Up! (1976)
Directed by: Russ Meyer
Written by: Anthony-James Ryan, Roger Ebert, Russ Meyer
Starring: Kitten Natividad, Monty Bane, Raven De La Croix, Robert McLane
USA
AVAILABLE ON DUAL FORMAT 4K UHD & BLU-RAY, AND STANDALONE BLU-RAY: 28th April,
from SEVERIN FILMS UK Webstore and SEVERIN FILMS US Webstore
RUNNING TIME: 80 mins
REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera
Adolf Hitler, calling himself Adolf Schwartz, is alive and living in California, but he’s murdered inside his Bavarian-style castle by someone placing a piranha in his bath. Who did it? Nobody in the nearby town of Miranda actually seems to care, most of its inhabitants being more interested in sex and often carrying on with somebody in secret. Things are raised up a notch or several when Margo Winchester arrives. Sheriff Homer Johnson tries it on with her to no avail, Leonard Box rapes her and is killed in retaliation, then Homer blackmails her into sleeping with him. Margo then gets a job at the local diner, which is owned by the bisexual Alice who’s married to Paul, who fancies Margo but was sexually servicing Schwartz. Ah yes, Schwartz. So who killed him then?
Russ Meyer dabbled in several genres throughout his career, generally making a few films of one type before trying something else out, but, after having two flops in a row – The Seven Minutes and Black Snake – the ‘7os saw him hone what a Russ Meyer film to him should be. Granted, Severin Films’s other Meyer release this month, Motorpsycho, was probably the first movie in which the boob loving auteur really began putting his obsessions and the Meyer touch onscreen, but it was with his three last theatrical features that he seemed to refine the Meyer experience. As he said while making Supervixens, “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”. Well he certainly kept that promise with Supervixens, Up! and Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens, both the sexual content and general insanity increasing even though you could say that for some time Meyer’s films had been extolling the pleasure of shagging more than anything else, and in a generally likeable and curiously innocent way for the most part – he’s the smutty schoolboy who never grew up even though he mastered his craft more and more and very much knew what he doing. Up! is a bonkers, lightning paced exercise in smut, screwing and silliness where everyone is either engaged in sexual activity or has sex on the brain seeing how it permeates every line of dialogue, along with elements that are borderline surreal. Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens did it again three years later, but it became a bit tiring and some of the laughs fell flat; here, nearly everything hits the mark, from the goofy jokes to a lot of crudely poetic lines, in a film that truly shows the essence of Meyer, though how one is meant to take its two rape scenes isn’t really clear.
We begin with the words “this is no fairytale” up onscreen, before we see a naked woman [except for long black boots] up a tree. “I am your Greek chorus” she tells us, “your cacophony of carnality, the embodiment of the body and your sherpa of suspense” while we get closeups of her breasts and lady garden. “Come, take my hand, sheath your sword to its hilt., are you up to it? – and then we get our titles along with introductions to all of the characters by closeups of various things while they’re having sex. Well, what else would they be doing? We find ourselves inside the castle of Adolf Schwartz. We’re not meant to ask how he’s been able to live in California for so long without being imprisoned; in fact nobody even seems to be aware who he actually is until the end. He’s having an orgy that also involves three women named The Headsperson, The Ethiopian Chef, Limehouse and a man named Paul who’s dressed like a pilgrim here but not in any other of his scenes. I won’t describe exactly what goes on here, and to be honest the editing doesn’t make everything clear, but if you’ve ever wanted to see Hitler being sodomised then you’re watching the right film. This is eventually intercut with one of our main female characters Alice being pleasured in the woods by another lady – in fact most of the sex in this film takes place in the great outdoors. When eventually alone after he’s paid Paul for a couple of extra favours, Hitler [let’s call him that] puts on some Nazi propaganda music and takes a bath, only for the music to be switched off by an intruder whom he recognises before he or she puts in, as our Chorus calls it, “Nimrod the tool of destruction”. The water turns red as Hitler is killed.
Now we meet the lady who I guess can be called our heroine, Margo, jogging along a road. Of course she has large jugs and a tight outfit that reveals them nicely. This is how Meyer likes his women to be; getting annoyed by the possibly exploitative, un-PC nature of this will be a pointless dead end. Homer the Sheriff tries to pick her up in his car to no avail, son of a sawmill owner Leonard does succeed in this, then assaults, chases, beats and begins to rape her while she’s out cold in a scene that’s pretty jolting -though that’s not automatically a bad thing. She wakes up and quickly turns the tables on him by slicing his penis with a knife, I think. Homer witnesses this, but covers up the incident because Leonard’s loaded father could put Margo in jail forever, and so Homer uses this to his leverage. Margo sleeps with him, and all over the place – on steps, in water, in a car – a typical late Meyer montage, though it’s very hard to believe that she’d be up for this considering what’s not long happened to her. Margo is soon working at the local diner, a place where even the shots of food make us think sexually because that’s all anyone talks about, and business booms, even though the husband and wife owners Paul and Alice aren’t the faithful kind as we already know, though they still seem to have a happy marriage. Paul goes after Margo while Homer receives oral pleasure from Foxy Woman when he books her for a traffic violation before bedding a Native American lady named Pocahontas; their tryst is accompanied by cliched Red Indian chords on the soundtrack and when he gets together with Margo again she comments that his penis is red so must have been with an Indian! Racist by modern standards? Possibly, but it’s all so daft that it’s hard to get offended, and on the other side of the coin Meyer rarely restricts himself to just celebrating the beauty of white women.
