Erica Gavin Hits MoMA for a 'Vixen!' Q&A
The outrageous film's — you should pardon the expression — titular star had a lot to say about her signature performance
January 9, 2026
Look, if you don’t know anything about Russ Meyer, all I can say is you need to check out his deranged masterpiece Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), one of the most famous exploitation flicks of all time.
But another of his works that’s at least as indicative of his warped world view and obsession with gigantic boobs is Vixen!, which screens January 16 at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art.
I’ve always thought the greatest auteurs are also voyeurs, not to mention fetishists — Hitchcock, De Palma, the list goes on — and Meyer’s passions drive every bit of footage he ever shot in a 60-year career that had more in common with, say, Kenneth Anger than William Castle or John Waters, with whom he is sometimes compared.
There’s art in them there hills.
In their original releases, Meyer’s films were considered smut, and not all of them were even successes. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! — starring enduringly statuesque, shouty Tura Satana (please immediately stream the new doc Tura!, narrated by Margaret Cho) — was a movie that tanked on arrival but that became a beloved cult classic quickly.
By 1971, MoMA was championing it as an art film more than pornography. (In fact, MoMA’s embrace of Meyer led to him bequeathing his entire archive to the institution, and that’s why this breathtaking restoration of Vixen! is available there for us.)
Vixen! — unlike Faster — did not need time to build a fanbase, raking in $8M in 1968 dollars (about $75M today) in spite of its X rating. That’s Top 20 of the Year territory. It’s shocking, watching the film today, to ponder how many moviegoers sought out the transgressive quasi-porn flick nearly 60 years ago.
The surprise is not just that Vixen! is so sexy, but that its aggressive camp tone makes it quite brittle and, at times, unsettling. It’s hard to believe straight guys were tenting over the story of the nymphomaniacal — accent on maniacal — wife of a bush pilot (!) in Canada who seeks to bed every man, and at least one woman, who crosses her path. Sure, Vixen (played with impressive gusto by 19-year-old Erica Gavin) is buxom and a babe, but she’s also a twisted sort of feminist, always on top of every sexual situation (the first time we meet her in the film she’s angrily demanding that the guy beginning to make love to her hurry it up already).
Vixen is in charge of every situation, which wasn’t always the case in nudie flicks.
But actually, the most startling aspect of Vixen! isn’t the sex, it’s the racism. There’s a lot of sex, of course, but it’s very melodramatically mimed, nothing real in spite of as many boob shots as you can handle. But the parts of the film that had the audience gasping were Vixen’s steady stream of nasty racial remarks aimed at her brother’s buddy Niles (veteran actor Harrison Page). The N-word only appears once (and Vixen doesn’t say it), but every other slur and stereotype is weaponized, and it’s never really clear, like, why, especially because Vixen and Niles mend fences arbitrarily at the end.
It’s honestly bonkers.
But that’s Vixen!, and that’s Russ Meyer — the point is his work is uniquely his own. It feels like watching a man’s secret thoughts that he hopes nobody ever finds out about, yet in Meyer’s case, he filmed the thoughts and distributed them for all the world to absorb.
That includes Vixen seducing her own brother, played as a good-hearted biker (in a swastika!) by sexy Jon Evans, hopping from under her hubby (Garth Pillsbury) into the arms of a tourist (Robert Aiken). She even takes on the tourist’s Jennifer Coolidge-esque wifey (Vincene Wallace) in the film’s utterly bizarre lesbian-sex scene, which looks exactly how you might expect a cheerful, pervy straight guy envisioned lesbian sex in 1968.
I was lucky enough to attend a January 8 screening at MoMA with Erica “Vixen” Gavin herself in attendance. Her thoughts on the film were fascinating, coming from someone who ran naked through the woods and stuck a fish in her mouth while filming this movie. According to her, Meyer viewed the lesbian scene as the key to the whole film (I disagree), and told her he would toss the whole film if she couldn’t pull it off. He also told her that lesbian sex was like two pairs of scissors going at it.
That and her other anecdotes were alternately insightful and hilarious, and represented a rare opportunity to hear from a principal in the film. Having her there, we were able to hear straight from her about growing up as the daughter of a blacklisted Hollywood actor (Fred Graff), which was particularly interesting considering Vixen! has an outta-nowhere extended sequence in which Vixen, Niles and a wacky Irishman (Michael Donovan O’Donnell) debate the merits of communism. At gunpoint. Mid-air.
By the way, if all of the preceding isn’t enough to make you Vixen!-curious, the restoration is jaw-droppingly astonishing — this thing looks like it was shot yesterday, and since it was filmed in the Canadian wild, its beauty is not only about its actors’ flesh, but also about unspoiled nature.
That said, even with its share of hot guys, Vixen! is all about Vixen — Gavin drags the whole film in her wake in a performance that suggests she might have had a bigger career if Hollywood weren’t ignoring her for making her debut mostly topless. We did, at least, get to see her again in Caged Heat, Jonathan Demme’s 1974 women-in-prison film, but she would have been a terrific addition to Charlie’s Angels or to any number of other ‘70s and ‘80s TV shows and movies.
The chick is a star.⚡️
Check out Gavin’s entire Q&A with filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh: