Supervixens

1975 film by Russ Meyer

Supervixens is a 1975 American film directed by American filmmaker Russ Meyer. The cast features Meyer regulars Charles Napier, Uschi Digard, and Haji. The film also features Shari Eubank (in a dual role) in one of her only two film roles and Christy Hartburg in her only film role.

Gas station attendant Clint Ramsey, who works at Martin Bormann's Super Service in the desert, finds himself too irresistible to a series of girls, all of whom have the word "Super" in their given names. In the beginning, he is married to the hypersexual, demanding, and jealous SuperAngel (Shari Eubank), who constantly harasses him at work. She orders him home at once when she calls Clint and overhears a female customer, SuperLorna (Christy Hartburg), hitting on him at work. Clint finds SuperAngel's constant accusations and arguing a turn off and, back at home, they fight after he rejects her aggressive advances. A neighbor calls the police as Clint leaves for a local bar, where the bartender is the very scantily clad SuperHaji (Haji). Meanwhile, SuperAngel seduces Harry Sledge (Charles Napier), the cop who responded to the police call. He is impotent and unable to perform. She repeatedly taunts and insults him over this, which finally results in him killing her by stomping her brutally in a bathtub, then throwing a radio in the water which was plugged into the wall socket. Sledge burns down the house, then tries to pin the murder on Clint. Clint claims being in the pub all night, but SuperHaji has her revenge on him (for insulting her breast size earlier) by refusing to confirm his alibi. Clint is then forced to flee. In his rush to escape, Clint hitchhikes a ride from a boy (John LaZar) and his girlfriend SuperCherry (Colleen Brennan). During the drive, SuperCherry comes on to him and puts his hand over her breast, but then pulls it back. She then tries to give him a handjob over his pants, but he continues to resist her advances. The driver takes offense to Clint rejecting his girlfriend, but she says he probably just wants a closer contact. She again attempts and fails to seduce him and he asks the driver to let him get out. The driver follows him out and beats and robs him. Clint is found by an old farmer who takes him to his farm to heal from his injuries and Clint agrees to work for the farmer for a week to repay him. The farmer has a younger Austrian mail order bride, SuperSoul (Uschi Digard), who is hypersexual. After energetically satisfying her husband, she comes knocking on Clint's door at night. She immediately pushes him into his bed where she proceeds to mount and rape him, until he manages to overpower her. However, she does the same the following day and this time overpowering him after jumping him from behind in the barn. Looking for SuperSoul, the farmer finds them in the barn, then chases Clint away and punches SuperSoul. Fleeing from the farm, Clint meets a motel owner and his deaf daughter, SuperEula (Deborah McGuire), who convinces him to take a ride with her in her dune buggy to have sex in the desert. They are caught by her father and chased out of town. Clint eventually meets up with SuperVixen (also played by Shari Eubank) at Supervixen's Oasis, a roadside diner. SuperVixen is (inexplicably) a friendly and giving reincarnation of SuperAngel, whose ghost now appears nude between scenes to comment on the plot from atop a bedspring balanced on a mesa. Clint and SuperVixen fall in love and are inseparable, although their common nemesis, Harry Sledge, arrives on the scene and plots ending the lives of the now happy couple.

Meyer's previous two films had failed at the box office The Seven Minutes was a straight drama about censorship, done for 20th Century Fox, and Black Snake was a blaxploitation film. He originally intended to follow this with Foxy starring his then wife Edy Williams but the marriage ended and "I just couldn't picture myself making twenty films starring Edy Williams". "Those years were very confusing to me," said Meyer. "But instead of rushing off and throwing myself out the window, I was able to psychoanalyze myself and discern what was best for me. I looked myself square in the face and realized I couldn't do everything." Meyer decided to return to the parody sex comedies which had made his reputation so he made what he described as a "sort of sequel" to his 1968 hit Vixen!. "I don't want to do too much yakking," he said. "If there was too much plot, too much dialogue, the story would get in the way of the action. I want a film like an Al Capp cartoon where you know right off who's good and who's bad." I used John LaZar, who was Superwoman in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He plays Cal McKinney, and he and Supercherry are a couple of muggers and they mug Clint. Then I had O’Luke, who was in Mudhoney, Stu Lancaster, married to Uschi Digard, who was an Austrian wife and giant — well, they’re all giant busted women in the picture, which I think makes the send up. Every chick he meets is like — “Oh Christ, here we go again!” So she’s Supersoul and she speaks essentially in German, and she’s probably the most aggressive woman in the picture, of the seven. She's just totally — she does two things: she's either milking the cow with a giant udder, or she’s rapaciously taking her old man, out in the fields, wherever the case may be. And then there's a sequence where she attacks, rapes, literally consumes a young man in a manger, screaming, shouting German, describing explicitly what she’s doing and how it feels. Then we have a black girl who’s built like the rest, and she’s dumb, she can’t speak, she uses sign language. But she has a white father, and we never explain that. She’s Supereula. "There's a new chick every ten minutes," said Meyer. "And each chick is more outrageously constructed than the next." There were a number of other actors who had appeared in earlier Meyer films like John LaZar, O’Luke, Stu Lancaster, and Uschi Digard. The film featured a murder scene which was the most violent yet depicted in a Meyer film. "My films have to please me, to entertain me, and I really dig violence," said Meyer. "I think it's very entertaining. Of course, I like to involve sex with it sex with gusto that's my style."

The film was Meyer's biggest commercial success since Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, making $8.2 million during its initial theatrical run. Meyer also said later the thought "the film wouldn't have had the success it had" without Napier "in spite of the big boobs and seven girls. Napier, I think, has a quality that few actors possess: Wallace Beery, Borgnine, Alan Hale. There can be just a thin edge separating evil and humor and they work both sides of that line."

The British version of the film cut a moment where Napier stomped on a woman after killing her in a bath. The R rated version removed the bathtub murder. "I wouldn't do it again," said Meyer. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film one star out of four and wrote that "Meyer has lost the sense of humor that occasionally made his films enjoyable. The humor has been replaced with repulsive amounts of violence." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times said Meyer explored "as never before to such an extent the dark underside of his erotic myths. It's 'Supervixens,' not The Day of the Locust, that's genuinely apocalyptic." Edy Williams, Myer's ex wife, later sued unsuccessfully for a portion of the film's profits.

Meyer makes the cartoonish nature of the film explicit towards the end, when Harry's impending death is preceded by the "Beep beep!" sound of the Roadrunner, which always introduces imminent disaster for Wile E. Coyote in the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon series. The antagonist breaks the fourth wall between the fictional world and the audience with a facial gesture showing he is resigned to his fate. As a humorous sidenote, in the end credits of the film the names of all participants have been changed either partially (Uschi Bristol instead of Digard) or completely (Brown Pants, C. Unt). Shari Eubank is credited as 'Shari Sheridan'. As a combat photographer in World War II, Russ Meyer made many friends and acquaintances in Europe. Meyer used running jokes and recurring themes in many of his films which were unique to the veteran's sense of humor. In Supervixens, these include the use of German marching tunes and Nazi references. Actor Henry Rowland appears as Martin Bormann, who was Adolf Hitler's personal secretary, rumored to have escaped Allied justice for decades and the subject of many "sightings". The Bormann character refers to SuperAngel as the Führer. Bruce Springsteen mentions the film in the chorus of his song "Pilgrim in the Temple of Love". The band Garbage included a song called "Supervixen" on their self titled debut album.