
Certainly, he's not consistent. He followed up his master musical Tommy (1975) with the lame Lisztomania (also 1975). Years after his sleaze masterpiece Crimes of Passion (1984), he ripped himself off with the ridiculous Whore (1991), also released under the even more absurd title If You're Afraid to Say It...Just See It.
But when he's good, there's nobody who can compare to him. Nobody heaps on the hallucinatory visuals, wild set decoration and stylized acting like Russell. One of his favorite shots is to start in on a tight closeup of a strange-looking person (often singing) and then speed-zoom out to reveal an entire tableau of oddities. But he's also capable of producing extremely literate works. His biopics of classical composers (except Liszt) are amazing, and his adaptations of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1969) and the 20-years-later sequel The Rainbow are memorable.

Of the notoriously problematic Reed, Russell said that he would simply ask for "Mood One," "Mood Two" or "Mood Three" from him. Certainly both Reed and Jackson's work for Russell ranks among their best.
1970's The Music Lovers tells the story of Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) and his troubled marriage to Nina (Jackson). As Russell himself said, "It's the story of the marriage between a homosexual and a nymphomaniac." Christopher Gable, another Russell regular, plays the object of the composer's lust, and the most memorable scene involves Nina, who's gone out of her mind, giving her body to the eagerly groping inmates of the asylum she's been committed to. It's also a sublime marriage of filmmaking and classical music.

Butchered by censors for its "blasphemous" content, its most famous sequence featuring naked, hysterical nuns raping a life-size statue of Christ, is pretty shocking. It's packed with other shocking scenes of torture and barbarism at the hands of pious hypocrites. Strong stuff, for sure, but it deserves much more recognition than it's ever gotten. The U.S. Warner Home Video release is heavily edited, but there are more complete DVDs of varying quality available. I got a good import copy from Luminous Film and Video Wurks.

Russell and this work were a match made in Heaven. Packed with wild visuals to accompany the musical numbers, it's still great entertainment after 35 years. And composer Pete Townshend made the smart choice to speed up the music and give it more punch for the film. When I heard the original version after I saw the film, I was shocked at how slow and dull it sounded. I took my Dad to see Tommy on its original release (in Quintaphonic sound!) and I wasn't sure he really got it. But later he bought me the original recording as a birthday present, so who knows?
Who can forget the star-studded musical numbers? Eric Clapton's "Eyesight to the Blind" with the Church of Marilyn Monroe, Tina Turner tearing it up as the Acid Queen (love that distorted mouth-twitching closeup!), the late Keith Moon as Wicked Uncle Ernie and Elton John as the Pinball Wizard. Jack Nicholson shows up as the doctor Tommy's guilt-ridden parents take him to, and he's awful—but it fits into the crazy framework.

The story of an architect by day and prostitute by night (Kathleen Turner) being pursued by a kinky, insane, poppers-huffing street preacher (Anthony Perkins), it features some of the most explicit sexual content seen in a non-pornographic film, including a cop being sodomized by his own nightstick.
Turner is sexy and sleazy; she wouldn't show her wild side quite this way again until her sensational turn as John Waters' Serial Mom (1994). Perkins plays the preacher like Norman Bates had moved to the big city and fallen into a life of dissolution, which isn't a bad choice. Russell stages it all in an obvious, exaggerated, studio-bound milieu. Crimes of Passion was one of the first films to be offered on home video in two versions: there was the R-rated cut (in the blue box) and the steamy unrated cut (in the red-hot box).
Happily, a home video company that had branched out into theatrical releases (the now-defunct Vestron) offered Russell a multiple-picture deal in the latter part of the 1980s, all made on his home turf, resulting in a couple of somewhat diverting peculiarities (Gothic and Salome's Last Dance), another nice D.H. Lawrence adaptation (The Rainbow) and one bona fide cult classic (Lair of the White Worm).

Lord D'Ampton: Do you have any children?
Lady Sylvia: Only when there are no men around.
Lady Sylvia also has the ability to sprout gigantic fangs at will and can spit venom a good ten feet. Oh...and she is also "charmed" by music. And there's a really great song about the legend of the D'Ampton Worm, a bit of which can be heard in this trailer:
Recently, Russell has made television movies, online videos and even written a column for The Times. He's also an exhibited photographer and published author. In 2008, he returned to New York to direct an off-Broadway production of "Mindgame," a thriller with Keith Carradine.
At age 83, he shows no signs of losing his taste for the outrageous. His 2007 online video A Kitten for Hitler proves that. This quote from the master himself really says it all:
"This is not the age of manners. This is the age of kicking people in the crotch and telling them something and getting a reaction. I want to shock people into awareness. I don't believe there is any virtue in understatement."