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.

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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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)

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.

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.