Last month I was having at drink at Horatio’s, a seafood restaurant right on the water in San Leandro, California. This town is right across the bay from San Francisco’s International Airport. One other factoid – San Leandro is the birth place of Russ Meyer, who was the first guy to put a movie which featured ‘Tits and Ass’ into your neighborhood movie house.

Sorry about that archaic term ‘movie house’. When Russ began showing cleavage and lots more on screen – the word Multiplex hadn’t even been coined.

While colleges hold film festivals centered around Russ Meyer’s body of work, we will just look at one of his movies today. There’s tons of stuff about Russ on the web. So we hope you will use this review as a jumping off point to do further research on your own.

Russ Meyer was certainly a breastman. From his first nudie- teaser, The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) to his last finished feature – Pandora Peaks (2001), all of his films featured prodigously busted women. The theme of his films was that we men, would do anything, to be with, or to have, any woman whose figure would begin at opulent, and progress all the way up to and through voluptuous.

Russ died in September, 2004 – so this DVD represents the last of what we will see from him. Pandora Peaks is at once, the title, the subject of the film, as well as the star. Or maybe we should also say that the theme of the movie is boobs, namely those of Pandora, and the not insignificant breastworks of the often thought of but rarely seen Tundi Horvath. Candy Samples and Leosha have brief cameos.

There’s no plot, and no timeline to care about. Russ delivers some very brief biographical notes and then its off to nearly 70 minutes of bosomania.

His style is all editing. The camera rarely moves at all. It wasn’t Russ’s way. No, he merely shoots a ton of footage and then he cuts it all together. What we see are brief images all stitched together at breakneck speed.

They must have had Russ Meyer in mind when they invented remote controls for VCR’s and then DVD players. Russ is the one director that doesn’t ever let up on the pace. Be warned – don’t blink, and certainly don’t get up to go the kitchen for a brew.

So what are we going to see – lots of boobs (Pandora’s and Tundi’s) all expertly framed in composed shots. Pandora will shimmy and shake, wobble and dangle, stretch, and wiggle over and over.

Tundi has basically 10 minutes or less on screen but Russ lets us have just a little bit of her at a time. So we see (and hear) Tundi in staccato bursts of imagery. She’s going to be talking about her bust nearly non-stop, and I hate to tell you this, but ol’ Russ let’s us down. Tundi has an enormous bustline, and I think…

…Russ only had a limited amount of time to fim her, and what he did get he held back for years before using this Pandora film as the vehicle to get Tundi on screen. You will be wishing for more and some better views of Tundi, but it just won’t happen. And what we do see is so rapid-fire that it almosts doesn’t register.

Pandora, on the other hand, knows all about maximizing her posing capabilities. She also narrates quite a bit of the movie. There’s a good bit of tongue-in-cheek with the narration; but this movie is about tits, so it really doesn’t matter.

Other standard Russ Meyer techniques on view – the blurred swooshes between locations/scenes to convey travel and motion, the obssessive imagery that nails the points home again and again – so much so that we begin to feel a bit bludgeoned.

Erect skyscrapers, domes, tent pegs, mountains, and even street signs hinting at breasts, and traffic signals are delivered again and again as obvious penis and breasts iconic images. Russ adores visual double entendres, so there’s plenty of them. Finally, there’s pistons pumping, drills drilling, and steam engines hissing and working hard and looking like something’s about to explode. Russ, we get it…

But let’s not leave out the crystal sharp images. Russ doesn’t go for soft focus, or telephoto’ed zooms. No he gets it all on screen and nails it to boot.

Well I could rhapsodize about all the bravura cleavages that Russ is going to show us. But one of the key and foundations of film is – SHOW – DON’T TELL.

So I’ll let the images do the rest of the work. Russ, you’re not the only one of us that has bosomania. Three point seven five for this rollercoaster ride in the Russ Meyer amusment park for boobaholics. Written, directed, produced, and distributed by Russ Meyer himself.

Pandora Peaks
RM Films International Inc
http://www.rmfilms.com/