Science didn’t invent dream-recording machines or brain decoders before sexploitation legend Russ Meyer’s death in 2004, so we’ll never truly know what zany daydreams he held in his mind. As spicy consolation prizes, though, the scandalous triple-feature of Vixen! (1968), Supervixens (1975), and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979), newly restored by Severin Films in collaboration with The Russ Meyer Charitable Trust, will do nicely.
If you don’t know Meyer’s name but grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, you nonetheless know his work, whether through classic MTV programming or Quentin Tarantino’s early films. A trailblazer in titillation, Meyer’s influence echoes through those decades’ pop culture into the 2020s. Our pop culture simply wouldn’t be the same without his preference for saturated colors, presto cuts, close-ups that zero in on shimmying young bodies like nudity-seeking missiles, and the marriage of over-the-top sex with over-the-top mayhem.
![](https://coolmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SUPERVIXENS_185_ProRes4444XQ_2398_ENGLISH.00_06_26_04.Still010-scaled.jpg)
Screenshot by Severin Films
Think of revisiting Meyer’s work as archaeological, if that makes watching smut easier for you. Vixen!, Supervixens, and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens mark a period when a filmmaker like Meyer could take big risks and parlay their success into future masterpieces. Vixen! did enough box-office business that 20th Century Fox hired Meyer to direct 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a massive inspiration for Tarantino and the greatest work of his career.
Not bad for a skin flick where capitalism is a lusty, big-bosomed woman with a white supremacist streak. Vixen!’s title character (Erica Gavin) volleys racist epithets at the film’s lone Black character, Niles (Harrison Page), when she isn’t having connubial fun with her dumb, loving husband, Tom (Garth Pillsbury), or trysts with literally everyone she meets who isn’t Niles, including her own brother, Judd (Jon Evans).
Vixen can’t stand Niles. Niles can’t stand Vixen. But even he can’t resist her forever, no matter the contempt she shows him. If Meyer is making softcore porn here, by gum, he’s making a political statement, too. That becomes more pronounced with the arrival of O’Bannion (Michael Donovan O’Donnell), an incognito Marxist and IRA sympathizer plotting to make for Cuba in Tom’s Cessna. The notion sounds absurd until you recall that you’ve spent just shy of an hour watching Vixen!’s ensemble, except Niles, pantomime-boinking each other. In Meyer’s vision, a high-altitude hijacking functions as a reality check to a fantasy world of carnal playtime; the sexcapades are replaced with a heated political debate about the merits of Communism, the Vietnam War’s horrors, and the detriments of American racism.
![](https://coolmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/beardo-scaled.jpg)
Screenshot by Severin Films
Vixen! is seedy, but reveals something about its era, too, just as Supervixens does by cleverly reversing the typical sex comedy narrative, where men are bound and determined to get laid and women play hard to get. Here, gas station attendant Clint (Charles Pitt) suffers through his rocky relationship with his possessive wife, SuperAngel (Shari Eubank). When nutjob cop Harry Sledge (Charles Napier) kills her in a shocking fit of rage, Clint goes on the run as the prime suspect.
In a string of loosely related vignettes, Clint meets women who, like his ex, are extra-endowed, voluptuous, and find him inexplicably, irresistibly attractive. (Incidentally, their given names all start with “Super,” too.) In Clint’s misadventures, Meyer finds bawdy humor scattered throughout the American Southwest; in Harry’s bloody rampages and psychopathic ravings, he digs up the germ of male entitlement, writhing at the heart of 1970s macho identity and still shockingly prevalent in contemporary American politics.
Sex sells. Sex speaks, too, if you’re not too much of a puritan to listen; even Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, where Meyer breaks the fourth wall like he’s Jean-Luc Godard’s pervy American cousin, says volumes about the country’s class divide and duplicitous faith leaders. It just packages its social critiques with air pillows of raucous satire, lurid sensationalism, startling displays of violence, and bare-naked flesh. Controversial? Yes. Entertaining? Endlessly.