Up!, the penultimate film from veteran exploitation director Russ Meyer, is pretty much his usual tone of voice dialled up to 11. Quite unlike Motorpsycho from a decade or so earlier, which is a comparatively demure and toned-down, Up! is about as zany as it gets. It’s an acquired taste, for sure, but one that’s worth sampling.
Up! starts at its very weirdest: a reincarnated Adolf Hitler, living in suburban America under the surname Schwartz, is chained up and whipped in a sex dungeon. From there, things rarely taper off: Schwartz is murdered, spawning a Twin Peaks-style mystery with suspects ranging from the local diner worker Paul (Robert McLane) to the new arrival Margo Winchester (Raven De La Croix).
Of course, this is a Russ Meyer film after all, so it’s rarely as simple as that. Every ten minutes or so is interspersed with a montage of wildly risqué sex scenes, packed with the nudity, body hair, and gyrations you’d expect. Compared to Motorpsycho, it’s more reminiscent of classic, overt sexploitation – brimming with frivolity and nudity over plot. The visuals, similarly, obscure absolutely nothing, both male and female. I mean, when you start off with Hitler being a sex slave, it can’t really get more provocative.
The murder mystery angle of Up! is actually one of its biggest strengths. Twin Peaks from Mark Frost and David Lynch clearly took a cue or two from the setup of a tight-knit but weird community rocked by a murder, but this is an angle that Up! doesn’t explore enough. There are also some slasher influences here, with a scene that clearly pays tribute to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from two years earlier, and a nod to Psycho. Meyer’s reverence for the burgeoning horror genre is on full display in a conclusion that’s as gory and grisly as it is silly.
That said, not everything about Up! has aged particularly well. There are some particularly grimace-inducing racial stereotypes, some fairly uneasy jokes about the Holocaust and Jewish people, and it handles a scene of sexual assault with none of the caution it probably should. It’s a product of its time, sure, and the opening with Hitler being sodomised doesn’t get it off to a particularly sensitive start, but it’s worth noting.
However, this new 4K restoration of Up! from Severin Films is a mightily impressive one. Aside from one or two errant shots the entire thing looks incredibly clean, with some particularly detailed colour restoration. The audio clean-up isn’t as good, with dialogue often sounding tinny and hard to hear.
If you wanted to watch a classic of the sexploitation genre, Up! is likely one of the most apt examples you could conjure up. It has all of the risqué sex, frivolity, and raunchiness you’d expect, with a breakneck pace and some delightfully grisly smatterings of gore. Not everything lands 50 years on, but as Meyer’s penultimate film before his retirement, it’s no doubt one of his most significant.
★★★
Up! releases on 4K and Blu-ray from Severin Films on April 28, 2025. You can learn more here.
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