“Vixen was the first American skin flick intended to appeal to women as well as to men, and aimed at booking in respectable first-run situations.... Its story situation is pure simplicity: Vixen and her husband, a wilderness guide, live in the ‘bush country' of the Canadian Northwest. Rooming with them, for the time being, are Vixen's brother and a black American draft card evader who's a friend of his. An American couple come to spend the weekend, a red-bearded Scottish Communist happens down the road, and most of these characters interact sexually and/or politically with each other for about an hour.... My own notion is that Vixen is the quintessential Russ Meyer film. The opening sequence clearly establishes the movie's ground: Vixen, wearing a bikini, is pursued through the Canadian Northwest bush country by an unclad man. He pins her to a tree. She struggles... to undo her bikini. They make love. Afterward, she gazes up dreamily at him, and the reverse shot shows him putting on his Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform. Meyer's ability to keep his movies light and farcical took the edge off the sex for people seeing their first skin flick. By the time he made Vixen, Meyer had developed a directing style so open, direct, and good-humored that it dominated his material. He was willing to use dialogue so ridiculous (‘We decided to stop doing this when we were twelve,' Vixen's brother protests as she seduces him in a shower), situations so obviously tongue in cheek, characters so incredibly stereotyped and larger than life that even his most torrid scenes usually managed to get outside themselves. Vixen was not only a good skin flick, but a merciless satire on the whole genre. It catalogued the basic variations in skin-flick plots, and ticked them off one by one.
“Of all the sex scenes in Vixen, the only one with genuine erotic impact is the lesbian encounter between Vixen (Erica Gavin) and the wife of the visiting fisherman (Vincene Wallace). And this one works, I believe, because Meyer wanted it to. He doesn't cut into it with asides or embellishments. He stays with the characters. His editing rhythm is deliberately sensuous. And his direction of the actresses (Erica Gavin remembered in an interview several months later) was ‘exhaustive.' The scene was talked over, run through, rehearsed, and finally shot so many times, she recalled, that the thin edge of exhaustion began to look like the thin edge of passion.”