It’s Russ Meyer’s birthday this Sunday (he would have been 88), and I’ll be celebrating by watching Supervixens again. The film most people associate with Meyer is his 1965 bad girl drama Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but while that has its merits (and I’m all up for Tarantino’s remake, starring Tera Patrick), Supervixens is the one.

None of Meyer’s other films comes close. During filming, he promised it would be “the sum total of all my films”, and it absolutely is. A road movie about a good man getting into bad situations, it features seven beautiful, strong, huge-titted women. Meyer usually featured one main girl in his films, but this time he wanted a whole slew. “We’d bring one in every reel,” he later explained, “like a new linebacker. You don’t have time to grow tired of the looks or the actions of one girl.” He’s right, and it worked: shot in 1975 for around $90,000 (although he told people it cost $400,000 in an attempt to have it taken more seriously), it earned nearly $18m at the box office, his biggest success by far.

Meyer was an auteur, doing his own cinematography and editing (he had been an army cameraman during World War II,) and Supervixens is like a Looney Tunes short come to life: all pitchforks and sticks of dynamite like a brutishly sexual episode of Road Runner. He continued with this style, albeit to lesser effect, on his next (and last) two films, Up! and Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens,) causing some to coin the term “Bustoons”. Meyer’s friend and sometime collaborator, the American film critic Roger Ebert, had always heralded the director as a pop-artist, in the tradition of Andy Warhol and Lil’ Abner creator Al Capp.

The story has rugged hero Clint Ramsey, (Charles Pitts, who’s now a tenor,) hitchhiking across the desert after being framed for murder, although the plot is little more than an excuse for him to meet a different sexlet every 20 minutes. There’s Super Lorna, played by Christy Hartburg (the incredible girl on the poster;) Super Angel, Clint’s cold-blooded, jealous girlfriend; there’s a deaf-mute girl who takes him on a wild dune buggy ride; there’s an old farmer’s young Austrian wife, who rapes him in a barn.

Other than the surrealism, the thing that really sets Supervixens apart is a particular is-this-really-happening scene of brutality. After a girl mocks Charles Napier for not getting it up, he stabs her, throws her in the bath and repeatedly stamps on her before dropping the radio in, electrocuting her and blowing the house up. It’s crazy, like Scorsese directing a 70s video nasty. In 2000, Los Angeles magazine asked Meyer to defend the sequence. “She had to learn she could not just have her way,” he said.

Supervixens is Meyer running riot. It’s got everything you could want from the king of the nudies, as well as a pretty compelling narrative, with effective acting, in its own way. Jack Horner, Burt Reynolds’ director in Boogie Nights, dreamed of making porn films with good enough plot and action to keep you watching after the sex scenes. Meyer’s films aren’t quite porn, but structurally, they fulfill Horner’s dream; if the sex scenes were hardcore, the film would still work. Then again, Meyer never took sex too seriously: “I intend my films to play as comedies, because sex is funny,” he said. And Supervixens is his greatest work. The DVD is great, with an illuminating director’s commentary (“She had a bush on her like a blacksmith’s apron,”) but even better, London’s Prince Charles Cinema are playing the film at 1pm on Monday April 5th, and I can think of worse ways to spend a lunchtime.

Happy birthday Mr Meyer. I hope you’re surrounded by big-titted angels.

ALEX GODFREY