Up! (1976)

Raven De La Croix out on her morning jog.

Made towards the end of his career, "Up!" is the most over to top of the few Russ Meyer movies I've seen. It's also one of three movies co-written by film critic Roger Ebert. It's beautifully shot with lots of great scenery and mountains of exposed flesh.

I started writing a plot summary, but decided it was pointless. Look it up online if you want to, but I'm not wasting my time typing it all out. Plot isn't going to be a deciding factor in watching this. People don't watch Russ Meyer movies for their subtlety and unless you're a 13 year old boy, I can't imagine you're watching them for their masturbatory potential. It's too bad the adult film industry made his kind of films obsolete and eventually forced him out of the game. Meyer himself said he was repulsed by pornography and thought it was too "clinical". Instead, his films glorified the female body and pointed out just how ridiculous sexual acts are. Every single sex act in this film is exaggerated to the point of absurdity. Russ Meyer made fun, sexy films filled with gratuitous nudity, violence and improbable situations. Often the plot didn't make sense, but it didn't matter. Meyer is brilliant with his editing, and the juxtaposition of some of these scenes really works well for comedic value. The violence, too, is piled on in cartoonish levels driving home just how ridiculous this is. People with axes buried in their backs simply yank them out and keep going. It doesn't have to be realistic, this is escapism. I watched this with my wife and she lost interest just after the opening credits. If she wasn't already familiar with my tastes in film, I might have been embarrassed by subjecting her to this, but she just rolled her eyes and went back to her book. She isn't part of his target audience. These are movies for men - beer drinking movies. I like his stuff better when it's a little less absurd, but this was good fun. I'll spare my wife the experience in the future, though.

3/5 

(Normally I'd put a link to the trailer or a scene in this space, but there isn't anything I can link that wouldn't require some sort of content warning on the blog. Sorry, folks. If you search YouTube, you can find the entire film with Spanish language. Chances are you wont be able to follow the plot or figure out what's being said, but there's plenty of skin to see.)