Customer Reviews

Russ Meyer's Up!

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Up" is so much better than other soft porn movies. It has lots of large, naked breasts and bizarre, creative dialogue and plot. The acting, cinematography, editing and picture quality is all top-notch stuff. However, I'm not sure it is worth the exhorbitant price. If Russ is going to charge 30-40 dollars for his fine films, he could at least spend an hour and a half doing a commentary track.

This turned out to be a very enjoyable movie. The actress who played the role of Margo Winchester,Raven De La Croix actually
made this movie.
A German(Nazi) type person is killed after someone slips a
pirana into his bathtub.Undercover agent Margo Winchester makes
her entrance by jogging down the highway.She is nearly raped and killed by one of the locals.She soon gains the confidence of the locals and begins investigating the murder.There is also a good
action scene involving an Indian maiden.The true murderer is
finally revealed after our hero Margo Winchester is stabbed.Her
and the murderer have a nude battle all over the countryside.She
turns out to be a Los Angeles Police Detective.A very good movie
on the Russ Meyer scale. I only wish the Raven De La Croix had made more movies.

The film begins quite mysteriously in a dungeon where a young man is torturing an Adolf Hitler look-alike... We then quickly cut to a stunning nude, played by Kitten Natividad, who teasingly introduces the audience to the setting...

We are in Northern California, in a small, rural community... Just outside of town, a very beautiful, buxom young lady is hitchhiking along a lonely country road... She is picked up by a young man, who happens to be the infant terrible of the local rich set... He tries to take advantage of the girl's abundant sexuality but after a short sequence involving a brutal rape, she turns the tables and ends up killing him...

Russ Meyer has never been one to linger too long on a single shot... He likes to cut, especially to ladies running naked as jaybirds around the lush countryside... In this case, however, he has added more than just a tease with Kitten Natividad, who narrates the events of the story with a husky, British accent while displaying her terrific figure... The true star of the show, however, is Raven de la Croix, whose piercing dark eyes and fully rounded, voluptuous figure combine with some firmly loyal acting for an explosive performance...

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

I'd seen one Russ Meyer movie before, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and remembered it as a fun frolic filled with bountiful babes. So I bought Up! hoping for some light-hearted fun along the same lines, and boy was I disappointed. Up! is a mean-spirited, unfunny, violent movie that happens to have a fair amount of nudity. There are a few worthwhile moments, but none of them ends up being sexy because almost every scene ends with a rape or graphic murder. Not exactly what I call fun filmmaking!

Doesn't make a lick of sense and isn't titallating but it's quite amusing. As usual ther's some innovative photography and ridiculously large body parts. If you're a Russ fan, you'll want to see this.

I can contrast UP! with Jurgen Syberberg's film, "Our Hitler," a numbing film of some 9 hours which states that Hitler was guilty, Germany was guilty, and everyone was guilty. So no one is guilty! Hitler walks as a result of this tedious, boring film that puts the viewer in a trance.

Meyer, on the other hand, gets rid of Hitler so fast with a piranha fish in his bathtub. And the movie is good anti-fascist soft porn! It does make fun of Nazis, and I recommend this film as an antidote to Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." Obviously, Riefenstahl's movie is a work of evil art. But Meyer, in a strange way, does make fun of it.

Oddly enough, Meyer's films have been a hit in the Western zone of Germany, formerly the region of the nation that had embraced Hitler.

The movie has qualities of melodrama and subtle political messages.

Strongly recommended as an antidote to fascism and the morality of the right wing.

Herbert J. Weiner

The first 45 minutes are fine. I loved the frenzied cartoonish "Tom & Jerry" pace, but after a while it started to wear on me. Maybe if I'd found just one of the women attractive it'd be a different story but as it was I couldn't wait for the end. Mainly it was the amount of dialogue. The script has got to be as thick as a novel. Words shooting out of people's mouths so fast I finally gave up trying to listen.

The story, which is completely unimportant concerns the murder of Adolph Hitler who now lives, until recently, in a small town in America. The suspects are a bunch of locals who all have overgrown sex organs and do nothing but bang and run (literally) around 24 hours a day. There had to be grocery bags of drugs consumed while filming this movie.

I could go into the story deeper, but who really cares? The non-stop sex scenes are not stimulating in the least. I felt numb by the end of the movie. There is nothing erotic. No seduction. No foreplay. Just bang, bang, bang! Like machinery. Jane March holding hands in THE LOVER was more erotic than anything in this movie.

Worth a rent, but not 60 bucks.

Meyer's films seemed to get more and more bizarre near the end of his directing career. Up! is definitely his wildest in terms of both sex and violence. Like with most of Meyer's films, there is a plot to follow, but it's not much to talk about and only serves as a reason to string endless sex scenes together. Plotwise, it has Raven De La Croix drifting into a small town and getting involved with the sexcapades of a local married couple who own a diner. That's the plot in the most basic of terms, but throw in a horny sheriff, an insane juggernaut lumberjack, a Hitler wannabe, and a killer on the loose, and you've got the recipe for a crazy ride. The killer wears black gloves, making it almost seem like a Russ Meyer "stab" at a giallo! Speaking of a killer, this film is probably Meyer's most violent. He'd usually throw in dashes of violence in previous films(the murder in Supervixens is kinda shocking and unexpected in it's brutality), but here he's upping(no pun intended)the ante a bit, even including a chainsaw murder. There are two brutal rape scenes that are rather unpleasant. All rape scenes are unpleasant, but there's something especially disturbing about zany cartoon sound effects being used during them. This may put off some folks, even those who usually enjoy Meyer's movies. Then of course there's the sex. As in Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, Meyer makes it his mission not to let 5 minutes of screen time pass without nudity and/or sex. You're bombarded with so many images of beautiful female anatomy that you almost become desensitized, if such a thing is possible! The sex in Up! is about as dirty and graphic as the law will allow without being a full fledged porno film, so don't watch it with the kiddies. The sex is also a bit more extreme than in previous Meyer films. Meyer was an old fashioned kinda guy when it came to sex, he liked no "freaky" stuff. Here he delves into S&M, oral sex and even a scene with two men! New territory for Russ. The long rubber male appendages used to a humorous, yet restrained degree in Supervixens are all over the place here, probably to make the male viewer feel inadequate. Once again, Russ shows us that he can photograph the female body like no one else. Kitten Natividad is the narrator who's nude the entire film, and looks stunning. Raven De La Croix(a long time obsession of Meyer's) isn't the most attractive woman, but you certainly can't take your eyes off the woman's body. Many more yummy woman are in and out of the film, but these two woman you will go away remembering. Even with all of it's excessiveness, Up! is a very entertaining and funny film is you don't take any of what you're seeing seriously. Well, I don't see how you could considering the whole thing is just too silly. It's a must for Meyer fans, and certainly recommended for trashy sex/exploitation/cult film lovers. UP!!!!!!!!!!!

If I have to take it or leave it, I will take it.