More problematic to some will be a second rape scene, when even the first included a long distance shot of the attacker having an impossibly huge penis, clearly intended as comic. American exploitation cinema has a history of including sexual assault as an ingredient, but here a public assault has Meyer himself shouting “f*** her” and at one point the rapist raping a second woman who’s lying on top of the first. It’s easy to feel uncomfortable at these attempts to lessen the seriousness of something that’s so horrible, and maybe Meyer was being crass, but I don’t think he was intending to upset, especially in terms of the audience for his films at the time, and it’s a good way to aid the film’s transition into action and bloody violence where an axe and a chainsaw are both put to good use yet there’s still a rather tongue in cheek approach. For most of the film’s length, nobody cares about Hitler’s murder except for the Chorus who every now and again reminds us of it and goes through the suspects even though it’s very unlikely that most of them had anything to do with the killing. Some of the best writing in the script by Meyer, Anthony-James Ryan and – yes, him again – legendary film critic Roger Ebert – is in her descriptions of people, for example the oriental Limehouse; “daughter of the rising sun, the kamikaze of cunnilingus… almond eyed, impressive as the sayings of Chairman Mao, her body a gorgeous zither to work magic”. And of Margo “why is she here, draining the sacks of men at will, lust and desire moulded in the flawless configuration?”. Eventually the actual plot does resurface, with a set of silly revelations and one naked woman chasing another then engaging in a dialogue scene which contradicts some of what we’ve previously seen – but by now, it seems appropriate if you’re in on the joke, as do not one but three silly epilogues.
People throughout have exchanges like “I’d like to strap you on”, “that’s a good line I used it once myself”, while in the background of many scenes you can hear silly police radio stuff going on. The sex is generally energetic, sometimes way over the top [a blowjob where the woman’s head is bobbing up and down to a ridiculous extent] and lacking in actual emotion, except for when Paul and Margo go out into the woods [of course] for some fun; it’s rather tender and loving. It’s nice that Meyer does make an attempt to depict the beauty of a couple who know each other so well making love. I’m really enjoying these films but will admit that I don’t really find them erotic; however I found said scene to be genuinely sexy in a great way, despite the perhaps slightly mocking use of Richard Wagner’s ultra-romantic Prelude from “Tristan and Isolde” – in a film that has less use of music than Meyer normally employs and it mostly seems appropriate too; Meyer’s use of scoring is one of the few things in his work that I don’t feel he properly worked out. Some might also say the campy performances he seems to like don’t come off well or seem realistic, but then again his films, especially it seems his later ones, aren’t set in an approximation of the real world anyway, it’s obvious right from the get-go. Here, as is often the case unless Alan Napier is involved, the women generally fare better than the men, with Janet Wood projecting a down to earth quality as Alice in a role that ends up requiring quite a lot, while Raven De La Croix exudes that matter of fact carnality which the central Meyer woman usually needs to be. However, it’s Kitten Natividad as the Chorus whom most viewers – at least if they’re male and straight – may remember best of all. Earthy and clearly loving Meyer’s putting her up there as a celebration of female sexuality, she’s fantastic in front of the camera and deserved a career outside of Meyer Land.
Natividad ends Up! with her character concluding matters while having sex at the same time, understandably getting more and more aroused. I can’t think of a better single representation of Meyer’s singular brand of cinema and outlook on life, even if the film itself, to my mind, ranks just slightly bellow Supervixen which I feel could be Meyer’s defining statement on film. Which is still pretty high really.
SPECIAL FEATURES
UHD
Audio Commentary With Film Historian Elizabeth Purchell
BLU-RAY
After the first few minutes where opticals and dissolves can’t help but not look great in HD, Up! suddenly looks fantastic and stays that way. The landscapes are lush and detailed, skin tones are immaculate [this was really a necessity considered the amount of skin that’s on display here], and blacks are deep. The level of grain is surprisingly low, but nor does it look like any grain removal was done.
Audio Commentary With Film Historian Elizabeth Purchell
Purchell, who warns that they’re not going to be scene specific but occasionally comments on what’s happening onscreen, goes solo on this track, and by Jove what a great commentary it is; Purchell’s passionate about the movie and Meyer’s work in general [though is he really “one of the great filmmakers”?] and has the knowledge and obviously carried out the research to back it up. Most interesting perhaps for me was learning that Up! was initially conceived as a tribute to and vehicle for his friend Henry Rollin who played [real life] Nazi Martin Bormann several times for Meyer but who turned it down, and that Meyer wrote the main script on his own [so where does the also credited Anthony-James Ryan come into it} and Ebert wrote the rather lyrical Greek Chorus material. Raven De La Crois was worried that Meyer wouldn’t like her tattoo which was a gift from her first husband, but she was wrong and Meyer even made a point of it in the film. Purchell also goes into things like Meyer’s view of homosexuality and the rape scenes with a balanced, open-minded viewpoint. An enlightening but very easy to take in track.
No Fairy Tale… This! – Interview With Actress Raven De La Croix [17 mins]
De La Crois gives a nicely balanced account of her time being in the film [“a Cinderella story in a way”] and especially Meyer himself. She was glad to be in it, but nearly drowned shooting her character’s first rape – Meyer telling Larry Dean to repeatedly dunk her in the water and hold her down – and nearly suffocated while shooting the second. The table collapsing in that scene wasn’t supposed to happen but was kept in because De La Crois wouldn’t shoot it again, and refused to do two sexual bits elsewhere so Meyer gave them to Foxy Lae [Pocahontas]. Meyer was clearly a bit of a hard taskmaster and would do things like give new lines to other characters if he was angry with somebody, though she clearly has affection for him and speaks rather movingly of his death.
Radio Spot
Prime Meyer beautifully restored and with an especially enlightening audio commentary. Severin are killing it with these Meyer releases. I pray that even more will follow. Obviously these films aren’t for all tastes, but I’d still Highly Recommend this release if you’re partial to dirtiness and craziness – which is surely a lot more people then who’d might admit.
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