Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens

At this point 'Beneath..' appears to be Russ Meyer's last movie, which is a pity. A pity because we could do with his invention and energy and ideas to liven up our dull movie going lives, and also a pity because it isn't one of his best efforts.

Meyer's two movies prior to this one - 'Supervixens' and 'Up!' - are two of his best ever, and don't receive the attention they deserve. 'Beneath..' follows a similar format to those two classics but does so with more coarseness and less fun. Meyer takes advantage of the more liberal censorship laws of the late 70s and makes his most explicit movie yet, but loses much of his sense of smutty joyfulness.

The one thing that saves this movie is the exuberant performance from the dynamic Kitten Natividad. If you are a fan of Kitten and her sensational body then this is the movie for you! Otherwise I could name at least a half a dozen Meyer movies to watch before this one. A disappointment this, but still has enough glimpses of Meyer's genius to make it worth a look.

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?

Beneath the Valley is one of Meyer's better known works, largely due to its broader distribution, over-indulgence of feminine beauty and crass humor. These are all time-honored features of Meyer in his films, but as his last feature (Pandora Peaks typically isn't counted in terms of conventional Meyer timeline), everything gets laid on extra thick. Meyer tests the boundaries of just how far he can go before the viewer reaches sensory overload. Nonetheless the impeccable Kitten Natividad and the often unmentioned, but still unforgettable Ann Marie stay true to Meyer fashion and manage to suck in the viewer while Meyer dishes out social taboos and common problems associated with the modern couple. Nobody is safe from his scathing satire. The homosexual professional, the self-defeating redneck and the two-faced nature of radio/TV evangelism all get a thorough walloping in this film. This film also serves as the epitome of Meyer's work with photography and cinematography. His virtually-patented "up through the bed springs" shots are unmistakable and this film serves as the perfect showcase and record of this unique, yet effective technique. Never before has any director opted to shoot the love scene from the mattresses point of view! Although this film does indeed lack in comparison to Supervixens or Up! as one of Meyer's late '70s style flicks in terms of dramatic story complexity, it's still Russ Meyer, and that alone makes the film worthwhile.

An on-screen narrator gives us the rundown on the inhabitants of a small south western American town…

One young man works in a junkyard and restricts his sexual activities to rear end collisions, which is upsetting to his lovely but horny wife… A German emigrant plays out unusual erotic fantasies late at night… A female radio evangelist has a strange preaching style… The general plot concentrates on the junkyard employee and his wife…

In contrast to his other ventures into provocative cinema, Meyer constructs this film more on sex than on violence… The erotic studies are quite varied, filled with his usual fast cutaways to naked, buxom ladies running inexplicably around the country side…

The film is not without its macabre overtones either… He stimulates, suggests, teases, provokes, shocks, and upsets his audience in such an unusual way that he has become an American institution

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.