severin Films devoted months to the painstaking restoration of its weather-damaged negative before scanning it in 4K and compiling over two hours of new and archival footage, all with the blessing and cooperation of The Russ Meyer Trust.

Every Russ Meyer movie I haven’t seen before becomes my favorite of his movies.

Co-written by Roger Ebert, this feels like Our Town but with so much sex.

Except, unlike that play, we meet everyone in this small town clothed and unclothed.

There’s radio evangelist Eufaula Roop (Ann Marie, who was in the last Meyer movie that became my favorite, Supervixens), who is first shown mounting Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland, Otto from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and also Bormann in Supervixens; I find it amusing that Meyer both shot war footage as part of the 166th Signal Photographic Company, the official photo unit in General Patton’s Third Army during the Second World War*, and named a major character in his movies — twice — after the private secretary to Adolf Hitler) inside a coffin. We also see a salesman going door to door, making love to every wife in town, starting with one played by Candy Samples (she’s listed in the credits as The Very Big Blonde and lives up to that; her adult career lasted from 1970 to 1989). And oh yes, there’s Junkyard Sal (June Mack), who sleeps with the men she orders around in her scrap heap.

Our hero, if there is one, is Lamar Shedd (Ken Kerr, who not only was Fred in Up!, but was the assistant director on Roar and a grip on Eaten Alive; that isn’t a pun), who is on again and off again with his wife Lavonia (Kitten Natividad, a former maid for Stella Stevens and the star of many an adult film up until 2011; she’s also in Airplane and The Tomb). Either she’s trying to get in his pants while he’s trying to study or he’s trying to go into the tradesman’s entrance. Congratulations! If you didn’t have to look that up, you’re also a pervert.

Lamar goes to work at the junkyard, while his wife nearly drowns and sexually assaults a fourteen-year-old boy named Rhett (Steve Tracy, whose career and short life found him in eleven episodes of Little House On the Prairie, as well as the Tom DeSimone-directed gay porn movie Heavy Equipment). Then, she finds that salesman and balls him too.

Note: In 2025, my goal is that more people use ball as a verb in sentences. Please help me make this dream a real thing.

As for Lamar, he’s trapped by his boss and forced to please her while his co-workers watch from outside. He’s desperate, as he’s trying to better himself with an education. It ends up with everyone being fired and Lamar heading for a strip club where he’s slipped a mickey by Mexican exotic dancer — meter algo en la bebida de loc — Lola Langusta, who ends up being his wife.  They fight again, she sleeps with a truck driver and he returns home in time to fight the guy. She saves him by burning his ballsack with a lightbulb. Yes, really.

In an attempt to make things work, the couple visits dentist/marriage counselor Asa Lavender (Robert Pearson, Claws). It ends up with Lamar sleeping with nurse Flovilla Hatch (Pittsburgh adoptee Sharon Hill, who was an actual nurse in town before playing one of the lead zombies in Dawn of the Dead; she also appears in Knightriders and has done location casting for lots of Steel City shot films, like Rappin’, Gung Ho and Lady Beware), the nurse sleeping with Lavonia and the dentist trying to have his way with Lamar. After this, Lamar decides to find God, which means that Eufaula Roop  baptizes him and nearly drowns him as she mounts him. Lamar leaves, finds the truck driver Mr. Peterbuilt (Patrick Wright, who was also a truck driver in Graduation Day) in bed with his wife again, knocks him out and finally makes love to his bride.

Meanwhile, Zebulon (DeForest Covan) crushes everyone in the junkyard and takes it over, Eufaula makes love to Rhett, who goes home and makes love to his father Martin Bormann’s wife SuperSoul. Yes, Uschi Digard, playing the same role she had in Supervixens. As narrator Stuart Lancaster closes his words, we see Russ Meyer filming in the distance and Digard’s lovemaking powers cause an earthquake.

This was Meyer’s last movie until he would return in the 2000s to make Russ Meyer’s Pandora Peaks and the Playboy video Voluptuous Vixens II.

By the 80s, breasts could be surgically made to create the woman that Meyer loved most. Hardcore pornography had taken over for softcore. And so Meyer retired a wealthy man. He owned the rights to nearly all of his films and made millions reselling them on home video, working out of his home. If you called the phone number in ads to buy one, you were probably talking to him.

His grave says, “King of the nudies. I was glad to do it.”

