Mondo Meyer! A salute to sexploitation king Russ Meyer

Sexploitation king Russ Meyer's 1975 chef d'oeuvre, Supervixens -- the colorfully tawdry tale of a gas station attendant on the run for a murder he didn't commit and his encounters with a succession of statuesque and seductive superwomen  -- is the centerpiece of "Mondo Meyer!", an evening dedicated to celebrating the unique aesthetic and leitmotifs of the late, great cinema auteur. The Saturday event at PhilaMOCA kicks off with a screening of said film, shot in color for $100,000 (its reported gross: $17 million), with the buxom and bodacious Uschi Digard, Shari Eubank, Christy Hartburg, Colleen Brennan and Haji as, respectively,  SuperSoul, SuperAngel, SuperLorna, SuperCherry and SuperHaji . Charles Pitts stars as the grease monkey on the lam, driving all over the continent-- and running into the aforementioned femmes with, um, the continental shelves.  Meyer was nothing if not a breast man.

But  maybe he was a feminist, too, in his own weird way. In a 1995 Inquirer interview, Meyer posited a theory as to why women are such big fans of his work: "They like the idea of the man being a klutz…'And [my] women are all, of course, outrageously abundant, smart, aggressive, in charge. They take advantage of the man."

Post-screening, after everybody's had a chance to collect themselves, movie historian Irv Slifkin (Filmadelphia, Videohound's Groovy Movies: Far-Out Films of the Psychedelic Era) will talk about Meyer – a combat cameraman in World War II – and his life, work and times. Slifkin knew the man, who passed away, in 2004, age 82, and has stories to tell.

And post-Slifkin, the burlesque ensemble Miss Rose's Sexploitation Follies will mount a show dedicated to Meyer and his campy conflations of sex and violence. Doors open at 6:30pm. Admission is $12. PhilaMOCA, 531 N. 12th Street. Website: http://www.philamoca.org/