Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Viewed October 8, 1999 on video

For full information about this film, click here

I put this movie on late Friday night (after my mom retired to bed) expecting pornographic scenes placing big bare-breasted women in the foreground.  I should have expected more from Roger Ebert, who wrote his one and only screenplay back in '70 for softporn-meister Russ Meyer.  Like the back of the video's case says, "it spans nearly every film genre -- comedy, musical, horror, murder, sex and melodrama."  Whether it succeeds in any of those genres is another matter -- but I found it fascinating to watch.   It's often resistant to generic gratification, with tittilatingly actresses bouncing around the screen but no graphic moments of consummation.  Instead we get blurry scenes of haystack sex, a beheading and a hermaphrodite. We also get a lame melodrama, the movie's attempt at a plot, and a surprising number of musical sequences, which are mediocre at best (if only to see Playboy Playmate Dolly Read bouncing around with an electric guitar and in a tight turtleneck sweater)  The editing is the real star of the film -- it is terrific B-grade work.  The cuts are rough and rapid, trying to make sense of shoddy camera placement that often breaks the 180 degree line.  If you watch a recent Scorsese movie, you'll realize that he must have taken inspiration from this film, unless there was another before it.  The faux-moralistic epilogue is just the icing on the cake -- it actually sounds like when Ebert is reviewing a movie that has some moral content which he elucidates in his own special critic-as-high school counselor way.  If there are other B-grade movies like this, then I've been wasting my time with "A" pictures.

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