*Meyer was given to carny flimflam — which is the best kind — and claimed to have seen soldiers in a stockade being trained for a suicide mission during the war, then told  E. M. Nathanson who wrote The Dirty Dozen, which Meyer was given 10% of. He was also part of a team that planned on assassinating Hitler and Jospeh Goebbels, with Meyer supposedly shooting the evidence of the leader’s death. He also lost his virginity to a girl named Babette — I imagine she had the kind of breasts that eclipse the sky — that was paid for by Ernest Hemingway. I’ve also heard Meyer shot the flag raising at Iwo Jima, but there’s no way all of these things can be true.

Actually, yeah. It’s Russ Meyer. They can all be true.

The Severin release of Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens has an archival commentary by director, co-writer, producer, cinematographer and editor Russ Meyer; an interview with “Latin Brünhilde” Kitten Natividad; Talk It Over, a Tucson talk show where Ellen Adelstein interviews Meyer and a new interview with the host and a trailer.

You can get this from Severin.

I’m struggling for a way to explain what a big deal Severin releasing this movie is to the uninitiated.

For years, I’ve worried that because it was so difficult to see the full catalogue of Russ Meyer’s movies that he’d be relegated to a director only remembered for a few images seen in books, but movies never seen.

So to me, the biggest event in film in 2024 was the fact that Severin Films, in conjunction with The Russ Meyer Trust, was bringing these films back to the public, newly scanned in 4K from the original negative stored at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

We’re so lucky to have this.

After the dramatic films The Seven Minutes and Blacksnake were failures at the box office, Russ Meyer went back to what worked best. Sex comedies.

He said, “I’m back to big bosoms, square jaws, lotsa action and the most sensational sex you ever saw. I’m back to what I do best — erotic, comedic sex, sex, sex — and I’ll never stray again.”

He wrote this himself and claimed it was based on Horatio Alger’s tales. “They were always about a young man who was totally good, and he would always set out to gain his fortune and he would always come up against terrible people. They did everything they could to do him in, but he fought fair, you know, and he always survived and succeeded in the end. So, that’s just one facet of the thing.”

Supervixens would be the biggest commercial success Meyer had since Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, making $8.2 million on a $100,000 budget.

Clint Ramsey (Charles Pitts) works at a gas station for Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland) — Hitler’s personal secretary who ran to America and runs his small shop in the desert — and is married to SuperAngel (Shari Eubank). All she does all day is call and harass him at work when she isn’t demanding that he come back home and make love to her. When a customer — SuperLorna (Christy Hartburg) — flirts with him, SuperAngel flips out and tries to kill him with an axe. He goes to a bar where Super Haji (Haji) flirts with him as a cop named Harry Sledge (Charles Napier, playing the same character from Cherry, Harry and Raquel) tries to sleep with his wife but can’t perform, so he murders her in the bathtub. He burns down their house and sets up Clint, who runs from the law.

The rest of the movie is a series of his adventures, from being molested and mugged by Cal (John LaZar) and Super Cherry (Colleen Brennan) to being taken care of by a farmer whose wife SuperSoul (Uschi Digard) assaults him, as well as sleeping with the deaf daughter of a motel owner named SuperEula (Deborah McGuire) and finally discovering his true love, Super Angel (also Eubank). Of course, Harry shows up and wants to destroy their happiness, even if Clint only sees him as a friend. They’re all nearly blown up before the dynamite claims the villain like Wile E. Coyote.

Meyer said that the where Harry beats, stabs, stomps and drops a radio in the tub to kill Super Vixen was the most trouble he’d had with censors, other than Kitten Natividad’s full nudity in Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens. He also had to deal with watching this movie in the theater with Eubank and her father, who hated that his daughter was working with Russ Meyer. After the film ended, Eubank’s father sad he actually liked the film.

One thing that’s interesting about this movie is that it’s unafraid to show glimpses of penis unlike so many other films by Meyer (and a lot of other softcore). It’s also absolutely ridiculous and so over the top that I have no idea who can take it seriously, other than people still being upset about the murder scene. At least Super Vixen comes back as a ghost and is able to be in charge of her own sexuality, as all ends happily because of love.

