
Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens
Director: Russ Meyer Run Time: 93 min. Format: 35mm Rating: X Release Year: 1979
Starring: Kitten Natividad, Ken Kerr, Anne Marie, June Mack, Henry Rowland, Uschi Digard
This July, take a drive deep shall we say “Down South” with The Deuce to the starving-for-it core of our shall we say “Cun-tree” via a deep dip into one Smalltown, USA… and discover together there a bevy of dark demented desirous secrets barely buried BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA-VIXENS! A hot-house hoot of hedonism, jingoism, and shall we say “jismism”… shall we?? We did!!
The basic shall we say “stripped down” story here being that of buggering buffoon hubby Lamar forever leaving his luscious wife Levonia cold with all his yearnin’ for book-learnin’ (?!!?) and insistence on shall we say “beating it through the back door”… setting off a series of sex-capades that shall we say “straddles” the whole sexed-up strata of Small Town, USA’s citizenry… At once and together a stinging satire of America’s sham moralizing as its populace gets forever screwed in the shall we say “alternate ending” AND a fun shall we say “filled” fantasy fantasia of fetishism, femdom, and freewheeling fornication!!
A later shall we say “entry” in the string of Meyer’s “Vixen” movies and maybe his most mind-meltingly mannerist and meta… its filmmaking freed from the tethers of taste or trepidation – untimid in its telling – a frantic frenetic fever-dream forward-thinking fable that very well may have flummoxed the raincoat-clad despite cloudless skies crowd for the Lyric Theatre‘s mega-Meyer double feature shall we say “coupling” with 1975s SUPERVIXENS… And though perhaps more or less or mostly there for the shall we say “jujubees” shall we say “on hand” – by the time of BEANEATH’s release many a film-fan and flim-flam “critics” alike suspected Meyer had more up his shall we say “sleeve” – as would be expected from a filmmaker forged in the fire of WWII’s “official photo unit” to General Patton, is rumored to have shot the shall we say “raising” of the flag at Iwo Jima (to which one imagines, had he his druthers, would have been accompanied by a slide-whistle’s “whoooooop!”), and who’s self-penned tombstoned epitaph dead-panly reads: “King of the nudies. I was glad to do it.” … As too you will be when shall we say “buried” deep in The Deuce BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA-VIXENS!!