Russ Meyer: Last News

Critics be damned, John Waters is not afraid to drop a cinematic hot take.

Todd Gilchrist editor Three films by Russ Meyer, the sexploitation director film critic Roger Ebert described as “the ultimate auteur,” are coming to physical media in December. The estate of the pioneering independent filmmaker has reached an agreement with media company Severin Films to distribute three of his signature films, “Vixen,” “Supervixens” and “Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens,” on home video for the first time in decades.

Director Ethan Coen – collaborating with wife Tricia Cooke instead of brother Joel – delivers a disposable but not entirely unentertaining lesbian-centered crime caper comedy in Drive-Away Dolls. With its raunchy sex and vivid violence, the film is more an affectionate tribute to hard R drive-in B movies that more resembles something from the mind of Russ Meyer than anything resembling smart, Oscar-y movies like the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, Big Lebowski, Barton Fink, Fargo, Blood Simple etc.

Pat Saperstein Deputy Editor Francesca “Kitten” Natividad, the go-go dancer who became a cult pop culture figure when she was cast by sexploitation film director Russ Meyer in “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens,” died Saturday of kidney failure after suffering from cancer at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, according to her friend Siouxzan Perry. She was 74. “She adored her friends, cats, family and fans,” her sister Eva wrote in a statement on Facebook posted by Perry. Born in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Natividad moved to Texas as a child, where she became class president of her high school in El Paso. After moving to California, she became a cook and maid for actress Stella Stevens before becoming a go-go dancer and adopting the name “Kitten.” She met “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” director Meyer through a dancer friend, and he hired her to narrate his 1976 sex comedy “Up.” She had already had breast implant surgery in Tijuana when Meyer paid for a second surgery, giving her the outsized proportions that would become her calling card.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Something’s not quite right with Pearl, who wields a pitchfork less like a tool than a sex toy when tending the family farm. Such macabre behavior will come as no surprise to fans of Ti West’s “X,” who met the character in her advanced years, horny and homicidal, killing the amateur adult film crew staying on her property, then feeding their pieces to a grateful alligator. West wrapped that early-2022 horror offering with a trippy teaser for “Pearl,” a stand-alone origin story rendered in the style of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. The trailer suggested something practically avant-garde, with a dance scene, dream sequences and a super-saturated color scheme, but the reality is more mundane than A24 audiences have come to expect.

The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that the filmmaker would be going solo without his brother Joel who directed The Tragedy of Macbeth without him last year.Ethan wrote the script for the untitled film, reportedly inspired by Russ Meyer, alongside his wife Tricia Cooke in the early 2000s.A synopsis reads: “The story centred on a party girl who takes a trip from Philadelphia to Miami with her buttoned-down friend. Cruising bars ensues as does the potpourri of a severed head in a hatbox, a bitter ex-girlfriend, a mystery briefcase and an evil senator.”The film’s lead roles have now been filled.