Charles Napier Archives - Parallax View

[Originally published in Movietone News 42, July 1975]

My experience of Russ Meyer films has been less than encyclopedic (Finders Keepers Lovers Weepers, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, The Seven Minutes), so I can’t state authoritatively just what breakthroughs SuperVixens may represent in his oeuvre. Complete frontal nudity was not featured in the others I saw, and I believe the man himself has cited this as the first instance of male frontal nudity, at any rate. It’s still softcore, although back in the groove resolutely enough to warrant an X-rating (Richard Corliss opined in print that the MPAA had ruled The Seven Minutes R instead of PG so as not to embarrass Meyer before his old fans). And it’s still the most energetic sex filmmaking, qua filmmaking, around: 2,800 setups, Meyer told an SFS preview audience, and they do go blazing past, so frenetically, and some of them downright dynamically, that anybody with camera- and cutting-sense is going to have a hard—make that a difficult—time keeping his mind on the ostensible subject.

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Review: Thunder and Lightning

[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978]

Corey Allen is best remembered as the Nick Ray actor whose sleeve got hung up on a car door handle during the chickie run in Rebel without a Cause. Last year he directed a Roger Corman programmer about moonshiners and badder cats in the B-movie South where cheerful corruption is about as plentiful and as conspicuous as sweat on a fat red neck. It was called Thunder and Lightning and, to the best of my knowledge, it never saw service in the greater Seattle area until this summer, when it was laid on as second feature to another 20th Centuryâ€“Fox release with revving engines in it, The Driver. I trust no one will be overprimed with anticipation if I suggest that Thunder and Lightning is probably the most slaphappily endearing low comedy since Russ Meyer’s The Seven Minutes; on the other hand, other self-flattering slummers like me who can handle that sort of endorsement are advised to file the title away and take note of it if and when it fills out another double bill in the future.