By Last Caress.

“I’d like to strap you on sometime.” – Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls

Action. Drama. Comedy. Musical. Sex. Romance. Horror. Social commentary. Sections in a video store? Well, yes, probably. But they’re also the many genres well represented in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Meyer, 1970), arguably the most accessible – and certainly the most successful – movie by auteur Russ Meyer, the purveyor supreme of camp comedy, high sleaze and powerful women with wide-eyed, elfin faces and gargantuan breasts. Arrow video, those purveyors supreme of cult classic movies, have released Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in a wonderful blu-ray package chock-full of extras, not least of which is a DVD presentation of The Seven Minutes (1971), Meyer’s seldom-seen second movie for 20th Century Fox (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was his first).

The Kelly Affair are an all-girl three-piece psychedelic pop-rock combo, fronted by Kelly (Dolly Read) and managed by her boyfriend Harris (David Gurian). They travel to Los Angeles to connect with Kelly’s aunt Susan (Phyllis Davis), who is heir to a large family inheritance and who is willing to share a considerable amount of it with Kelly, much to the chagrin of Susan’s odious accountant Porter (Duncan McLeod), who is secretly attempting to steal the inheritance.

Whilst in the City of Angels, The Kelly Affair are introduced to the wild and eccentric pansexual music mogul Z-Man (John LaZar), who immediately takes The Kelly Affair under his wing, changing their name to The Carrie Nations and alienating Kelly’s boyfriend/manager in the process. From here, the movie follows several plot strands at once: Kelly is seduced by Lance (Michael Blodgett), an actor and male escort; Porter tries at first to discredit and then to ingratiate himself with Kelly, to keep himself close to Susan’s inheritance; Band members Pet (Marcia McBroom) and Casey (Cynthia Myers) enter into relationships with aspiring lawyer Emerson (Harrison Page) and lesbian fashionista Roxanne (Erica Gavin, star of Meyer’s 1968 movie Vixen) respectively; Harris, upset at the increasing distance between himself and Kelly, allows himself to become the plaything of porn star and party girl Ashley (Edy Williams). These waters are muddied further by Pet’s fling with a champion boxer (James Inglehart), and by Harris’ one-night stand with Casey which leaves her pregnant and him trying to fling himself from the rafters of a studio set. Kelly and Harris in particular become increasingly enamoured of the drug scene around which they’re all spinning, and everything comes to a head – literally – at Z-Man’s drug-addled psychedelia bash, during which he has a proposition rebuffed and makes a bizarre and staggering confession…

Phew! If that sounds like a lot to take in… well that’s because it is. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was co-written by the late great movie critic Roger Ebert, and he and Mr. Meyer seemed determined to throw the kitchen sink at the script. Fox, having bought and made Valley of the Dolls (Robson, 1967), based on the successful novel by Jacqueline Susann, had an option to make a sequel and wanted to exercise that option. However, Valley of the Dolls was panned by critics and Ms. Susann began legal proceedings against Fox, claiming their awful movie had damaged her credibility as a serious novelist. Thus, Fox’s “sequel” had to bear no similarity or correlation to Valley of the Dolls whatsoever and, moreover, had to state as much during the opening credits.

Why still call it Beyond the Valley of the Dolls at all, then? Beats me. But Messrs. Ebert and Meyer elected to make a parody of what they perceived to be the whole LA “scene” at that time although, since neither were familiar with LA or its “scene”, a lot of it was guesswork, speculation and good old imagination. The characters of music mogul Z-Man and prize fighter Randy Black for instance are loosely based on Phil Spector and Cassius Clay respectively, but only on exaggerations of their public personas as Roger and Russ saw them; they didn’t actually have a clue who these people were in truth although, in light of Spector’s conviction for murder many years later, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls gains a morbid prescience as regards the character of Z-Man, played at the zenith of camp caricature by the wonderful doe-eyed John LaZar, who also featured in Mr. Meyer’s 1975 pic Supervixens. Indeed, the last portion of the movie takes a morbid turn – albeit a wacky and blackly humorous one – as Ebert & Meyer put a full stop on their camp and crazy drugged-up love-in with a series of vicious acts designed to vaguely echo the murders of actress Sharon Tate and her friends by Charles Manson’s so-called “Family”, itself a full stop on the camp and crazy drugged-up love-in of the “hippie” movement (and drawing one more connection to Valley of the Dolls, in which Sharon Tate featured). But, despite that and despite Beyond the Valley of the Dolls being Russ Meyer’s major studio bow, it’s also unmistakably a Russ Meyer picture: His stars, unblinking, angelic and Amazonian; his cuts, rapid fire, as though spat from a machine gun; Charles Napier, in there somewhere; comedic Nazi imagery, ditto.

