I streamed Russ Meyer’s Up! (also known as Megavixens, 1976) on an adults-only website called Spankbang.com. The related videos were titled “Actrice Harry Potter,” “Angelina Jolie Fake,” and “Angelina Jolie Fake 2”—pornographic clips giving the nod to Hollywood. Up! isn’t technically a porno, but it’s rife with fairly explicit simulated sex and full-frontal nudity, all of which showcases the type of casting Meyer was famous for. To a large extent Up! is a raunchy comedy, its tone hitting the tender spot between Mad magazine, Hamburger: The Motion Picture (1986), and post-Easy Rider counterculture films.
Released in 1978, Meyer’s antepenultimate film comes nearly 15 years after Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, Mudhoney, and Motorpsycho—all of which came out in 1965. It feels like a departure from the seductive danger of these genre-defining exploitation films. Instead, it’s a bit more like the lusciously campy Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which makes sense because that film’s writer, Roger Ebert, stepped in to pen the Shakespeare-heavy dialogue of Up!’s so-called “Greek Chorus” character, a nude narrator played by Kitten Natividad. She recounts the loose murder mystery plot, which begins when Adolf Schwartz (Edward Schaaf), a Hilter lookalike ex-Nazi, is killed by a piranha while luxuriating in the bathtub of his Northern Californian estate. The film then pivots and follows Margot Winchester (Raven de la Croix) as she cavorts and clashes with the surrounding locals—a sheriff, a lumberjack, a cook, and a restaurateur, among others—who are all Schwartz’s potential murderers.
Stylistically, the film is frenetic and ambitious. It speeds through a variety of settings while keeping a particular sexual or violent (and at its worst, sexually violent) act continuous, like its cinematic mind can only focus on its own titillating content. Meyer moves beyond his erotic narrative to elicit something purely psycho-sexual. The artistic intent of his film becomes most clear in its surreal finale, where sexual violence and murder are stretched in duration and logic beyond reason. Up! can feel at times like the live action equivalent of a ribald cartoon in a mid-century nudie mag. But at its best, the lightness of the film and its ability to move effortlessly from one idea and image to another resembles the montage-heavy work of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal, who often exchange literal images for symbolic and psychically visceral ones.
Up! screens this evening, October 23, at Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn on 35mm as part of “Weird Wednesday.”
