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The heroine's all-libido credo certainly applies to Russ Meyer's camera: "When I'm attracted, I respond." British Columbia, "bush country," just the ironic setting for a furiously inspired anthology of lusty American fixations, from fly-fishing to boob-leering to Commie-baiting. Vixen (Erica Gavin) is the tigress in hot pants and painted eyebrows, whose torrid pas de deux with a wet trout early on evinces a decisive acquaintance with Freud. A gonzo nymph introduced mounted by a Mountie, she shags half the province by day and by night goes home to her stolidly oblivious husband (Garth Pillsbury), who pleases her "where it counts the most." Their weekend guests (Robert Aiken and Vincene Wallace) have lost the taste for topless foreplay, Vixen to the rescue: She boinks him in the stream, then moves on to the tipsy, scarlet-clad wife in a tender, dazed, epically funny girl-on-girl sequence, "a change of pace" to cure their conjugal ennui. She jumps into the shower with her brother (Jon Evans) but quivers with repulsion at the thought of his black chum (Harrison Page) ravishing her. "Buckwheat can wait outside!" Ruby Gentry and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the irrationality of racism met with the irrationality of patriotism (cf. Fuller's The Steel Helmet). The lunatic peaks include parallel editing to braid the eponymous minx's cabin romping and the red-bearded proselytizer's (Michael Donovan O'Donnell) spiel on the decadence of Western civilization, and the expatriate biker's ardent defense of draft-dodging ("They ask me to kill or be killed when they won't even let me get a job or eat in a restaurant") in the middle of a hijacked flight to Cuba. A lambent work of flesh and abrasion, "just let your mind dwell on the possibilities." With Peter Carpenter, John Furlong, and Jackie Illman.
--- Fernando F. Croce |