So, how does it look? Well, Arrow have once again done a sterling job. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls – presented here in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio –  is an incredibly vibrant movie aesthetically, full of colours and light, retro-cool (although of course it wouldn’t have been retro at the time) and it looks every inch as much on this blu-ray. The movie could’ve been made yesterday. Audio is presented in the movie’s original mono state, as God intended, so although it won’t melt your face off in that satisfying way that the most impressive soundtracks do, it is however crystal clear without fault or overlap.

Extras are as follows:

• Introduction by John LaZar – Recorded in 2006 for the movie’s DVD release by Fox, John LaZar (Z-Man)  provides an ad-libbed and in-character introduction to the Special Features section.
• Above, Beneath & Beyond the Valley – A hugely entertaining and informative half-hour documentary, managing in its brief runtime to touch on Russ Meyer’s career in general up to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, into which it delves more deeply.
• Look On Up at the Bottom – Only a ten-minute feature, this, but it packs in a lot of opinion on the music of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which of course is plentiful since it’s about a rock band.
• The Best of Beyond – Critics and stars of the movie discuss their favourite scenes in this twelve-minute feature.
• Sex, Drugs, Music & Murder – seven-minute piece touching on the hippie counterculture of the sixties and the dark side which ultimately smothered it.
• Casey & Roxanne: The Love Scene – Erica Gavin and a decidedly flirty and coquettish Cynthia Myers discuss their lesbian love scene in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in this four-minute feature.
• Screen Tests – Just what it says on the tin. Seven minutes’-worth.
• Stills Galleries – Over a hundred incredibly interesting pics, segregated into four sections: Behind the Scenes, Cast Portraits, Film Stills and Marketing Materials.
• Trailers – Take a guess!
• Commentaries – For me, the highlights of the extras on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, even though neither is original to this release (both were commissioned for Fox’s 2006 DVD release): First up is from the late great Roger Ebert, co-writer of the movie and arguably the finest movie critic who ever lived. This is an incredibly informative yet fun and light commentary which I could listen to again and again (indeed, I intend to), and which stands right up there among the best commentaries I’ve ever heard. The second – featuring actors John LaZar, Erica Gavin, Dolly Read, Harrison Page and Cynthia Myers – finds this quintet in fine form, full of anecdotes and clearly enjoying the commentary and the work on which they’re commenting.

As mentioned at the top of the review, Arrow’s blu-ray presentation of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls comes packaged with a standard-definition DVD presentation of Russ Meyer’s second picture for 20th Century Fox, The Seven Minutes (1971). Based on a novel by Irving Wallace, the movie concerns the trial of a bookstore owner for selling an obscene publication, a novel entitled “The Seven Minutes”. The trial focuses on the novel itself, trying to ascertain whether the novel – which may have motivated a young man to rape a woman – is indeed obscene. With its heavily trial-based setting, The Seven Minutes is without doubt the most straightforward and conventional Russ Meyer movie I have ever seen; unfortunately, it’s also the driest and least interesting, despite some enthusiastic gyrations in a more typical Meyer vein by Baby Doll Devereaux early on. Deejay Wolfman Jack has a cameo and Charles Napier turns up (of course! It’s a Russ Meyer pic!) but, aside from an early sighting of Tom “Magnum, PI” Selleck – and his moustache! – there is little to commend this movie to anyone but Russ Meyer completists. An interview with Russ Meyer and Yvette Vickers (Attack of the 50ft. Woman) on David Del Valle’s Sinister Image talk show from 1987 is the only additional feature on the disc, but it’s best I think to view this entire disc as an extra to the main feature and nothing more. Looked at in that light, it’s a pretty bloody good extra.

So there we have it. A hyperreal and gorgeous-looking slice of funny, camp, sexy sixties psychedelia, a superb jump-off point for anyone unfamiliar with the great Russ Meyer – and if you ARE unfamiliar: WHY?? – and another triumph for the almighty Arrow Video.

Released 18/Jan/2016, get it before it’s gone. Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls is highly recommended.

By Last Caress.

