WILD GALS OF THE NAKED WEST

CONTAINS LITTLE IN THE WAY OF SPOILERS BUT MUCH IN THE WAY OF BLIMEY, CHARLIE, GET A LOAD OF THE UDDERS ON THAT

I don't entirely get Russ Meyer. On the one hand I'm not much of a fan of his work on the simple grounds that I don't share his passion for women with freakishly massive breasts, although I rather enjoyed Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. On the other he had a unique voice and a style and I'm glad there was an industry that let him express it; there certainly isn't now. If there's anywhere a filmmaker can currently indulge a penchant for 54GGs, it's probably in the world of specialist DVD pornography and that's not a platform from which you can become an international household name. Faster, Pussycat! has been described as the ultimate cult movie and I saw it at the National Film Theatre. Big Busty Whoppers* is a 30-minute video and the IMDb doesn't even list a director.

And Wild Gals Of The Naked West? It's an incredibly cheap "adult" comedy Western desperately padded out to 61 minutes and set in a town so sinful the residents didn't dare to give it a name. Everyone drinks, topless women lasso passers-by from their first floor balcony and haul them up for (offscreen) sex, shootouts and fistfights go on for days, Injun abduct um heap big woman (it's that kind of film - it was made in 1962). One day a meek-looking salesman arrives, miraculously isn't killed during the short walk up Main Street, takes one look at the decadence and insanity, and cleans the place up with his really huge.... pistol.

Much of this is in the style of those silent Western spoof sequences Benny Hill used to make: you expect to see Henry McGee or Bob Todd in cowboy costumes, or hear Yakkety Sax on the soundtrack, except that it predates Benny Hill by many years and is nowhere near as funny. Many of the "jokes" are repeated two or three times because otherwise this would be a 20-minute short and frankly gain nothing from repetition. Certainly it has energy, and ingenuity in dealing with its low budget: the opening "History Of The West" montage is achieved through editing, props, scenery and sound effects and not one single person on screen. Some of the interior scenery is painted on a plain white wall or even dispensed with altogether, even the saloon piano is a plain white shelf with piano keys drawn onto it in permanent marker.

Wild Gals Of The Naked West really isn't any good: none of it's amusing and the continual emphasis on grotesque faces and equally grotesque chests would suggest you've got to be some serious kind of fetishist to find any of this even slightly effective in your downstairs department. But there's certainly some kind of energy to it, some kind of auteurist style to it, and it's ingeniously made in places for the pittance they had to spend on it. But there is a lot better Meyer out there.

* I just typed "big whoppers" into the IMDb search bar and this was the first thing that came up.


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