Up! (1976)

One of my all time favorites.

best movie i've ever seen.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Russ Meyer's Up! is a nasty black comedy. Totally X-rated. In RM's later years there was something mentally ill about his fantasies. This film is masterful in it's kinetic editing together of a plethora of pervasive perversions. I think the photography is some of the best in his career. Kitten Natividad is one of my favorite parts of the film. She opens up the film as the story's Greek Chorus,(obviously the pen of Roger Ebert)she then opens up her legs with an incredible close up of her Brillo Pad-esque pubic hair. She reminds the audience over and over of the convoluted murder mystery of Adolf "Hitler" Schwartz. Adolf's sex dungeon is one of RM's freakiest and grotesque scenes. I absolutely love Candy Samples aka Mary Gavin as the Headsperson. I love her S&M black leather hood with a zipper on the mouth, "Headsperson,an abyss of gluttony," proclaims Kitten in one of the film's best montages. Like Beyond the Valley and Supervixens, this film is so 'punk' before the fact. Oddly, I think RM was so untouched by 'hipness' of the times. Watching Up! one can imagine pretty clearly why the Sex Pistols wanted Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert to make their movie. This film has an intentional nasty bad attitude in a fun way. Another thing that I love about Up is all the queer overtones. All the men have huge fake penises in this one (perhaps to match the giant tits?). The film opens with Hitler bottoming for his well hung hustler Paul (played by Robert McLane, who was in the queer 'Love Story' A Very Natural Thing 1974). The lesbian scenes are depicted as good and erotic and the male on male scenes are depicted as degrading and perverse. RM was old school and openly homophobic but oddly ALL of his films show an eroticism to men in a lesser degree to the women. RM still fetishizes male muscles, buttocks and torsos and sometimes even the penis... Just an interesting observation. Also, there are lots of shots of feet, his films are great if you have a thing for feet and shoes. All in all, I really like this one. I thought it was better than Supervixens, which is one people always seem to talk about.

Up!, writer-director Russ Meyer's twenty-fifth film, is a rare find: a feature that should be a bona-fide turn-on for many. A character who bears a corny resemblance to Adolf Hitler is murdered after enjoying some gay and straight sex. Most of the rest of the film deals with the question "whodunit?" although the activities of busty characters like Margo Winchester are interesting distractions for sure. This is the second Meyer film I've seen that features a black woman giving head to somebody, and the subject matter hasn't ceased to titillate me yet. Meyer, or "King Leer" as he was sometimes called, hasn't failed to deliver an erotic, primal, and at times silly motion picture that wouldn't be complete without the undulating of a totally nude Kitten Natividad as she narrates the story. Natividad's "roll call" of the characters gets a bit tedious by the third go-round, but who watches Meyer films for the story? The visual impact of many a "King Leer" film's sensual subject matter makes up its "money shots," and with a character wearing a leather mask flicking a lengthy tongue around in front of the camera, they're in there...and then some.

Up! (1976) *** (out of 4) Insane Russ Meyer flick written by Roger Ebert. A dictator (a Hitler spoof) is assassinated but who did it? That's pretty much the storyline for this film because the other 79-minutes are nothing but sex, big boobs, lumberjacks, more sex, lesbians, a fake penis and more wild and kinky sex. Pretty much everything that could possibly happen sex wise is thrown into this thing including three different rapes, which makes me wonder why Ebert went out of his way to try and get certain films banned due to their "treatment of women". The lack of plot really helps matters because in the end this is a very fun film full of laughs but it's mostly the outrageous sex scenes that make it so memorable.

Hallo everyone, in one of the later scenes of this film a signpost reads: Hanns Seidl Stiftung Wildbad Kreuth. On top of it is Adolph Schwartz' mailbox. Not everyone may know this political foundation, which is the propaganda-academy of the CSU party of Bavaria (Christian Social Union), a very right wing party, neo-con and very religious with Catholic fundamentalist tendencies, not openly fascist, but with occasional leanings in that direction. Adolph Schwartz' mailbox on this signpost suggests that Hitler resides at the Hanns-Seidl-Stiftung, which I consider an exaggerated but not too far-fetched insinuation. I wonder who gave Russ Meyer this brilliant idea. He cannot have been so familiar with local Bavarian politics. Pity I did not ask him in his lifetime. If anyone wishes to see the pic, I can mail it. Looking forward to comments. Gerhart, Munich