Sherpa is in cinemas now and will broadcast globally on Discovery Channel in 2016

http://sherpafilm.com/

Pop quiz, everyone: Since Sir Edmund Hillary and his faithful Sherpa Tensing Norgay became the first people to scale the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, how many other people have managed to do likewise? Is it six? Ten?  A couple of dozen? No more than that, surely?
Actually, it’s thousands.

Precise figures are uncertain at this point but it’s likely to be as many as 3,100+ climbers, and over 5,000 climbs. Not so much a voyage into the unknown anymore, it’s become a bucket-list item for those wealthy enough to pay for the experience and, as in the case of Sir Edmund all those years ago, the Sherpa people of the Himalayan region of Nepal are there guiding the way and making the trip as comfortable and comparatively easy as it can be.

In April 2013 international media outlets reported a fight which had broken out between a crew of Sherpas and a trio of European climbers. Exactly what had happened to trigger a brawl in such a perilous part of the world is unclear, depending as it does on which eyewitness is doing the explaining, but what’s clear is that Sherpas don’t appreciate being referred to as “Motherf*ckers”, and that something seems not to be sitting right with them. In 2014 Australian documentarian Jennifer Peedom, a specialist in “intimate portraits of people in extreme circumstances” as her website very aptly puts it, decided to head to Nepal to take a Sherpa’s-POV look at the Everest-climbing industry as it stands today and how it’s affecting them. This documentary, Sherpa, is the result and, as with so many documentaries, she got more than she bargained for.

Let’s stop for a brief lesson in the logistics of Mount Everest.

My ignorant assumption of scaling the world’s highest mountain was that it was probably the subject of a couple of expeditions per year, made up of no more than maybe three or four guys plus a couple of Sherpas acting as happy human pack-mules, and that these expeditions took maybe three or four days on the way up, plus another couple coming down. Sounds fair enough, doesn’t it? About right?

WRONG.

It takes WEEKS to scale Everest. Climbers have to remain at each base camp for weeks just to acclimatise to the height. It takes ten days just to hike to Base camp at the foot of the mountain. And whilst it’s true that a mountain will, for obvious reasons, become ever more perilous the further up the mountain you climb, in the case of Mount Everest the most perilous section by some way is the 600ft route from Base camp to Camp 1. It’s called the Khumbu Icefall, and it’s a constantly-shifting tumble of enormous ice boulders at the head of a glacier at the southern foot of the mountain. Ms. Peedom makes great use of time-lapse photography to demonstrate just how fast and dramatically this area shifts. It really shifts. Because of this, the Sherpas can’t map it. No matter how experienced they are up that mountain, this section is new to them every time. It shifts so fast that it’s different on the way down than it was when they went up past it. Huge crevasses and ravines can open up at any moment, and in seconds. Huge blocks of ice could fall from the glacier above in the blink of an eye. There is no way around it. And as hazardous as that sounds for the western climbers who, in their desire to conquer the mountain, have to traverse it once going up and once again going down, the Sherpas have to traverse it again and again as they bring supplies from Base Camp to Camp 1. Maybe as many as a dozen times more than the tourists. And there aren’t three or four explorers at a time; there are entire caravans, dozens of travellers taken by each of several tour operators, many at the same time.

While Jennifer Peedom and her crew were on the mountain in April of 2014, largely following the travails of experienced Himalayan guide operator, the New Zealander Russell Brice and his Sherpa crew led by Phurba Tashi Sherpa, an avalanche fell into the Khumbu Icefall, killing sixteen Sherpas making supply runs from Base Camp to Camp 1 for the paying customers.

Sherpa begins as it was intended: Looking at the Sherpa’s lot. Phurba is proud that he has scaled Everest (or Chomolungma as they call it) 21 times already. His family are somewhat more reticent. They’re mindful of the dangers mountaineering presents, and the risks in constantly traversing the Khumbu Icefall. Many Sherpa are increasingly aware of how much harder they’re expected to work each year to make the experience as wonderful as possible for the tourists; we see them stocking the delightful-looking Base Camp with shelves of books, and widescreen televisions. They’re not scared of a bit of graft by any means, but the exorbitant amounts of money being kicked around from the tourists to the tour operators and on to the Nepalese government, doesn’t appear to be spilling down to the Sherpas themselves. Increasing risks to safety puts the operators in a bind, too. Russell Brice cancelled his tour in 2012, costing everyone a lot of money. Now he’s feeling the pressure to go on no matter what even when, halfway through the movie, the worst tragedy in Everest’s history happens. Naturally the focus of the documentary shifts past this point – although not by much of course; the potential for this sort of horror represent a large part of the resentment bubbling up on the part of the Sherpas, and now here it is. Now, not only is there uncertainty as to whether the climb will continue, there’s a chance that this expedition isn’t going to pass without angry conflict, and this is the last place on Earth where you want to start butting heads with the people around you, upon whom you’re depending to get you home alive.

