Big Bosoms and Square Jaws By Jimmy McDonough

Bring on the redneck lesbian vampires

Fans of Russ Meyer include directors as diverse as Scorsese, Tim Burton and John Waters. Although his last film was made nearly 20 years before his death in 2004, Meyer's high-contrast lighting, razor-sharp focus and bombastic camerawork influenced films as varied as Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, David Lynch's Wild at Heart and, most recently, Frank Miller's Sin City.

Meyer's movies also opened the door to the plethora of gynaecological porn seeping out of today's DVD and video stores. Meyer himself dismissed connections between his films and hardcore pornography, saying, "There's a difference. I spend 14 months making a film. Not 30 minutes in a motel room." Nonetheless, before Meyer graduated from glamour photography to directing films, movies featuring nudity were either straight-on recordings of burlesque shows or had to be located in nudist camps with an educational message tagged on.

With the release in 1959 of The Immoral Mr Teas, Meyer gave "nudies" a twist, a storyline that turned sex into a seemingly innocent, wish-fulfillment fantasy. Within a year Mr Teas' apparent ability to see every women in the world naked spawned over 100 imitations and Meyer turned a $24,000 investment into a $1m gross. And five years later Meyer went one step further. He invented the sexploitation genre of the Sixties and early Seventies.

In McDonough's opinion, Lorna (1964) represented a big gamble for Meyer. Before this movie, Meyer's films had only employed off-screen narration. Now he had to produce a picture with live dialogue "requiring at least some pretence of acting". In other words, Meyer would create the first dramatic film with nudity. Not that this means Lorna contained a plot - Meyer's storylines are as thin as his actresses' costumes and he usually made up his outlandish dialogue as he went along. "I don't let the story get in the way of the action," he explained. Meyer was not an accomplished on-set director. Actors seeking motivation or wrestling with their character's "arc of development" would be told "Be a man". Actor Charles Napier recalls that Meyer set the cast at each other's throats: "Calling the girls [over] telling them we were faggots - and telling us the women were dykes. By the time you were filming and having a kiss and a hug and a hump, you did it through gritted teeth."

For Meyer, film-making was a search-and-destroy mission. He learnt cinematography as a combat photographer during the Second World War - Meyer's footage can be seen in the film Patton (1970) - and his best films were shot in the desert at a helter-skelter pace with a five-man crew, four or five ex-strippers and a couple of actors. There his photography - he carried the camera - captured the induced tension, resultant lust and what McDonough calls a "screaming from the id immediacy". Also, he was a master editor. An orgasm in a Russ Meyer film is a hot rush of Americana, with trademark "bosomania" spliced in machine-gun tempo to neon signs, pinball machines, tail fins, exploding rockets, accompanied by layers of music and overlapping dialogue concocted a decade before Scorsese and Altman would employ the same techniques.

Yet it is the descriptions of the flagrant crassness, the very vulgarity of Meyer's movies, rather than any discourse on film aesthetics, that make McDonough's book so refreshing and exuberantly entertaining. Vivid, clear-eyed accounts of Meyer's desert sets are peppered with telling details. The sound of Varla, the red-neck lesbian, breaking Tommy's back, for instance, in the infamous scene from Meyer's Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was achieved with the cracking of a walnut. Where Mayer mixed high and low culture - scenes of a wriggling, naked woman spreadeagled across a mountaintop with a stick of dynamite between her legs in Supervixens were accompanied by a Bach cantata - McDonough also repays the compliment. The off-screen line, "Seems like all I can see is yesterday," in Mr Teas is dismissed as "a bit of D-cup Proust". In a reference to the great star of Italian neo-realist cinema, McDonough salutes the actress Haji in Motorpsycho (1965) as "an Anna Magnani in pasties".

McDonough does not duck the fact that Meyer was an angry, overgrown child with a mother obsession, and is able to explain why this film-maker became a true maverick of American cinema. For Meyer was an auteur. He photographed, edited, produced and directed every single one of his 30 films, with 28 being made outside the studio system and largely self-financed, and two - Faster, Pussycat and Beyond The Valley of the Dolls - are now regarded as the finest films of the exploitation era.

McDonough describes these two films as "masterpieces". "Filmed at top hate, top lust, top heavy," Russ Meyer's vision was of a hyperactive world occupied by isolated, inadequate men in thrall to overendowed, voracious women. Jimmy McDonough's book is written in such wonderfully bad taste that he has remained true to that crazed vision.