Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens

With his final big-screen movie, the Sergei Eisenstein of skin- flicks, Russ Meyer, festoons Beyond the Valley of The Ultra-Vixens with his usual cynical and scornful look at small-town Americana. With the birth of video-tape and audiences preferences leaning in favour of penetrative, hard-core porn, Meyer bowed out with dignity, refusing to bow down to audience demand and lower himself to such a cheap and easy form of entertainment (although he would briefly return over twenty years later with Pandora Peaks (2001)). All the Meyer traits are here - blockhead male chauvinists, sex-mad townsfolk, a grizzled narrator, women blessed in the mammary gland area - and are loosely stringed together in what makes up the 'story'.

Set in the small town of, er, Small Town, USA, our narrator, The Man From Small Town USA (Stuart Lancaster), shows us all it's wacky inhabitants. There's a well-endowed evangelical radio preacher (Ann Marie) who has sex inside of a coffin, a man-eating junk-yard owner (June Mack), and a randy dentist/marriage counsellor (Robert E. Pearson). In the centre of it all is the beautiful, big-breasted Lavonia (Kitten Natividad) and her lug-head husband Lamar (Ken Kerr). They are happy enough, only Lavonia's unquenchable thirst for sex and Lamar's preference to 'entering through the back door' means that they must find themselves before they can finally 'come together'.

Co-written with Roger Ebert, Beyond the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens is less a story and more a collection of comic, fruity vignettes. Some of sharp, energetic and funny, others can be plodding. The satire is less sharp here than in his better movies, for instance Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) or Up! (1976), but his admiration of the female form is possibly clearer here than any of his other movies. He's often called anti-feminist, but, with Meyer, it's the women who hold all the power, outwitting and overpowering the numb-nut males, even raping one, a 14-year old boy I may add, in one scene. He certainly doesn't seem to mind though. It's often delightful and even titillating, but ultimately lacks the sharpness and daring of Meyer's best work.

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There are some films that are entertaining, thought-provoking and well-made. There are some that try to attain these qualities but fail. And then there are films like this. Technically, this film should be awful. The acting is poor, the storyline totally throwaway and there is more gratuitous nudity than... well, anything else in this movie. It's about as politically incorrect as you can get. But on the other hand, it's unpretentious. It's as if Russ Meyer said, "Okay, let's get this straight. This is a sex comedy, now let's get down to the sex and comedy."

Once you've got over the fact that this is a Dumb Movie And Proud Of It, this is a funny film. There are some sophisticated bits of satire- the very matter-of-fact narrator who links what is basically a series of sex scenes is reminiscent of those very moral public information films. There are also some jokes that are just plain stupid (the gay marriage counsellor is funny, if stereotypical).

Of course, what Russ Meyer films are most famous for is naked busty women. Although I must admit that although the aim of the movie is clearly tittilation, after a while the nudity frankly becomes boring. We basically know that every woman who appears will get 'em out, whether for a sex scene, to sunbathe or, what the hey, just because she's a woman with large breasts. There's only so much you can take before it gets tedious.

Otherwise, the movie is pretty much what you'd expect from a Russ Meyer movie of this era. Lots of desert locations, the same actors and actresses that appear in all of them, some truly perverse sex scenes (necrophilia, incest, paedophilia and the list goes on) and a sex scene involving someone babbling on in a foreign language.

Broadly speaking, you'll like this if you like Russ Meyer films. If not, you'll be bewildered and confused.

Russ Meyer's films may be silly and irreverent, but they're also great fun, and while Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens is not his best work, it's still great fun to watch and certainly comes recommended to Meyer's fans! In my opinion, Meyer is at his best when he's mixing comedy porn with a thriller plot structure - with Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Supervixens being the best examples of his work. Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens is basically your average porn movie with a focus on a load of set-piece situations, but Meyer keeps the laughs coming and there's no shortage of big breasted ladies to keep the audience interested. There isn't really much plot to speak of, but the film centres on Levonna & Lamar; a couple in "Smalltown, USA". They're having problems in (you guessed it) the bedroom, as Levonna wants to have sex normally, but Lamar only likes to go in through the backdoor. Levonna becomes frustrated, so she does what any woman would do - gets herself a wig, learns Spanish and pretends to be a Mexican dancer to try and change Lamar's sex preferences...

The plot isn't really relied upon and the film is more of an excuse for Meyer to present a load of silly scenes; but that isn't a problem. The situations that various characters find themselves in generally are funny - with the scenes that sees Levonna get her wig and Spanish phrase book, and a sequence taking place in a dentist's surgery being the highlights of the film. There's plenty of nudity as you might expect, and all the girls have overly inflated chests in the true Russ Meyer style. The sex is not exactly hardcore, but there's plenty of it and it's not disappointing. The style of the film seems to be a parody of the American "apple pie" theme and the story is told by a narrator, who seems to be taking on the role of the "all American workman", the twist being that he's always talking about perversion. I don't think Russ Meyer was really trying to say anything with this film - there's a slight hint of a point stemming from the idea of "Smalltown, USA is a normal small town, but look what goes on behind closed doors!", but it's not implemented well enough to have much meaning. Overall, this is a very decent little porn flick from Russ Meyer, and while I'd recommend other films of his over this one; Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens is worth a watch.

