Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)
Directed by: Russ Meyer
Written by: Roger Ebert, Russ Meyer
Starring: Anne Marie, June Mack, Kitten Natividad, Uschi Digard
USA
AVAILABLE ON DUAL FORMAT 4K UHD & BLU-RAY, AND STANDALONE BLU-RAY: NOW,
from SEVERIN FILMS UK Webstore and SEVERIN FILMS US Webstore
The RUSS MEYER SUPER BUNDLE also available on US store only [region free]
RUNNING TIME: 93 mins
REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera
Small Town is, perhaps, no different from any other small town. The inhabitants are frequently engaging in sexual activity, some of it having to be secret, though if you switch on the radio and tune into Rio Dio Radio then you’ll hear evangelical radio preacher Eufaula Roop who, for a small fee, will give her own special kind of healing to the unfulfilled and the unrelieved. Lamar Shed owns a junkyard and should be happy that his wife Lavinia often wants sex, but unfortunately he only seems able to do it from behind, leaving Lavinia feeling very unsatisfied. Fortunately there seems to be no shortage of candidates who are able to help her with her unsatisfaction, and Lavinia still knows that the most important thing is to sort our her husband so begins to come up with some ideas….
I don’t really consider Russ Meyer’s films to be pornographic, or didn’t until I came to Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens, which did cause me to wonder. Meyer’s last film made for the cinema has over half its footage devoted to fornication, the scenes themselves often being longer and more explicit than we saw before. However, after while I came to the conclusion that it still might not actually be pornography, seeing as pornography is usually intended to get the viewer sexually excited. While Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens is crammed full of shagging, it’s really another madcap sex comedy, just even more madcap than before, driven at a really furious pace, the editing never letting the viewer breathe for a moment. The result is rather exhausting, and, if you’re new to Meyer or even just these three particular films, I certainly wouldn’t suggest that you watch this one first; if you do, then what is basically Meyer on cocaine, with his style ramped up to the max, and his obsessions flooding out, might be too tiring and even grating. especially what with things like its fourth wall breaking where the narrator keeps on turning up to offer fake-serious commentary and even the actors sometimes facing and addressing the screen. The oddest thing, however, is how much female sexual assault of men there is, even though we’ve seen this before from Meyer. He probably thinks that the matter is just one to laugh at, and I’m certainly not one to normally criticise a film that much for having outdated and problematic views – in fact I detest things like “cancel culture” – but this did hamper my enjoyment of this third instalment of Meyer’s very loosely connected trilogy that also comprises Vixen! and Supervixens a bit – though not that much.
Shots that take us closer to and into Small Town are accompanied by – is it? – yes it is – the same German acapella song we heard when Martin Bormann was driving his truck in Supervixens. And then we meet the character again, but this time he’s playing a version of the tune on some kind of electric piano in a room containing a coffin while a big-breasted [of course] woman is sitting on a chair playing computer tennis. This is Eufaula, radio evangelist and healer. Martin takes his clothes off and the music becomes archetypal stripper music while we keep cutting to a close-up of Eufaula’s s face chewing gum which she then takes out and sticks to the side of the coffin, something which lessened my sympathy for this person is that act is a pet hate of mine. Martin lies down in the coffin and Eufaula covers him with a sheet which has holes for eyes, then she dances and an erection forms under the sheet, replete with comic sound effects. And then they have sex, her on top, the wheels of the coffin moving Now we get some scene-setting from our narrator, “Small Town USA, average people, ordinary people, the folks next door. Walk down any street, knock on any door, and who will you meet? Your neighbours, that’s what it’s all about. Friendly people getting to know one another, pulling together for the mutual good”. And indeed we’re introduced to sanitory engineer Mr Peterbuilt “a man to the name born”, dancer Lola Langusta “hotter than a Mexican’s lunch“, door to door salesman Semper Fedalis, scrapyard workers Beau, Tyrone and Zenbulum, Junkyard Sal their boss, dentist Asa Lavendar, dentist assistant Flovilla, “callow youth” Rhett, and – last but not least – scrapyard owner Lamar and his wife Lavonia. Of course many of these folk are introduced screwing.
We kind of get the impression that the plotting of this movie is going to be dense, with several intercut plotlines to keep up with. However, at the centre of things are Lamar and Lavonia, their story being one which will involve more and more of these other characters, and I’m sure you know how. Lavinia is highly sexed and has to resort to self-pleasure while Lamar is busy working, and we know that we’re in a somewhat more graphic world when several minutes is devoted to her rubbing a vibrator over her, pressing it on a nipple in closeup. Lamar gets fed-up with this and smashes it against a wall, so Lavonia resorts to coming on to him and fellating him under the table. Lamar is finally turned on enough to have sex with her, but it’s from behind, which she hates, so what we’re seeing is technically rape, her kicking him in the groin hardly seeming enough. Certainly not being satisfied, Lavonia goes out the next day and spots young Rhett. She undresses, then jumps the boy from behind and proceeds to mount and rape him. The young man soon escapes, but she dives down, catches him underwater by fellating him and then overpowers him. “The satisfied and dedicated instructress Lavonia has opened up broad new vistas of athletic endeavour for her gratified student” says our ever verbose narrator, but he turns out to be only 14! That’s certainly something that wouldn’t be the case if this film were made today, even though a lot of first sexual experiences are of this nature, albeit a bit less often days. Lavonia seems to be like Vixen, after anything in trousers and on occasion in a skirt, though that’s not considered to be a problem in Meyer Land. And what she really wants is sex with her husband while they can look at each other, and she’s willing to go extremes in order for this to happen.
Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens never comes up for air. Meyer claims that Ebert wrote 75%, and indeed I can detect some of the style of his film reviews in, as he’s credited, The Man From Small Town’s narration. Said narration and the almost-as-constant voice and sight of Rio Dio Radio’s Sister Eufuala are especially complicit in never giving the viewer time to pause for breath. Eufuala is a healer, though a special kind, asking those who come to her for help to sit in a bathtub, then baptising them before having sex with them. People screw, and screw, and screw, with more closeups of private parts than before – there’s even one shot of a penis which is just starting to develop some semen. Small wonder that a whopping ten minutes were cut out of the UK cinema version. Of course the women are often on top and dominant. The ladies in Meyer’s films do tend to be stronger than the men so that’s appropriate, as well as be more libidinous, but, ignoring Meyer’s rather positive view on marital infidelity, too much of the sex is non-consensual and this leaves a bad taste in the mouth, perhaps even more so because Meyer obviously thinks it’s funny when the girls do the attacking. Of course he still worships his women, in particular their breasts, Kitten Natividad [Lavinia] and Ann Marie [Eufuala] clearly having been told to wave theirs around as much as possible – and they do it with grace and make it look natural, Natividad also projecting an extraordinary sexual energy onscreen. And one shouldn’t try to take too seriously a film whose only social commentary seems to be the two “white trash” scrapyard workers being “bitterly envious of the lower class“, and that, behind the peaceful, idyllic facade, all sorts of stuff is going on in these small towns. Who knew?
A twist in the plot reveals two people actually being the same person which was bleedingly obvious really, a fact that our narrator even comments on. But we shouldn’t expect subtlety in a film where a dildo talks, a black sock in which someone has just jerked off hits a wall and semen leaks out, and somebody tries to poo and fails so cries “no shit” – all bits that I laughed heartily at, by the way. However, two interesting scenes could have done with some. Dentist Asa is gay so, as should probably be expected in a film of this kind and this time, tries to forcibly get with our hero, though thinking about it maybe he’s not that bad according to the logic of the film which has rape – or at least one type – as a common and not bad thing. Asa locks Lamar in a closet, which is amusing even though I doubt that we’re intended to infer from Lamar’s preference for anal sex that he’s a closet gay. But we didn’t really need Asa to say “get out of my closet” several times? Russ, we get it! Then there’s, in a film where what violence there is is accompanied by more silly sound effects and people bleeding different colours [the seeming interest in nastier brutality as shown in Supervixens and even Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls isn’t present here], Zebedee getting punched and white blood pouring from his mouth. The visual joke is amusing enough and we didn’t need somebody to point this out. Interestingly, this one of two African-American characters ends up being a major winner in a story which Meyer and Ebert may have had trouble concluding, though I also wonder if Meyer, deep down, actually knew that would be his last motion picture. Seeing as Supervixens contained a reference to Vixen!, it’s perhaps little surprise here when a twist is followed by the return of a character from Supervixens. But then, along with some other random occurrences, we’re also graced with an appearance from Meyer himself, in filmmaker mode, accompanied by Wagner’s “Ride Of The Valkyries”. I imagine that some Meyer fans find it rather poignant.
This time the music score, credited as before to William Tasker, consists mainly of music that seems to evoke the setting and tone of the movie, with lots of banjo and Jew’s harp, though deliberately odd inclusions still occasionally come along. I’ve criticised Beneath The Valley Of Tbe Ultra-Vixens more than its to predecessors, and I do think it has distinct issues, yet it still has that skewed Meyer world view I’ve come to really like and plenty of laughs.
Rating:
I enjoyed “Beneath The Valley Of The Utra-Vixens” rather less than “Vixen!” and “Supervixens”, in large part due to the amount of sexual assault depicted and played for laughs, but it’s fair to say that many won’t be particularly bothered by this, and this sex comedy still delivers plentiful laughs and exudes raw energy. So still Recommended – though with maybe a bit of caution!
Severin’s releases of these Meyer films are absolutely great all-round. The restorations are incredible and the special features, especially Meyer’s candid commentary tracks, provide strong added value. I’m sure that fans need no further recommendation to buy, while, despite him having a few problems with the third movie, they’ve certainly made this writer want to go further into Meyer’s odd but at times rather wonderful world, and will probably make any readers who aren’t experienced Meyer-ists to do the same.
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