Mondo Culto: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

What exactly makes a cult movie? It's tough to define, but here's a stab: it's a film so bad, so weird, or so obscure that it's overlooked when it comes out, but then slowly creeps back into the culture, spawning theme parties and websites and PhD theses. I love these movies, and I'm here to spread the gospel on the best I can find. Drop me a line with your favorites. I'll watch anything once.

In the late '60s, "King of the Nudies" Russ Meyer was approached by FOX to make a sequel to the film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's bestselling novel Valley of the Dolls. He enlisted Roger Ebert -- yes, that Roger Ebert -- to co-write a screenplay, but by then Susann was suing the studio and the movie had been recast as a spoof.

Dolly Read (Playmate of the Month, May 1966) stars as Kelly Mac Namara, singer of a girl group, with Cynthia Myers (Playmate of the Month, December 1968) as Casey on bass and Marcia McBroom (of a thousand album covers) as Petronella Danforth on drums. Why yes, as a matter of fact, this is an avant-garde art film. How did you guess?

Kelly, her band, and her boyfriend/manager, Harris, drive out to LA, where her aunt takes them to a party at rock impresario Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell's (apparently based on Phil Spector). The scene is a bitter parody of a wild Hollywood shindig, circa 1969, with "grass," "downers," naked girls frugging in the crowd, and the Strawberry Alarm Clock as the house band. Z-Man (played by John LaZar) is a creepy, magnetic Svengali who takes Kelly under his wing and launches the band to superstardom. What could go wrong?

The innocents are predictably corrupted by the evils of Hollywood. Kelly dumps Harris for a gigolo called Lance Rocke -- yes, I said Lance Rocke; Harris shacks up with porn star Ashley St. Ives (Edy Williams, aka Mrs. Russ Meyer); and Casey, after getting pregnant by Harris in a drunken blackout that neither of them remember, starts an affair with the woman who helped find her an abortionist. Ah, young love.

Then the plot slips even further into soap opera melodrama -- think suicide attempts and miraculous recoveries from paralysis -- but the lines are priceless. Roger Ebert says it was "a satire of Hollywood conventions, genres, situations, dialogue, characters and success formulas." Hmm -- OK, Mr. Revisionist History, was it parody or just the worst writing ever? Z-Man stops the party to scream, "This is my happening … and it freaks me out!" and at one point Kelly actually says, "I'm going to change into something more comfortable. Hang cool, teddy bear." Z-Man's Elizabethan lingo is always laughable, but "I beseech you to get thine ass in gear" steals the show. Last one, of so many to choose from: "You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance!" Man, that should be on a t-shirt.

The climax of the film is a party that ends in quadruple murder, inspired by the 1969 Manson Family killings, which, you may remember, included victim Sharon Tate -- star of the original Valley of the Dolls. Man, that's dark. How do you turn mass murder into a feel-good flick? A wedding? Hey, make it three! OK, I'm seeing Ebert's point; who could believe that anyone would write this seriously?

Meyer made one more movie for FOX, and then went back to being an independent, releasing films like Supervixens and Up! before dying in 2004 at age 82. Roger Ebert, of course, went on to become Roger Ebert. In the years since, the film that Variety called "as funny as a burning orphanage and a treat for the emotionally retarded" emerged as a cult classic, named #87 on the Village Voice's poll of 50 film critics' list of the 100 best films of the century, ahead of Blade Runner and Godard's Masculin Féminin. Ha! (That would be the last laugh.) And so, we get our formula: bizarre extremes + time = cult classic.

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