I'm fairly confident that Meyer was the greatest artist to have devoted himself to the sexploitation genre film. If that contradicts something I've said elsewhere its because I sometimes forget about Meyer because he's sui generis.

That's not to say Meyer's movies are the most erotic. I'm not sure they're even supposed to be erotic... Meyer views human carnality with the amused distance of a farmer leaning on a fence watching barnyard animals in rut. (If I had Meyer's bosom fetish I might see the question differently. Russ Meyer loved breasts like Imelda Marcos loved shoes.)

His colorful, violent slapstick peep-show world of moronic muscle men colliding with insatiable amoral amazons is so distinctive and fully realized it has the stylistic integrity of a comic strip––every person in a Meyer movie looks like a Meyer character. (Many of his actors were chosen primarily for physical attributes yet he consistently got professional quality performances from people who couldn’t possibly be professional actors. Meanwhile, George Lucas cannot even get a professional performance from Samuel Jackson or Liam Neeson.)

Trying to think where he fits in the big picture, I'd say he’s a comparable to Jean-Luc Goddard or Richard Lester… a daring self-indulgent stylist and artistic prankster who did a lot to shape the texture and vocabulary of modern media. There’s a lot of Sam Fuller in Meyer’s passionate earthy clarity but ever-earnest Fuller was not a prankster. Like Hitchcock, Meyer hid his artistry behind the façade of a brazen showman. (Meyer actually wrote the bizarre circus-poster descriptions of the movies quoted below, defying anyone to take him seriously.)

Stanley Kubrick and Russ Meyer make a neat pair. Both men were 1950s print photographers who moved to film–an unusual career path. They were also, not coincidentally, two of the few directors with a visual style so distinctive you can readily identify their movies from a scene. Both men quickly mastered the conventional forms by the early 1960s and spun off into wild innovation in the mid-late 60s. Neither man felt he could work effectively in the Hollywood frame-work. Meyer's ultimate influence on trash cinema was comparable to Kubrick's ultimate influence on the rest of cinema. (It's tempting to think sex movies are easy. But if that's the case why is VIXEN so much better than Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT? Within his limited realm Meyer was supreme.)

Meyer was a confident artist of the "making it look deceptively easy" school. His technique was rock-solid classical with detours for expressionistic montage effects. Even the wildest passages are natural and unobtrusive. Few directors were blessed with a better sense of pace. (Meyer's earlier movies can drag sometimes, but we must compare apples to apples. Meyer's slower early films were breathlessly paced compared head-to-head with the era's other grind-house movies.) It all goes down as smooth as television but, unlike TV, you actually feel it; combining the hypnotic accessibility of a cool medium with the raw power of a hot medium. Meyer was one of the first to grasp the post-modern lesson that our media driven conception of the world has become so artificial that parody, rather than satire, is our clearest lens for seeing the big picture.

Meyer's 1959 movie THE IMMORAL MISTER TEAS did more than any other to shape the 1960s "nudie" movie. From then on Meyer made better and better sexploitation movies until he’d out-stripped the genre entirely. Eventually he was drawn to Hollywood to make BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. (Written by Roger Ebert, an early critical champion of Meyer. Ebert has brilliant instincts. He’s been the most consistently correct movie critic since… well, since anybody. IMO.)

When sexploitation went XXX in the 1970s Russ Meyer chose to stay in the world of drive-in style exploitation. A pity, because he would have been easily the greatest XXX feature film director and might have reshaped the unfortunate fate of the genre.