“Myra Breckinridge” is the infamous film that almost completely derailed the career of Raquel Welch (“Fantastic Voyage”, “Fathom”). It’s a truly weird film that feels like Ed Wood’s “Glen Or Glenda” crossed with “Monty Python”. It deals with the film industry, sex, sex-changes and sexual violence in a sort of sadistic yet comedic manner.

Myron Breckinridge (Rex Reed) undergoes surgery to change his sex and now, he’s Myra Breckinridge (Welch). Myra heads to Hollywood to make a claim on the wealthy estate of a relative (John Huston “Chinatown”) Myra is out to destroy masculinity by any means necessary. There is nothing that Myra won’t do including carrying out sexual assaults on men and stealing their girls.

I’ve never seen any man that undergoes surgery to look like a woman look anywhere near as feminine and attractive as Raquel Welch. I have no idea whether we’re meant to like Myra or loathe Myra. Myra is meant to be championing the feminist cause and yet this is a character that sexually assaults a man and then tries to coerce the man’s girlfriend into having sex. You can’t get much more predatory than that. To see the revered John Huston in this is surreal. Mae West (“I’m No Angel”) came out of retirement for this disaster.

“Myra Breckinridge” has some of the worst editing I’ve seen in a long time. The film constantly cuts to footage from various older films. We see old stars such as Shirley Temple, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. I wonder how mad they or their families must have been for footage of them to be used in a film where Raquel Welch plays a man that has a sex-change and sexually assaults a guy. This is a bafflingly bad film and it’s no wonder that it flopped. It’s the sort of film that manages to offend everybody (men, women, straight, homosexual etc…) without ever having any real point.