Ultra Vixens

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)

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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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?

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.

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.