Ultimately, this is what a holiday weekend is for: getting around to watching all the stuff you’ve TiVo’d for the last few months. And it was thus that I finally got around to watching Russ Meyer’s BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. Perhaps the very first thing you see in this movie says it best: “This movie is not a sequel - there’s never been anything like it before.” Before, or since!

Actually, to take the opening even further: The next sequence is a buxom woman in lingerie running through the grounds of a beach house, followed by a man dressed as a Nazi, then a man dressed as a female superhero. It ends with the superhero putting a pistol in a sleeping woman’s mouth and cuts just before he pulls the trigger.

This movie, my friend, is beyond insane.

I don’t want to give away the plot (which is barely the point of the movie anyway, believe me) so instead I’ll concentrate on the things I like about it. Number one, the acting style. It’s operatic. The air of sleek unreality created by so many non-actors overacting is just astonishing. One pivotal character, nicknamed Z-Man and played by a real actor named John LaZar, speaks in a kind of mish-mosh Shakespearean patois. No particular reason, he’s just nutty that way. Z-man is loosely based on Phil Spector.

The editing is too fast. I love that. Scene after scene cuts in someone’s mid-sentence, leaving the words to trail off into the next scene. There are flash cuts to non-sequitor shots. It’s what you’d call “MTV-style” editing nowadays, but this film predates MTV by 20 years so you’d probably be better off calling it “Laugh-In editing.”

The music cues. Stu Phillips scored this movie in a manner that could best be described as “sprightly but bombastic.” He takes the tone of every scene and writes the most thuddingly obvious backing to it. If it’s happy, you get flutes and Cowsills-like chorus. If it’s sad, Soap Opera organs. The music cues crash into each other, throwing their differences into sharp relief.

Oh, and it’s all about sex, drugs and money. And the ending narration has to be heard to be believed. And the screenplay was co-written by Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert.

Get your copy today… it won’t show on TV much. It’s just too weird.

(Pictures speak louder - the trailer perfectly catches the tone of this movie. )

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 1:29 am and is filed under General, Motion Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.