The Severin Films release of Russ Meyer’s Supervixens features archival commentary by director/writer/cinematographer/editor/producer Russ Meyer, plus Russ Meyer Versus The Porn-Busters, a Mike Carroll interview with Meyer; an interview with Charles Napier; a trailer; a TV commercial and the reason I discovered Meyer in the first place, the episode of The Incredibly Strange Film Show all about his work.

You can get this from Severin.

Based on the “Public Enemies” in the Superman/Batman comic book series, written by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness, this DC Animated Universe movie, directed by Sam Liu and written by Stan Berkowitz, does a great job of getting in almost everything from that story as well as looking like McGuinness’ art.

15 years before this happened all over again in our reality, Lex Luthor (Clancy Brown) is elected President thanks to a severe nationwide economic depression. While he tries to make it seem like he’s working for the greater good, he uses his power to go after Superman (Tim Daly) and Batman (Kevin Conroy).

Luthor doesn’t need them, as he has his own superteam of Captain Atom (Xander Berkeley), Katana, Black Lightning (LeVar Burton), Power Girl (Allison Mack), Starfire (Jennifer Hale) and Major Force (Ricardo Antonio Chavira). Unknown to those heroes, Luthor has put a bounty on the head of Superman and Batman, which several villains try to get, including Metallo (John C. McGinley), who is killed by someone else and the murder blamed on the heroes.

As a meteor comes to Earth, Luthor plans on letting it hit and remaking the world, as he’s been taking drugs so that he can be as strong as Superman. He’s also hired tons of bad guys — Solomon Grundy (Corey Burton), Killer Frost (Jennifer Hale), Giganta (Andrea Romano) and Captain Cold (Michael Gough) to stop the heroes.

There’s also a scene where the Toyman (Calvin Tran) builds a Superman/Batman robot to go into space and destroy the meteor that’s pretty cool.

This is followed by Superman/Batman: Apocalypse, based on the Superman/Batman comic storyline “The Supergirl from Krypton.” Loeb moves fast with his stories and things get silly at times, but they are entertaining.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Made by Rumble Dog Pictures,they described this movie in these words: “In this alternate reality of John Carpenter’s characters, Michael Myers is a patient who breaks out of a mental ward on Halloween night that’s run by the more caring yet naive Dr. Loomis. Two months later , we find Myers wrecking havoc on the days leading up to Christmas. For any die hard Halloween fans, check out this new wintery take on your favorite masked killer.”

This starts as the movie Alone In the Dark, as Dr. Dan Potter (Dwight Schultz) arrives to meet with Dr. Leo Bane, who has been clumsily edited by audio to be Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence). He runs a program for those with mental illness in the hopes that they can be healed, including a group of violent criminals that includes Byron “Preacher” Sutcliff (Martin Landau), Frank Hawkes (Jack Palance), child molester Ronald Elster (Erland van Lidth) and John “The Bleeder” Skagg (Phillip Clarke), who hides his face and is recast as Michael Myers.

That night, everyone escapes and we don’t see any of the characters from Alone In the Dark again, other than Dr. Bane who is now Dr. Loomis. This brings us to Black Christmas, proving that Bedford is close to Haddonfield. The movie stays in the world of the Bob Clark effort — reminding us of the urban legend that Halloween was to be a ripoff of this movie called The Babysitter Murders — yet mixing in moments such as Mister Harrison (James Edmond) going to look for his daughter at the frathouse and seeing Flick get his tongue stuck on a pole from A Christmas Story.

That’s enough fan service, as that’s at least a Bob Clark movie. I was also fine with the edit of The Shape killing Clare (Lynne Griffin), as that makes sense within this movie, as well as adding snow effects into moments from Halloween 2.

Where it gets goofy is when Michael is playing a piano for Gizmo from Gremlins or terrifying Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) by acting as the Shovel Slayer from Home Alone. The first of these scenes is so poorly animated that it breaks the good work from the rest of the movie. The needledrop music doesn’t help either, but I do enjoy hearing “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade.

The last shot, at least, of The Shape standing next to Clare’s dead body in the attic is pretty good. I just wish this stuck to the idea of Michael ending up in Pi Kappa Sigma house. Sometimes, just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should.

You can watch this on YouTube.

73 minutes of your life, Slayed is about the community of Harris County, AZ dealing with the trauma of a Christmas Eve massacre five years before and now, it looks like Santa is coming back to kill all over again at a water treatment plant.

You can watch this on Tubi.