Review of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)
Three girls have a rock band and take it to Hollywood, where success is nearly instant and there’s always a twisted party going on, with a snuggling couple in every room. Everybody gets a melodramatic subplot and the finale makes brilliant use of 20th Century Fox’s fanfare jingle. A narrator hammers in the traditional moral lesson, in case you missed it for all the tits, ass and blood.
Cult-object critique of Hollywood and the campy melodramas of the era. It is a pastiche of the already trashy Valley of the Dolls (whose title refers to narcotics), co-written by Roger Ebert. Fox bosses apparently thought they could throw some money at indie sleazer Russ Meyer and get away clean with the profits. Meyer completed his two-film contract the following year. It wasn’t renewed.