Up! (1976)

Some things I liked some I did not.

Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

An action-packed slog

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

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

OK, here's what happens in the first few minutes:Adolf "Schwartz", a wrinkled, perverted old resident of the American Midwest, still wearing his trademark moustache & cowlick, is pleasured in the dungeon of his Germanic castle by his servants, finally submitting to sodomy from his favourite, 'The Pilgrim', who steals all the money out of his wallet. Adolf then takes a nice, relaxing bath, reads the paper, & gets eaten alive by a piranha called The Nimrod.Summarising the story would be an idiotic exercise - it involves a young couple, Paul & Sweet Li'l Alice (Paul is the previously mentioned Pilgrim, & Sweet Li'l Alice is a nymphomaniac, surprise surprise), a stranger in town called Margo (also, presumably, a nymphomaniac), a corrupt cop called Homer (I guess you could call him a nymphomaniac, except he's a guy), & loads of drooling, sex-starved hillbillies. Get the picture?Plus, the plot (ho, ho, ho) is helped along by the Greek chorus of a romping, naked wood-nymph who keeps reminding the audience of the ongoing investigation into Adolf Schwartz's murder. Apparently this film is a murder mystery.What separates Russ Meyer's films from normal smut or porn is the sheer deranged energy that fuels them, a warped sense of humour & a genuine cinematic skill. 'Up' is no exception, but unfortunately, it's one of his later films, which tend to display a much nastier, truly misogynistic bent, & contains two of the most offensive scenes I've seen in a Meyer film.The first involves Margo being beaten almost to death & then raped while unconscious. An extremely violent, graphic & gratuitous scene which seems totally at odds with the comic atmosphere that the film is really trying to achieve.The second is even worse in its own way - Margo is gang-raped in a bar, with Russ Meyer himself in the crowd, egging it all on. What makes this scene particularly nasty is that it's shot in a strangely comic fashion. Not aiming for high laughs, but making it out to be somehow absurd, as opposed to horrifying. Things go really crazy when the giant lumberjack raping Margo grabs Sweet Li'l Alice & tries to rape them both at the same time. Doesn't make much sense on any level, but little does in this film.Meanwhile, the murder investigation continues, & the resolution involves the offspring of Adolf Hitler & Eva Braun...Meyer fans will find a few laughs in 'Up!', as he seems to be going for insanity over titillation, but anyone else will be baffled, offended, or both.

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.

I just watched Russ Meyer's up yesterday and i thought it was really funny. I had seen supervixens which is not as good and beneath the valley of the dolls, which i thought was corny. But up has beautiful photography and i like this whole style, some scenes are really funny and violent and i was surprised to see the actresses act OK. I have heard Russ Meyer used a lot of strippers and go-go girls from that time and with big natural breasts, this is before silicon. And i thought Kitten was very funny, talking between scenes and doing these ridiculous go-go steps and screaming like she's coming. Did you know that Kitten was Russ's wife in the 70's....Up is just brilliantly entertaining......up ..up and away