Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens

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.

I saw this film for the first time in 1993 when I was 18 years old and it gave me a properly kick. "Beneath..." was featured in the midnight program on German cable, but it was not like the usual kind of soft porn I had seen already, because this movie was much more funny, satirical and entertaining. There were a lot of women with oversized breasts like Uschi Digard or Kitten Natividad, combined with grotesque and cynical humor. Russ Meyer´s film was a completely new experience for me: it made me interested more and more in independent and underground movies, films that you aren´t able to see very often, which are normally not featured in commercial cinemas or difficult to rent in conventional video stores. Films that later followed were "Supervixens", "Up!" or "Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!". Even masterpieces like Romero´s "Night of the living dead" presented me a completely new side of film making that I hadn´t known until then. Lovers of soft-focus lens erotic à la David Hamilton surely won´t like Russ Meyers movies in any way, because his flicks are vulgar, obscene and provoking. For all others like me he is a master of the modern pop culture. (10/10)

More than a comedy, this is a parody on a parody. Based more than a bit on Thornton Wilder's "Our Town", it satirises American middle class values in a much more Rabelaisian way than Wilder himself did. Or could.

OF course, Meyer is the great auteur. He writes, directs, produces, shoots and appears in this film, helped only by a pneumatic cast on screen and Roger Ebert thankfully off it. Even the title screams satire, from the great outsider, poking Hollywood right in its Beyond the Valley of the Dolls/Beneath the Planet of the Apes tunnel vision. Nobody makes films as full-blooded as Russ Meyer. His vision is full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. But it's also sophisticated in structure, with enough dramatic irony to warrant the term post-modern.

I haven't seen it in 20 years but I'll never forget the rollercoaster experience, or the absurd self-referential epilogue. An extraordinary film that deserves acclaim beyond its secretive cult status.

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?