It was Russ Meyer who pretty much launched the new Sexploitation industry in 1959 when he made THE IMMORTAL MR. TEAS, the first nudie-cutie which grossed one-million dollars and spawned a new breed of adults-only movies throughout the early-60's. Nudie-cuties and nudist-colony movies then became a bore among the male audience so they began to mature. "Roughies" were films which mixed nudity and violence with women getting what they deserve. By that time around the mid-60's the Sexploitation era was at it's peak with "Roughies" like OLGA'S HOUSE OF SHAME and THE DEFILERS along side more creative and even more entertaining nudies like KISS ME QUICK knocking 'em out at grindhouses along 42nd street.

By the 70's, the innocence of Sexploitation had transformed itself in to "porno". Old masters obeyed their audiences' lusts and turned up with more dirtier flicks containing more nudity and less artistic touches. Some usually went over-board while others like Russ Meyer kept their brains in their head to create more funnier and sexier films which we can now look upon as art that has been lost through this age of video-taped and digitised filth.

Meyer's 70's features were usually lots of fun. Films like SUPERVIXENS and UP! are highly original and humorous spins on society with the typically great Meyeresque cinematography, editing and dialogue. BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA-VIXENS is his last film to date made in 1979, the coming-approach of video-cassette in which men could just go their local videostore to get aroused instead of their local grindhouse. It was also a year where things were really changing in the Sexploitation industry and even auteurs like Russ Meyer seemed to be going along with the flow. ULTRA-VIXENS is a pretty outrageous film but that does not necessarily mean it's a great film. Stuart Lancaster repeats his role from SUPERVIXENS as a farmer living in Smalltown USA narrating the tale of Lavonia (Kitten Natidad) and her husband Lamar who does not seem to be as horny as the rest of the town. They go around laying the town's small population and end up happily laying each other again. ULTRA-VIXENS contains *lots* of exaggerated sex and (lower-deck) nudity. A bouncy-boobed evangelist makes it with Martin Boorman to 'Old-Time Religion' while Kitten is fully naked for over half the movie making it with lingerie salesmen, nurses and underage boys. So basically, this is a movie that will satisfy the more perverse members of the audience. You can be anything but a porn freak to enjoy most of Russ Meyer's movies but it is a completely different case here. His amazing twenty-year career in film-making explored a whole range of Sexploitation sub-genres: nudie-cuties, "documentaries" on busty women, backwoods dramas, morality tales and bigger budget films for Fox Studios all make up for this; a tasteless, boring, totally unsophisticated piece of pornographic crap which seems to crave for more of it's director's special touches. You do get (in very small proportions) his snappy editing, cinematography and characters from previous films. Stuart Lancaster, who had been appearing in Meyer's films on and off since 1965, can sometimes be entertaining to watch, Uschi Digart once again plays Soul (humping her 15-year-old son), Henry Rowland as Martin Boorman and even RM himself shows at the end.

During the last forty years men's entertainment has depended on it's (mostly male) audience and what they enjoy viewing. THE IMMORTAL MR. TEAS was made at a time when most bachelors were clean-cut and sophisticated. Today's hard-core, non-simulated sex viewed over the internet seems to be aimed at brainless sleazebags who have never had a girlfriend or, for that matter, many friends. Meyer made this right in between these two eras and seems to be confused whether he's doing another one of his standards or a film for perverts. It's hard to sit through a film who's director does not know what he's getting at. Basically Russ should have stopped with UP! Like the rest of the reviewers, some of you may enjoy ULTRA-VIXENS more than I did.

This is a godawful movie. A pathetic swansong for Russ Meyer. It's hard to believe this is the same guy who brought us Faster, Pussycat! Russ eventually decided to swap his stylish penchant for sex and violence for what I suppose is meant to be a sex comedy with some 'social commentary' thrown in.

You would think, wouldn't you, that a movie which has Martin Borman having sex in a coffin, sex at a baptism, rape within marriage, pedophilia, incest and endless nudity including about 30 minutes of Kitten Natividad waving her tits about would somehow manage to be provocative or outrageous. It's not. It's just really boring. I saw it when it came out, and it was boring then, too. At the end of the movie, when the narrator inexplicably walks in on his fourteen year old son screwing his Austrian wife (why Austrian?), and decides he wants a bit of junior too, you ought to be shocked, right? Nope. You just think "What the f**k is the point of this scene? What's the point of any of this?"

The feeling I get all the way through this movie is that Meyer is trying to show John Waters a trick or two. Forget it. Compare this rubbish with Water's hilarious 'Polyester', from the same year, which is far more outrageous, funny and subversive, and didn't even cop an R rating. Come to think of it, I think Divine is probably sexier than half the women in this film. The Christian radio announcer with the absurdly large breasts who goes on and on and on and on in scene after scene is so excruciatingly tedious that I just had to hit fast forward whenever she started up. The endless bonking, screaming and bad music will set your teeth on edge.

Alright, are there any redeeming features in this movie? Well, there is one - count it - one - slightly memorable line. The two white trash junkyard workers who are 'bitterly envious of the lower classes', but God, if that's the best he can do...

There is a thing with colour. People keep bleeding weird colours. But Meyer is no Peter Greenaway. The Uncle Tom black character bleeds white, which might have been subtle, if one of the characters didn't heavy-handedly point it out to us in case we missed it. Similarly, the one potentially clever scene in the whole movie - where the main male character gets locked in a closet by a gay marriage therapist - is ruined by the latter character telling him to 'get out of my closet' about fourteen times. Besides which, I'm not sure why why we should infer from said male lead's preference for anal sex with his wife, that he's a closet gay anyway.

I can only conclude that Meyer had completely lost his talent by this stage. He's never made another movie (except some recent DTV thing apparently), and frankly, who cares?