Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Woodyanders This fetid stinkbomb of a film has a notorious reputation as one of the worst movies to ever ooze its disgusting way onto celluloid. Is it really that bad? Well, yes it is, but it's often so strange and perverse that it ultimately becomes downright mesmerizing in its unapologetic freakishness. Raquel Welch, looking absolutely gorgeous and carrying herself with admirable flair and poise, gives it all she's got as Myra Breckinridge, a ruthless, predatory and venomous femme fatale who tries to nab a sizable inheritance from blustery millionaire acting school dean Buck Loner (an outrageously hammy John Huston) and cheerfully destroys any hapless males and females who get in her lethal way. You see, Myra was originally the preening homosexual Myron (a terrible and insufferably smug performance by popular movie critic Rex Reed) prior to having a successful sex change operation (done by none other than John Carradine!). Director/co-writer Michael Sarne delivers a brutal no-holds-barred satire on Hollywood decadence, libertine permissiveness run insanely amok, and the swingin' early 70's sexual revolution which unmercifully mocks both the stuffy old guard and hip youth culture with equal seething disdain; this fierce in-your-face mean-spiritedness gives the picture a shocking acidic edge that certainly isn't subtle or sophisticated, but still gets the nasty job done in a hilariously vicious way all the same. The hysterically broad acting further enhances the all-out lunacy: an aged, yet spry Mae West is positively sidesplitting as blithely bawdy talent agent Leticia Van Allen (the sequence with West heartily belting out "Hard to Handle" on stage is a total gut-busting riot), Calvin Lockhart camps it up to the ninth degree as fey gay Irving Arnadeus, Farrah Fawcett is a bit too convincing for comfort as giggly bimbo Mary Ann Pringle, Roger Herren likewise does dumb with unnerving conviction as macho stud Rusty Godowski (the scene which depicts Myra joyfully sodomizing Rusty is genuinely sick and startling), and Tom Selleck sans trademark mustache even makes his ignominious film debut as one of Van Allen's handsome and virile boy toys. Moreover, there's also lots of clips from vintage golden oldie 30's features edited into the main narrative throughout; this just throws the picture even more off kilter and hence adds to the bizarrely entrancing train wreck quality of the whole misguided enterprise. Now, this isn't a good film by any conventional standards, but man is this wonderfully wretched abomination a one-of-a-kind piece of remarkably vile and depraved kitsch.

MartinHafer The only reason I was tempted to see it was that I have aspirations of seeing every film from Harry Medved's book "The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time". What a creepy and god-awful mess of a film! It truly was an incredibly bad film (and a deserving selection for the book) and when you see it today you are left wondering "what were they thinking?!?!".The film begins with a scene where film critic Rex Reed is about to undergo a sex change. The whole thing is done in a strange and surrealistic way as an audience sits nearby to watch. Despite Rex transforming through surgery into Raquel Welch (truly an impossibility), you keep seeing BOTH incarnations of the same character (Myron and Myra) as they set on adventures designed to bring him/her hot sex as well as irritate their hated uncle (John Huston).Now had any of this been handled with any degree of finesse, it could have potentially been an interesting sex farce--certainly NOT family material, but still entertaining. However, instead of finesse or style, the entire effort is handled in a ham-fisted manner with all the style and grace of a production created by sexually frustrated 7th graders! For example, some bizarre necrophiliac urge pushed the producers to resurrect 78 year-old Mae West from the dead. She utters an amazing string of double entendres that MIGHT have been funny coming from a 20 or 30 or 40 year-old. However, seeing Miss West (who is very reminiscent of Lon Chaney in PHANTOM OF THE OPERA) deliver these lines made me feel rather queasy--it was like watching granny trying desperately to score one final time before meeting the Grim Reaper! The film is written in such a broad and sophomoric way that there really is almost no discernible plot and the acting, if you want to call it that, if sadly unprofessional. Plus, in a very bizarre move, the film is often permeated with usually irrelevant footage from many, many classic Hollywood films. Seeing Laurel and Hardy, Carmen Miranda, Claudette Colbert and countless others spliced into a smarmy movie is just sad and it should be criminal to abuse the dead or those unwilling to be in a smutty film.If you think seeing a "comedic" anal rape scene or a geriatric nympho is funny or interesting, then by all means see MYRA BRECKENRIDGE. Otherwise, think twice before viewing--your brain will thank you for saying "no" to this film!!By the way, don't you think that since Rex Reed starred in this bilge the idea of him being a film critic is a bit hypocritical? It's sort of like making Michael Jackson a camp counselor!

laddie5 When the blight of Catholic censorship fell like an axe on Hollywood in July of 1934, Mae West was, if not the chief cause, at least Exhibit A in the case against movie smut. 42 years old and at her eye-rolling prime, she was in the middle of making "It Ain't No Sin" -- and there are no prizes for guessing what "it" was. Filming was suspended and she was forced to rewrite her outrageous, lowdown script two or three times before it could be approved. After that, the censors clamped down on her more with each film, and her huge popularity slowly evaporated.In 1968, the ratings system drove the last nail into the Production Code, and suddenly you could put anything on the screen -- even "Myra Breckinridge," an incoherent mess of a novel featuring transsexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, female-on-male rape, and free-floating camp sensibility... to which the movie added Vietnam-era American self-hatred, anti-Hollywood vitriol, and Mae West.But hey, maybe that's what happens when you bottle up your impulses for 34 years. To me, it seems entirely appropriate that the woman most responsible for censorship should sashay back on screen to headline this carnival of perversion and bad taste. Amid its flailing about, "Myra Breckinridge" half-heartedly tries to excuse itself as some kind of expression of Woman Power. But Mae West, moaning and clutching herself while black dancers gyrate behind her, simply IS woman power. And as ever, she's so rapturously in love with herself she can hardly stop grinning with pleasure. Yeah, she's almost 80, and a lot of people seem hung up on that. Don't they notice she addresses the age issue herself? "I'm a little tired today," she tells her assistant. "One of these boys will have to go."In today's post-shame America, old age is the last taboo. It's a beautiful thing to watch Mae West demonstrate that it ain't no sin.

ianlouisiana Much like Orson Welles thirty years earlier,Mike Sarne was given "the biggest train set in the world"to play with,but unfortunately lacked the ability to do anything more than watch his train set become a train wreck that is still spoken of with shock and a strange sort of awe. Despite post - modern interpretations purporting somehow to see it as a gay or even feminist tract,the fact of the matter is that it was a major disaster in 1970 and remains one today.How anyone given the resources at Mr Sarne's disposal could have screwed up so royally remains a closely - guarded secret.Only Michael Cimino ever came close with the political and artistic Armageddon that constitutes "Heaven's Gate".Both films appeared to be ego trips for their respective directors but at least Mr Cimino had made one of the great movies of the 1970s before squandering the studio's largesse,whereas Mr Sarne had only the rather fey "Joanna" in his locker. Furthermore,"Heaven's Gate" could boast some memorable and well - handled set - pieces where,tragically,"Myra Breckinridge"s cupboard was bare. Simply put,it is overwhelmingly the worst example of biting the hand that feeds in the history of Hollywood.