jlomax28 Russ Meyer's Up! is a nasty black comedy. Totally X-rated. In RM's later years there was something mentally ill about his fantasies. This film is masterful in it's kinetic editing together of a plethora of pervasive perversions. I think the photography is some of the best in his career. Kitten Natividad is one of my favorite parts of the film. She opens up the film as the story's Greek Chorus,(obviously the pen of Roger Ebert)she then opens up her legs with an incredible close up of her Brillo Pad-esque pubic hair. She reminds the audience over and over of the convoluted murder mystery of Adolf "Hitler" Schwartz. Adolf's sex dungeon is one of RM's freakiest and grotesque scenes. I absolutely love Candy Samples aka Mary Gavin as the Headsperson. I love her S&M black leather hood with a zipper on the mouth, "Headsperson,an abyss of gluttony," proclaims Kitten in one of the film's best montages. Like Beyond the Valley and Supervixens, this film is so 'punk' before the fact. Oddly, I think RM was so untouched by 'hipness' of the times. Watching Up! one can imagine pretty clearly why the Sex Pistols wanted Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert to make their movie. This film has an intentional nasty bad attitude in a fun way. Another thing that I love about Up is all the queer overtones. All the men have huge fake penises in this one (perhaps to match the giant tits?). The film opens with Hitler bottoming for his well hung hustler Paul (played by Robert McLane, who was in the queer 'Love Story' A Very Natural Thing 1974). The lesbian scenes are depicted as good and erotic and the male on male scenes are depicted as degrading and perverse. RM was old school and openly homophobic but oddly ALL of his films show an eroticism to men in a lesser degree to the women. RM still fetishizes male muscles, buttocks and torsos and sometimes even the penis... Just an interesting observation. Also, there are lots of shots of feet, his films are great if you have a thing for feet and shoes. All in all, I really like this one. I thought it was better than Supervixens, which is one people always seem to talk about.

GoneWithTheTwins Outrageously gratuitous and excessive in every sense of the word, Russ Meyer's Up! cleverly mixes busty babes, bloody violence, blouse-busting femme fatales, and well-endowed vixens into an erotic comedy of epic proportions. The fact that the plot is a murder-mystery that no one cares to solve, a narration by Kitten Natividad is bursting with Shakespearean poetry explaining characters no one cares to profile, and unimportant timeframe titles keep popping up as each scene starts hardly matters; anyone watching Up! is clearly in it for the over-the-top exploitation and generous doses of female nudity.Kitten Natividad is the Greek Chorus, a naked narrator who excitedly details the wide assortment of characters who frequent the various story lines. Frequently she'll recap events with slightly different clips of footage and plenty of elaborate, riddle-filled, lyrical observations. Adolf Schwartz (Edward Schaaf), a depraved Nazi warlock and S&M fetishist, is brutally murdered in his bubblebath with the deadly fish Harry the Nimrod. There are many suspects, courteously announced by Kitten, but little motive and fewer complaints. It's a baffling puzzle with only the clue of a black-leather-gloved culprit.Meanwhile, Margo Winchester (Raven De La Croix) is viciously attacked during a morning jog, and winds up accidentally killing her rapist. When the entire event is witnessed by local policeman Homer Johnson (Monty Bane), he coerces her into a few sexual favors to overlook the killing. Later, she gets work selling hotdogs at Sweet Li'l Alice's (Janet Wood) Cafe; in short order she's also "romantically" involved with Alice's husband Paul (Robert McLane).As with most of Russ Meyer's X-rated voluptuous hellcat extravaganzas, the extreme sexual violence, overflowing testosterone and copious mounts of salacious nudity is done in such a jaunty manner that it's undeniably humorous. It's campy, pornographic, and wallowing in a sea of carnality, but effective in its mission of unrefined eroticism and gung ho extravagance. When Alice and Margot discover their bridled, steamy bisexuality when consoling each other with a sensual hug seconds after barely escaping a traumatizing sexual incursion, it's obvious that the whole ordeal is a well-planned setup for a spicy, fleshly girls-only encounter.The film opens with ludicrously happy music, changing over to dramatic, orchestral, country, classic rock, patriotic, swashbuckling and everything in-between, even delivering wittily-placed Beethoven. Painfully bad dubbing and poor sound effects round out notable technical aspects, although it's almost unfair to critique how the movie was made considering the reason for its creation. With a creative zipper-cam shot, oodles of random sex, a crazed ax-wielding lumberjack, bondage, lesbianism, constantly unsheathed bosoms, bottomless ecstasy and overload of chesty pulchritudinous and lots of unnecessary explanations and dialogue during the lengthy birthday-suit final chase sequence, Russ Meyer's Up! should definitely not be confused with Pixar's latest computer animated family film.Mike Massie

