Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
d. Russ Meyer, 1970
It seems particularly arbitrary to write a review of Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. The movie is interesting enough, but it's so out there that no review can approximate its strangeness. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is about a female rock group (The Carrie Nations) going to L.A. to make it big. The lead singer of the band, Kelly (Dolly Read), has a rich aunt in L.A. that is winning to give her part of the fortune Kelly's mother wouldn't take. The film then continues through the usual kind of plot points that one would expect from a film about rock music. People cheat on each other, there's a lot of drug using, and a couple of fights. The melodrama that's been building for a large portion of the movie culminates in the final 20 minutes of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, perhaps the strangest of any film. These sequences are all the more eerie when the viewer recalls the opening credits, which had them playing behind them. After these irreverent and completly insane 20 minutes (in which several people die and someone gains the ability to walk again), the movie gives us a run through of what each character learned through the experience. Leave it to Roger Ebert - who wrote the film's screenplay - to critique the film before it's even over.