Jennifer Peedom co-directed the quite remarkable National Geographic/BBC co-production Solo, about the doomed attempt by Andrew McAuley to kayak 1000 miles across the Tasman sea. With that, her other Everest-based docs Miracle on Everest and Everest: Beyond the Limit and now Sherpa, Ms. Peedom is becoming an important voice in the study of human beings at the very edge of their capabilities, and Sherpa is likely to be one of the finest documentaries you will see this year.

By Last Caress.

A Girl at My Door, the debut picture from writer/director July Jung, is nominally a familiar and oft-told tale (kid needs to escape abusive domestic situation) attached to an equally familiar premise (cop winds up in sleepy suburb having fallen from grace in The Big City, seeks redemption).

Young-nam (Doona Bae) is a South Korean police Captain, freshly arrived at her new station amongst a small, close-knit fishing community on the southern shores of Yeosu and in total contrast to her previous post in Seoul. She didn’t apply to be stationed out in the sticks; in the wake of an internal investigation (about what exactly, we are not informed, although clues to what might have happened present themselves along the way); Young-nam has found herself removed to this place. She is introduced to bragadocious local kingpin Yong-ha (Sae-byeok Song). He’s ignorant and misogynistic from the off and, as it transpires, he’s also an alcoholic like his cantankerous mother Jum-soon (Jin-gu Kim), but the locals and indeed the constabulary pay little more than lipservice to his transgressions because of his family lobster fishing company, upon which the town depends.

Later, Young-nam happens upon a gaggle of adolescents bullying a girl (Sae-ron Kim) who reveals herself as Do-hee, stepdaughter to Yong-ha. She’s reticent and uncommunicative but she soon opens up to Young-nam; her stepfather is prone to frequent outbursts of violent drunken abuse, aimed at Do-hee ever since her mother fled the relationship.

This allegation places Young-nam in a quandary. She wants to exercise her authority as a police officer to throw the book at Yong-ha – there’s certainly plenty of substantiating evidence of abuse all over Do-hee’s battered body –  but she also has to be mindful of his standing amongst the locals and of her own unfamiliarity to them, as well as her need to present a low profile to her superiors for the sake of her precarious ongoing career prospects. Still, Do-hee asks Young-nam if she can stay with her, at least over the school holiday period whilst her stepfather gets his head straight following a recent family tragedy and, whilst initially reluctant, Young-nam eventually sees this as the compromise that might just keep Do-hee safe whilst maintaining the status quo. But Young-nam has private issues of her own too which could destroy her entire life as well as put her traumatised young ward in further jeopardy…

Do-hee, portrayed superbly by youngster Sae-ron Kim, is a study in the consequences of systematic familial abuse. But it’s really as much about the things which aren’t being said as about the things which are. The fantastic Doona Bae, back for her first Korean feature since her Hollywood turn in Cloud Atlas (Wachowskis, 2012), presents Young-nam frequently and silently exercising incredible emotional restraint, and she has to do so because of the issues with which her character Young-nam is struggling, one of which is an important character twist revealed mid-movie but another of which is her own deepening alcoholism, which she disguises by way of pouring all of her booze into mineral water bottles. It’s also about the nature of societal tolerance and intolerance in Korea, given both the reprehensible behaviour the townsfolk are prepared to ignore for their own material benefit and the character traits in Young-nam which appear to inspire a collective and barely-disguised seething contempt.

A Girl at My Door is shot and cut with an assured and confident hand which belies writer/director July Jung’s relative inexperience, photographed in deliberate and measured fashion typical of quality Asian cinema and demonstrating as much restraint behind the camera as Doona Bae demonstrates in front of it. And despite the slow pace of the picture, the heavy nature of its subject matter and its ever more disquieting tone, A Girl at My Door never feels ponderous. It’s not a hap-hap-happy family feelgood movie but it’s a good ‘un for sure, and comes highly recommended.

A Girl at My Door is out on DVD.