Valley of the Dolls was a famously rubbish 1967 relationship drama, dead earnest in its execution. So naturally this 1970 follow-up is a raunchy sex comedy directed by Russ Meyer and penned by the late film critic Roger Ebert. Valley starred Sharon Tate, who along with four others would be murdered by the Manson family in 1969. The fact that this homicide forms the basis of Beyond's insane bloodbath ending tells you all you need to know about the approach Meyer and Ebert are taking with this remake/sequel.
Dolly Read plays Kelly, the lead singer of an up-and-coming all-girl pop-rock band, which heads to LA to meet Kelly's aunt, Susan (Phyllis Davis), and hopefully meet with her $50k inheritance. But Susan's adviser, Porter (Duncan McLeod), has his eyes on the money and dismisses Kelly and co as kinky hippies. While this battle is waged, the girls live up to Porter's title, boozing and bonking their way through a series of parties, while their new svengali, Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell (a lascivious John Lazar), sidelines their existing manager Harris (David Gurian), changes the band's name, and shamelessly promotes them for himself.
"All uptight about tomorrow and hanging onto yesterday," moans Randy Black (Jim Iglehart, channelling a low-rent Mohammed Ali); "all that matters is now." Combining counterculture energy with cheapo raunchiness, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls boldly and ruthlessly satirises the Love Generation.
The story begins with a road trip promising boundless opportunity and free-spiritedness, but ultimately the girls' desires are parochial and shallow: sex and wealth. It takes a genuine tragedy to wake Kelly up to what's really important – as the needless narration only too clearly spells out in the end: "Those who only fake must be prepared to pay the highest price of all." Throughout, the aesthetic is pure gaudy music vid, edited like some kind of hangover flashback, especially in the party scenes, hopping back and forth between scraps of crazy cat dialogue from hedonists self-medicating on booze and weed and downers. ("Dolls" is a slang term for the latter.) When Z-Man is showing Kelly around her first party, he introduces her to a whole cast of characters, defining their uniqueness as if they all have a special part to play in maintaining the Free Love myth.
But individualism taken to its endgame is dangerous, and Kelly's indulgence of her desires is precisely what ends up hurting those around her. Harris's old-fashioned monogamous romanticism is incompatible with the wild world into which he follows Kelly. His old world values leave him not only isolated but assumed to be gay. In the end he is metaphorically de-sexed, embodying a deeper, less possessive love, one equally free.
I'm making the movie sound like a Freudian bore but it's quite the opposite. It totally indulges and hyperbolises the excesses of the period, and it's packed with frank-yet-harmless sex and nudity, as well as a host of awesome driving pop songs you've heard somewhere before. The whole cast plays it straight, because that's how satire should work – and also because Meyer never let the cast in on the joke. It works perfectly: Casey's (Cynthia Meyers) pregnancy revelation is pure soap brilliance.
Long before the final reel you'll be well entrenched in the joke, revelling in the film's breathless pace, blinding colours, and ridiculously intricate wordplay. Z-Man's climactic actualisation of his medieval king persona is the zenith of excess. As he beheads his subject we hear the 20th Century Fox theme. It's the icing on one of the most subversive cakes in mainstream cinema history.
Dolly Read plays Kelly, the lead singer of an up-and-coming all-girl pop-rock band, which heads to LA to meet Kelly's aunt, Susan (Phyllis Davis), and hopefully meet with her $50k inheritance. But Susan's adviser, Porter (Duncan McLeod), has his eyes on the money and dismisses Kelly and co as kinky hippies. While this battle is waged, the girls live up to Porter's title, boozing and bonking their way through a series of parties, while their new svengali, Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell (a lascivious John Lazar), sidelines their existing manager Harris (David Gurian), changes the band's name, and shamelessly promotes them for himself.
"All uptight about tomorrow and hanging onto yesterday," moans Randy Black (Jim Iglehart, channelling a low-rent Mohammed Ali); "all that matters is now." Combining counterculture energy with cheapo raunchiness, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls boldly and ruthlessly satirises the Love Generation.
The story begins with a road trip promising boundless opportunity and free-spiritedness, but ultimately the girls' desires are parochial and shallow: sex and wealth. It takes a genuine tragedy to wake Kelly up to what's really important – as the needless narration only too clearly spells out in the end: "Those who only fake must be prepared to pay the highest price of all." Throughout, the aesthetic is pure gaudy music vid, edited like some kind of hangover flashback, especially in the party scenes, hopping back and forth between scraps of crazy cat dialogue from hedonists self-medicating on booze and weed and downers. ("Dolls" is a slang term for the latter.) When Z-Man is showing Kelly around her first party, he introduces her to a whole cast of characters, defining their uniqueness as if they all have a special part to play in maintaining the Free Love myth.
But individualism taken to its endgame is dangerous, and Kelly's indulgence of her desires is precisely what ends up hurting those around her. Harris's old-fashioned monogamous romanticism is incompatible with the wild world into which he follows Kelly. His old world values leave him not only isolated but assumed to be gay. In the end he is metaphorically de-sexed, embodying a deeper, less possessive love, one equally free.
I'm making the movie sound like a Freudian bore but it's quite the opposite. It totally indulges and hyperbolises the excesses of the period, and it's packed with frank-yet-harmless sex and nudity, as well as a host of awesome driving pop songs you've heard somewhere before. The whole cast plays it straight, because that's how satire should work – and also because Meyer never let the cast in on the joke. It works perfectly: Casey's (Cynthia Meyers) pregnancy revelation is pure soap brilliance.
Long before the final reel you'll be well entrenched in the joke, revelling in the film's breathless pace, blinding colours, and ridiculously intricate wordplay. Z-Man's climactic actualisation of his medieval king persona is the zenith of excess. As he beheads his subject we hear the 20th Century Fox theme. It's the icing on one of the most subversive cakes in mainstream cinema history.