Like a few too many people who didn’t initially “get” it, I absolutely hated Beyond the Valley of the Dolls the first time I saw it back in the early 1980’s. Of course, I went in expecting one thing (I’d never seen a Russ Meyer film before) and yes, got something else entirely. Yes, I was probably a wee bit too young to grasp the wild blend of comedy, drama, morality play and plenty of under-dressed female and male flesh bouncing and wiggling about. But it only took a few years and a more maturely snarky perspective to see what I was really missing. Before then, I’d always given anything Roger Ebert said about movies the hovering eyebrow (as in “What does HE know, he co-wrote that crappy movie!”). After I started liking this beautiful, campy mess co-written and directed by Russ Meyer, it became of the first flicks I’d recommend to friends or anyone wanting to see something “out there” and it’s still ahead of its time in many respects…

Imagine an adult version of Josie and the Pussycats (the old cartoon, NOT the awful live-action film) if the girls were involved in drugs, wild parties and the occasional alternate relationship option. The film skewers its targets skillfully, frequently and through Meyer’s severely skewed lens, to new viewers it’s going to be hard at first to know if you’re watching a drama that dips into offbeat comedy or a comedy gone completely insane. Of course, it’s a satire that works because both Ebert and Meyer were point at and picking off plenty of Hollywood and entertainment industry tropes so fast and furiously that it’s best to just not even think so much or it spoils the ride. Prudes need not even apply here, and that goes for both the sex scenes and the rather shocking violence that’s actually far more disturbing than a flashed set of boobs or butts here and there.

Meyer’s tastes for exceptionally curvy ladies fighting against the odds (and sometimes each other), oddball characters with one of a kind faces and truly strange situations resulting from assorted excesses gets the full-on treatment here, but I’d say the most intriguing thing about the film is it has a happy ending you don’t see coming what with all the hell its characters get put through. One minute you’re laughing at a line or three of dialogue, the next you’re cringing because someone’s fallen from a high place in a suicide attempt or gotten brutally decapitated (in probably the best use of a corporate theme in a film EVER). But it all works and yes, you’ll probably have quite a conversation after all is said and done about what the hell it was you just watched. Even if that conversation is with yourself, as this one tends to linger in the mind for a little while afterwards…

Perhaps the most amusing thing about the film for me was finally seeing Valley of the Dolls on TCM a while back and seeing where this parody got much of its punch. I’d been avoiding that one for ages, as I generally don’t like these sorts of films. But the camp value and fact that Harlan Ellison wrote the screenplay from Jacqueline Susann’s popular trashy novel (he had his name removed after 20th Century Fox drastically changed his original not so happy ending). It made me wonder what Meyer, Ebert and Ellison could have come up with away from the studio that mucked around with what they really wanted to do with their visions of Hollywood hell they came up with. With Ebert’s recent passing (Meyer died in 2004), I’d gather the chances of Ellison thinking “Hm… maybe I’ll yank out that old screenplay and make some modern additions!” are none to none these days. Not that I’d want the man to go slumming at age 78 – he’s more than earned his much greater fame from much better works, I’d say.