Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is one of the great cult films of all times, and part of the reason it's beloved by its legions of fans is its music. Sure, Roger Ebert's outrageous dialogue ("This is my happening...and it's freaking me out!!" may be the most quotable), Russ Meyer's cheerfully tawdry direction, the duo's ludicrous plot twists, and the legions of buxom actresses are also responsible for its legendary status, but this is, after all, a movie starring a fictional rock band, so the music had to work on some level. At the very least, the bands had to sound plausible within their universe, and composer Stu Phillips, aided occasionally by Strawberry Alarm Clock, winds up providing expert period music, evoking both the breezy sunshine pop (the Sandpipers, after all, sang the theme) and the acid-fried hippie rock of the fag end of the '60s. Phillips' instrumental pieces work both as evocative link music on the soundtrack album and as mood music in the film, but the heart of the album, of course, is in the full-fledged songs, the tunes that made the Carrie Nations a hit in the film. The best of them is "Sweet Talking Candyman," which echoes the Beatles while pointing the way toward Rocky Horror, but each track works and the music is surprisingly diverse, touching on sweet MOR pop with "In the Long Run," rocking with a funky backbeat on "Look on Up at the Bottom," and doing hippie mysticism as well as Spinal Tap on "Come with the Gentle People" (a similarity Alex Patterson points out in his excellent liner notes). The brilliance of this music is not that it transcends time, since it most certainly doesn't, but that it so completely evokes its era in a way that only cheap exploitation movies could; by being cut to the bare minimums, they concentrated on only what mattered to sell the films, thereby capturing all the hallmarks of their time. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, as a film and soundtrack, does exactly that, but it was produced by highly talented individuals, so it winds up transcending its time by completely evoking it -- a pretty nifty trick, that. The soundtrack doesn't make much sense without the movie, but if you're a fan, the disc is pretty much indispensable since it runs a remarkable 25 tracks, contains alternate versions, and has a fantastic set of notes, including a reminiscence by the great Ebert, thoughts by Phillips, notes by Patterson, and lots of visuals, including a nude picture of Dolly Read. All this means that the long wait for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls has been paid off by a definitive CD that presents this movie at its best. It's an ultimate cult item for an ultimate cult movie.