Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
by Russ Meyer
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Cynthia Myers, Dolly ReadDirector: Russ Meyer
Brand: Fox
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 109 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-06-13
Audience Rating: NC-17
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Movie Review: classic
Summary: 5 Stars
I love Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls: just don't ask me to explain Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls.
Safe to say that this layer cake of a film has so many subplots, works on so many levels, it would be arduous to summarize in a medium size review. But when an all girl rock band meets an eccentric rock and roll manager in 1970, the fireworks crackle, than explode. In Russ Mayer technicolor.
Here is a movie that is satire, a musical, a soap opera, social commentary. Free love, hippy vs. straight, a drug film, a quasi blue movie. All that wrapped in a psychedelic firecracker.
Russ Mayer had been crowed "King Of The Nuddies" since the early 1960s. Films like Vixen and Faster, Pussycat! Kill!... Kill! were like 1960s Batman TV on breast implants. But it was 1969 when 20th Century Fox gave the king his due: a big budget and a young screen writer, Roger Ebert. They decided to make a film that would encompass many film conventions but adhere to none.
How about starting with some Playboy Playmates. Dolly Reed, Cytnthia Myers and Erica Gavin had all been so in the mid-to-late 1960s. Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls does have the cool gloss and hot colors of that era's periodical. I have never seen so much orange in my life.
Hot colors, hot girls, hot movie. Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls is about, among its many plots, the loss off innocence and loyalty and, at the end, redemption. One girl gets an abortion, has a same sex romance. Another meets a corrupt lawyer, stabs her boyfriend in the back to get to the top. The manager who brings the girls to the top is a wanna be cult leader and......just wait and see.
Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls was being made during both Altamont and the Manson Murders: when the hippy dream was going quickly sour. All those ambitions coming out of Woodstock in August 1969 didn't even make it to 1970, when this film was released. There is a palpable sense in Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls of dreams gone mad, of something that started out so pure gone terrible and mean and violent. This is fiction, this is cheese, but Mayer puts that dangerous curve that divided 1969 and 1970 at the heart of his subtext.
And even if you think my lofty analysis of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls is a bunch of revisionist hooey, making cheese into cheesecake, see this film anyhow. See it for the party scenes, see it for the music--hell, who am I kidding, see it for the sex.
Or just see it for the line "This Is My Happening And It Freaks Me Out."
Also check out the soundtrack, featuring Stu Phillips, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, and the Sandpipers.
Summary of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
When three female rock'n'rollers travel to Hollywood to claim an inheritance, they meet up with a kinky music promoter who turns them on to a whole new scene. At first, all seems very exciting and the naïve trio becomes submerged in his dangerous tinseltown underworld-before they discover his true motives.Similar DVD Movies
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