Since the beginning, people have struggled to describe Russ Meyer’s 1970 film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and no mere string of words quite captures its narcotic essence. “It’s a camp sexploitation horror musical that ends in a quadruple ritual murder and a triple wedding,” said its screenwriter, Roger Ebert, to Time. “A modern soap opera filmed as if it were a Batman episode,” wrote the Seattle Times’ John Hartl. “A crazy-quilt, hilarious combination of Peyton Place, an Elvis Presley musical, The Guiding Light, the Charles Manson story,” attempted Los Angeles Herald-Examiner’s Richard Cuskelly. “It’s as if Audrey Beardsley had staged a vaudeville style orgy in an asylum,” wrote Lloyd Steele in Movies. “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. God, where to begin? This is a picture so absurdly terrible that it’s nearly great. I really dug it; the hard part is to figure out why,” were the befuddled words of Rolling Stone’s Michel Goodwin.
Source: Gizmodo – An Appreciation of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a Film With No Equal