MisterWhiplash Russ Meyer makes his films, when they're at their best or most brilliantly deranged, like the dream of some sexually charged sixteen year old who's seen his share of pornos and 70's era exploitation films. They're crazy visions of women with (usually) nothing lower than 36-C cups, men with third legs (wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more), and enough fornication to blow the head gasket of any puritan viewer. That being said, Meyer isn't exactly a real porno director. He makes sex films in the same way that Robert Rodriguez makes wild action or horror or kids films: as a do-it-yourself-auteur (i.e. writes, directs, produces, edits, DP's, even camera operates), he's all about getting a pulpy sensibility of what would otherwise be typical trashy material. Meyer also is gifted with a wonderfully cringe-worthy sense of humor. To give just a brief example- and maybe as one of the quintessential scenes in any exploitation flick- the scene where two completely naked women, one Eva Braun Jr with a knife and screaming maniacally about the fall of Nazism and the plight of his 'father', run after one another trying to kill each other in the woods.So Up! is in another in a whole body of works where Meyer turns the conventions of the usual in movie-making, like a kooky member of National Lampoon, but at the same time I'm not sure it's one of his very best. It's a little scatter-shot in the story, if there is one closely to even follow with the Greek Chrous (Kitten Navidad) where in every time whatever semblance of a story is taking shape we're led off by this narrator and Meyers's editing which takes us into a strange loop of sequencing of events and images (which in and of themselves are good, but distracting). But when Up! does click, it works very well. Mostly this involves the early scenes with Adolph Schwartz (ho-ho), who gets masochistic sex from a dominatrix and a man with a huge thing, and then gets killed mysteriously in his bathtub. Then we're thrust into some backwoods group, including a shifty but well-intentioned sheriff (Monty Bane), a big, uproarious homunculus in Rafe (Bob Schott), and of course Meyer's 'harem' of girls.It's fun, in all basic intentions, to see these girls have fun and go into exuberant glee doing their scenes, as opposed to the more degrading XXX features that get pretty boring after a while. This is where the dream facet comes in, where everything is just so surreal (the frolicking sex out in the open, wherever it is, the Nazi stuff right out of a typical exploitation flick from Europe, the double-climax that combines sex AND violence), that you just have to go along for the ride and laugh with all the craziness. What helps is Meyer's great cinematic eye- yes, great- as he shoots and edits as though every image has to be just next to perfect. While the actual content is sometimes all over the place, like with Rafe's rape scenes, where he turns into a true drunken gorilla, the actual quality of the film-making is nearly flawless. Which is to Meyers's credit, as what is in Up! could be the makings of a much more lewd and crude effort.Hard to find (had to look deep on line) and not without little dips in real strength in the comedy, Up! demonstrates some great Meyers' product: beautiful, voluptuous, and mostly funny women (loved the one woman who's voice sounded out of femme fatale noir), total horn-dogs and beasts in men, and a bit of vicious satire to boot. More beer!

yauh24 Never before has a porn movie made sex seem so ridiculous. Up!'s over-the-top irony cuts so deep that it does not merely satirize itself nor does it stop at its genre: Up! makes sex itself seem so absurd that, after seeing this movie, one wonders why anyone's interested in it at all. The many positive sex scenes in the movie are not shot as porn so much as parodies of the notion of sex as bliss (note the quick cut aways and the scene changes (mostly in beautiful natural spots), creating a sense of hours of lapsed time while preventing any build-up of erotic aura). The many negative sex scenes in the movie never grant any empathy to the rapists, never provide any glimpse of pleasure in the rapists, and always include the victimized avenging themselves, thereby rejecting pornographic rape fantasies and demanding that the viewer do so as well (if s/he hasn't done that already) (note: this actually makes the rape scenes easier viewing than, say, the one in Boy's Don't Cry, which - ironically - is probably more exploitative).Obviously, the movie is not easy to take. Watching it, I was full of wonder but can't say that it was enjoyable or even consistently funny. Compared to Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, this is much more sex-centered and much less of a movie. Once again, though sex-centered, the movie is not really porn in that it makes no attempt to be sexy, instead portraying sex and the culture surrounding it (porn, sexual politics, and Moral Majority-style opposition) as possibly the greatest farce of contemporary Western culture. Highly recommended for people with extremely open minds who are interested in seeing a destruction of auratic sex. For people interested in a good laugh or a good movie, you probably would want to check out something else. For people with any no-go areas, you should probably forget about this movie altogether.