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Girls, music and montage, one hour straight of the Russ Meyer essence. The introduction announces the palette of pure movement, and as a bonus gives a pellucid tour of San Francisco, where the topless "phenomenon sweeping the country" has its roots: Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf flicker by, the travelogue's parodistic bent becomes clear when the deranged narrator notes the city's "death-defying and rampaging" transportation while a trolley meekly makes its way across the screen. The Coit Tower is angled priapically, the camera is on the hood of a car as it plows down "the yawning orifice" of Broadway Tunnel with a bare blonde at the wheel. A cascade of freakishly high-spirited, go-go cuties follows in "swinging tribute to the unrestrained female anatomy," edited and scored to guitars and boing sounds out of bulky transistor radios. Each amazon gets her turn at the center of a pop panel—Pat Barrington rubs against an electrical tower, pigtailed Darlene Grey rolls in the swamp, Sin Lenee welcomes a water-tower torrent (along with the roaring locomotive in the desert, a holdover from Faster, Pussycat Kill! Kill!). Lorna Maitland pops up in a screen test from Lorna, though the favored fembot is Babette Bardot ("half French and half Swedish, fifty-fifty where it counts"), who pontificates on the effectiveness of pelvic thrusts and expresses mock-puzzlement at Yank prudishness. Wild "foam rubber" for days, Europe for the more aesthetic approach, the Crazy Horse in Paris before Wiseman, Hamburg and Copenhagen. Meyer's The Tales of Hoffmann, pointy nipples and loudspeaker double-entendres in a kaleidoscopic whirl that, in the middle-aged carny's mind, can defy even the Berlin Wall. With Diane Young, Darla Paris, and Trina Lamar.
--- Fernando F. Croce |