Severin continues their good work in bringing hitherto largely unavailable Russ Meyer titles to home video in glorious new 4K restorations. Their latest releases are Motorpsycho, a gritty genre mashup that’s been unjustly dismissed as merely a “dry run” for the better known Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and the late-period gonzo comedy Up!, involving, among other things, leather gimp masks and an orgy-loving Adolf Hitler.
Motorpsycho, from 1965, starts off as a rip-roaring exposé of a renegade biker gang led by troubled Vietnam vet Brahmin (Stephen Oliver). He’s joined by Slick (Thomas Scott), who has a fondness for his transistor radio (which, incidentally, provides much of the film’s fuzz-guitar-laden soundtrack), and Dante (Joseph Cellini), whose major signifier as a character is that he spouts off in Italian when he gets excitable. These two are, in true Meyer fashion, little more than caricatures, but Brahmin actually gets to display some nuance in his role. Mind you, these are far from the sympathetic outlaws of Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels, which would kick the biker movie into overdrive upon its release a year after Motorpsycho.
Two inciting acts of violence set the film’s course. First, the gang assault and rape of Gail (Holle K. Winters), the wife of veterinarian Cory Maddox (Alex Rocco), while he’s away on business. Then, upon making their escape, they happen across oldster Harry Bonner (played by legendary exploitation filmmaker Coleman Francis) and his young Cajun wife, Ruby (Haji, who would go on to Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), leaving both of them for dead and making off with the old man’s truck. Cory and Ruby are thrown together, setting out after the gang.
From here on out, Motorpsycho begins to mix elements of the vigilante rape-revenge film like Death Wish with the narrative conceit of a protracted car chase reminiscent of something like Vanishing Point. The action in Motorpsycho now moves progressively farther away from any signs of civilization, until the three characters left standing are surrounded by nothing but the arid desert expanses that Meyer enjoyed returning to for film locations time and again.
Motorpsycho keeps its depiction of sex, unlike Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, largely grounded in a grungy, sweaty realism, except for a couple of luridly suggestive match cuts and a truly outrageous scene where a snake-bitten Cory urges Ruby, “Suck it! Suck the poison out!” Though these moments may be good for a chuckle or two, they don’t actually work to undercut the film’s basic seriousness and dramatic storyline, unlike other Meyer films where he throws everything against the wall (sometimes literally), comedically speaking, to see what sticks.
The second half of Motorpsycho increasingly plays like a classic Hollywood western. Meyer films the high desert of California with the same precise and painterly eye that John Ford lavishes on Monument Valley. The film’s sun-blasted final 10 minutes particularly suggest the overheated finale of King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (and clearly presages Supervixens), albeit lensed in high-contrast monochrome rather than resplendent Technicolor. The last moments of Motorpsycho, though, are pure Meyer. Rather than return to his hospitalized (and doubtless traumatized) wife, Gail, Cory drives off into the sunset with Ruby by his side.
Up!, from 1976, boasts a more straightforward narrative when compared to the films it falls between in Meyer’s canon, Supervixens and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, which are both picaresque shaggy-dog tales. Up! is rather improbably presented as a murder mystery. In his Bavarian-style castle somewhere in Northern California, a man with a little mustache going by the name of Adolf Schwarz (Edward Schaaf) is killed when someone dumps a flesh-eating piranha into his bathtub. But not before we’re treated to one kink-laden session in Schwarz’s torture dungeon, where he employs a variety of folks to do his perverse bidding, especially Paul (Robert McLane), a.k.a. the Founding Father, who services Schwarz with both the lash and the rod, so to speak, while all duded up in a pilgrim hat and buckled shoes.
This is the first overt act of male homosexuality in a Meyer film, and, though it’s obviously played for laughs, it’s not condemned outright as anything more winkingly “perverted” than any of the other activities that the characters engage in. In fact, Paul ultimately turns out to be bisexual, and in an open relationship with Alice (Janet Wood), who is also prone to swinging both ways. What’s more, we find out at the film’s end that, though Schwarz used him like an object for his own purposes, Paul felt a genuine affection for the old reprobate.
But this is Meyerland, so none of the characters in Up! are particularly or wholly likeable. Even the film’s ostensible heroine, Margo Winchester (Raven De La Croix), falls prone to infidelity in her mostly physical relationship with local lawman Homer Johnson (Monty Bane), who’s no more faithful to her in turn. This being a Russ Meyer production, pretty much every character fucks each other by the end in a daisy-chain of sexual permutations. And many of these couplings are photographed in ravishing fashion, akin to a series of carnal advertisements, set against the lush and verdant Northern California landscapes.
As with a lot of Meyer’s late-period pieces, Up! makes a number of cheeky callbacks to his earlier films. Two of the most famous lines from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls get recycled and repurposed. Margo comes across the wire bedframe from Vixen! and gets promptly informed by Alice that it once belonged to a chick named Vixen, and Homer’s rustic domicile looks a lot like the one Vixen shared with her husband Tom. Up! also shares with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls a certain penchant for splattery, campy violence. Here you are treated to a rough-and-tumble duel between axe and chainsaw that ends with no victor.
Motorpsycho and Up! represent two very different tendencies within the Meyer filmography. The first sits comfortably alongside brooding “gothic melodramas” like Lorna or Mudhoney, while the latter gives pure expression to the free associative, comic book-inflected sense of satire found in most of the films from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls on. The gorgeous new transfers provided by Severin are now properly framed, and therefore unbound from the wan and ill-proportioned Academy ratio images of earlier editions, which will hopefully allow for some significant attention and reappraisal of these wildly entertaining films.
Motorpsycho and Up! are available on April 29 from Severin Films on 4K UHD and Blu-ray.
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