Russ Meyer's VIXEN Trilogy To Find New Life In 4K Restoration From Severin Films
What once seemed like a pipe dream is on track to become a reality as Severin plans to release brand new 4K restorations of three of Meyer's seminal films, 1968's Vixen!, 1975's Supervixens, and the filmmaker's theatrical swan song, 1978's Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. Thanks to a new licensing deal struck between Los Angeles-based cult film specialists Severin Films and the Russ Meyer trust, the long thought impenetrable Meyer vault is now accessible.
In a deal that has been years in the making, the Meyer trust has agreed to allow Severin access to restore and release at least some of Meyer's films. The initial trio, the very loosely linked Vixen trilogy, pre-order for the set on all major outlets opens in October with release set for December 3rd. While no further titles have been announced or confirmed, Severin co-founder David Gregory remains hopeful about the future, commenting in a Variety interview that he hopes this to be the beginning of an "ongoing and bountiful" relationship.
We asked Gregory what this project means to him, and his exclusive response was appropriately reverant:
Russ Meyer was perhaps the most pivotal pioneer of what we now call independent film. He was both a visionary filmmaker as well as distributor, and single-handedly fought local censorship battles across the nation that changed our culture forever. Today, ‘indie film’ is an industry in which tens of millions of dollars help produce ‘edgy’ entertainment for ‘informed’ audiences. Russ Meyer made that possible, and Severin Films is enormously proud to showcase his extraordinary legacy.
One of America's few true blue auteurs, Russ Meyer is often thought of as a pornographer - a title he bristled at - but in reality he was a one man exploitation wrecking crew. Writing, shooting, editing, and distributing nearly all of his 30+ films by himself, he was a self-contained industry. Though he was admittedly - and obviously to anyone with a pair of eyes in their head - obsessed with bosoms, Meyer had no interest in shooting hardcore sex films, he found them to be too clinical to be sexy. Instead, he was among the pioneers of the Nudie Cutie, starting with his groundbreaking 1959 dialogue free debut, The Immoral Mr. Teas.
As he continued to mature as a filmmaker though the mid-'60s, his oeuvre moved through sexy swamp noir, action packed gang girl classics like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and then onto more outré fare. The Vixen Trilogy highlights that evolution with the first film sporting a more conventional narrative and luscious black and white photography, while Supervixens evolves into a more adventurously edited and paced series of vignettes, the latter Ultra-Vixens is like an 93-minute roller coaster with an impossibly precise editing rhythm that had, by that time, become one of Meyer's calling cards.
With Meyer's absolute devotion to perfection in every frame of his work - his background as a military photographer led to an obsession with razor sharp and perfectly exposed (pun intended) images - it's only fitting that the obsessives at Severin Films have taken on this responsiblity. More than simply a hotly anticipated home video release, the 4K restorations will insure that Meyer's legacy will endure, a legacy that had been in danger of fading into obscurity if someone hadn't been able to crack the code.
The upcoming releases, available only as a trilogy box set, will feature the classic Bosomania-style artwork that Meyer designed himself decades ago in tribute to the filmmaker's wishes. It will be available on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K UHD, all restored from the original camera negatives, marking the first high definition (and ultra-high definition) releases of the films anywhere.This is a very big deal, and these films couldn't be in better hands.
