After making a mint and irritating moralists with his string of successful nudie cuties (The Immoral Mr. Teas, Eve and the Handyman) and wildly entertaining black-and-white roughies (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Motorpsycho), filmmaker Russ Meyer, a one-man directing, producing, writing, and editing machine, vaulted to a whole new level of success and infamy in 1968 with Vixen (or Russ Meyer's Vixen!, according to the title card). Slapped with an early X rating (but quite tame and easily within R-rated territory now), the film was a crossover hit with mainstream audiences (women in particular) but also fell afoul of censors, most famously in Cincinnati. The film also made a cult icon out of star Erica Gavin, an exotic dancer at the time who went on to reunite with Meyer for his legendary Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and also appeared in Caged Heat and the minor softcore vehicle, Erika's Hot Summer. The film's notoriety was so great that Meyer would capitalize on it with two unrelated later films, Supervixens and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-vixens, which became cemented as a trilogy of sorts in the public consciousness.

In the wilds of British Columbia, bush pilot Tom (Pillsbury) has no idea that his sexually aggressive wife, Vixen (Gavin), spends her time in his absence by hopping on anyone who strikes her fancy-- most recently a local Mountie played by Blood Mania and Point of Terror star Peter Carpenter. Demanding and upapologetic, she also harbors a racist streak that comes out when she interacts with Niles (Page), the draft-dodging black biker who's best friends with her brother, Judd (Evans). The couple also own and operate a lodge where their latest guests, married Janet (Wallace) and Dave (Aiken), separately fall under Vixen's influence when they come visit for some relaxation and fishing. However, she finds her worldview challenged when she, her husband, and Niles end up on a flight across the border with a covert Communist hijacker (O'Donnell) who has other plans in store.

With its lush scenery, blazing colors, and absolutely magnetic performance by Gavin, Vixen is the kind of film that was classified within the sexploitation realm at the time but had such a lasting impact that it's now been restored and been entered in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In addition to being the only film with an erotic bar dance performed with a dead fish(!), it's a funny, intentionally absurd melodrama peppered with enough political content to justify the very softcore but energetically edited sex scenes including a couple of infamous ones between Vixen and her brother. It also sports a catchy score by frequent library music composer Bill Loose, who had just done Meyer's Good Morning... and Goodbye!, and would score multiple later ones all the way up through Ultravixens. Incidentally, this was the first of only three Meyer films to get a bona fide soundtrack album release (followed by Cherry, Harry & Raquel and Beyond the Valley); some triple feature CDs were later issued but are mediocre quality audio rips from the home video masters and music and effects tracks of the movies themselves.

Meyer's own video label RM Films self-distributed Vixen on VHS in the late '80s when it became a fixture of finer mom and pop stores everywhere, soon followed by a wild laserdisc release from Image Entertainment paired up with the other two vixen-titled features and featuring a highly entertaining commentary by the filmmaker praising Gavin, torching censors, and rattling through the film's production in cheerful detail. RM Films later issued a bare bones (and expensive) DVD, while Arrow Video did it best on DVD overseas by porting over the commentary and adding a fun featurette, "Woman... Or Animal?" (20m4s), featuring new interviews with Gavin and Page looking back at a lively and respectful production process. (Both would also appear after this in Beyond the Valley, too.) That release was only hampered by iffy PAL conversion of the NTSC source and heavy interlacing, something plagued all of the Arrow Meyer releases. After Meyer's death in 2004, the entire library he owned fell into serious neglect with only the DVD editions (which themselves were taken from the '80s video masters) being sold for many, many years, leaving fans grieving that these major titles would never get another decent release.

Fortunately two decades later a miracle happened, and Vixen got a much-needed release from Severin Films as a UHD and Blu-ray combo as well as a standalone Blu-ray. The source here is the MoMA restoration, and it looks stunning with so much more detail and more vivid colors that it truly looks like a different film. Even the best print from the archives (which was screened for the last time in Meyer's presence in 1999) couldn't hold a candle to how the film looks here, and fans should be very happy indeed. The DTS-HD MA 2.0 English mono track is also in spotless condition and sounds a lot punchier here than before; English SDH subtitles are also provided. The original Meyer commentary and the Arrow Gavin/Page featurette are both ported over here, while Gavin appears for a terrific new audio commentary moderated by Severin's David Gregory (whom she calls "punkin'" at the beginning!) in which she expands on her earlier appearances and interviews recalling how she auditioned for the film, what it was like working for Meyer, how comfortable she felt doing the love scenes, and what the film's legacy has meant to her over the years. Also here are an amusing, rapid-fire 1981 "censor prologue" (1m38s) added for the film's 1981 theatrical reissue (featuring a lot of Uschi Digard), the theatrical trailer, and an episode of David Del Valle's Sinister Image public access show (21m27s) with Meyer and Yvette Vickers. The film's historical significance gets covered very well in the new featurette "Entertainment... Or Obscenity?" (13m34s) with Marc Edward Heuck offering a witty overview of the film's tumultuous, three-year legal battle with censorship board in his hometown of Cincinnati (where the film still technically banned to this day!) starting five days into its theatrical run, including the history of the theater at the epicenter of the scandal.

SEVERIN FILMS (Blu-ray)

ARROW VIDEO (DVD)

Reviewed on December 22, 2024.