Picture my average, boring summer afternoon: pajamas at noon, pot of ramen boiling away, the remote pausing on a nondescript cable movie channel. In one split second glace at the screen, I had seen more big hair, false eyelashes and cleavage than I’d ever imagined existed in my parents’ youth. I can’t turn away. Then I heard the phrase, “It’s my happening and it’s freaking me out!” gleefully announced above a swinging party by a man who would now be termed, at the very least, a metrosexual. My ramen boiled over while my eyeballs remained glued to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls for two hours trying to figure out what the hell I was watching.

A basic plot outline is as follows: A prom band consisting of three girls drives to Hollywood to make it big, accompanied by one of the girls’ boyfriends. After an almost unbearably cheesy interlude of singing and driving, the group arrives in California, inexplicably inherits a large sum of money and attends a party thrown by the Shakespeare-spouting, pop culture mogul Ronnie “Z-Man” Barrzel and an assortment of porn stars. The girls sign recording contracts, do lots of drugs, cheat on their lovers and, of course, ditch the music. The movie ends with Z-Man throwing a big peyote bash featuring a Nazi, ridiculous costumes, murderous rampages replete with tons of blood, the revelation that one of the main characters is really a transvestite and a lesbian sex scene. In order to resolve the convoluted plot, the movie ends with a narrative summary, an epilogue and a triple marriage.

Three years after my first viewing, I got a second chance to figure out BVD. Before, I thought I’d missed the first half of the movie, and that was the reason it didn’t make sense; last Saturday night I realized I’d missed less than fifteen minutes. The film is, in fact, just crazy. Thanks to the Oak Street Cinema, which is infinitely more fun than my living room, I think I’ve come as close to an understanding of the driving forces behind the movie as I’m ever going to have.

The audience helped. It consisted of people my parents’ age who helped me to distinguish between which parts of the movie were period-specific and those that are timeless (the majority of the movie). Lines such as, “You’re a groovy boy. I’d like to strap you on sometime,” cooed by porn star Ashley St. Ives, have become famous. One of my favorite moments of the film is when Kelly, the band’s front woman, and Z-Man walk in on a couple having sex in the tub. Z-Man’s response to the situation is priceless: “Glad to see my audience is in such happy dalliance. Pray, let them joust in peace!”

It was 1970 when Twentieth Century Fox gave Russ Meyer, the X-rated director of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! fame, and Roger Ebert, noted film critic, the green light for production on BVD. The film was intended to be a sequel to 1967’s Valley of the Dolls, which also featured a three-girl group going to Hollywood and falling into a pit of sex, drugs and demise. Instead, what was produced by the motley duo was nothing short of a burlesque farce satirizing both film genres and success formulas. Because the movie was released so soon after the Sharon Tate murders, Fox required a disclaimer at the beginning of the film to cover its ass.

Meyer and Ebert wrote the screenplay in a frenzied six weeks presumably fueled by more drugs than the best Hunter S. Thompson dreams. The two men seemed to have a harder time sticking to plans than most Hollywood players. Not only did they alter the nature of the movie from sequel to satire, they also couldn’t stick to the plot outlined in the screenplay. On a whim, they decided to have Z-Man reveal himself as a woman rather than continue with the homosexual rumblings embodied by his character in the film’s first hour. At least the cast was consistent throughout the movie, unlike Wet Hot American Summer where the same character is played by multiple actors in the course of the film.

Upon its original release, critics off-handedly dismissed the film, mostly because it was rated X. (Today, with a few minor cuts, it would be rated R without much of a problem.) Another problem arose when critics couldn’t figure out if the film was intended to be funny, especially given the bloodbaths near the end. This confusion resulted from the straight-faced way in which Meyer directed the B-movie actors. Apparently he fooled them so well into believing that the film’s content was serious that they were too intimidated to ask if some of the lines weren’t meant to be funny for fear of offending him.

It is this tension between tongue-in-cheek dialogue and the sincerity with which the lines are delivered that makes BVD work, whereas the original Valley of the Dolls was too awful to sincerely handle. The first 15 minutes of the movie are a good representation of the motley rest of the film, which, I admit, is not for everyone. Those with a love of all that is absurd, sarcastic and grotesque—such as fans of Bad Comedy—will be highly amused. As for everyone else…I’m sorry you’re missing out.