tomgillespie2002 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.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Greensleeves This movie will stretch your patience to breaking point in no time. The constant droning of the on screen 'comedy' narrator, the repeated shots of bouncing breasts and grinding crotches, the hysterical orgasmic screaming of the female leads will have you exhausted with it all after ten minutes. If the tedium doesn't get you then the unceasing loud and overwrought music score will guarantee a headache. Russ Meyer's early movies were much more enjoyable than this last effort where he goes all out to be as 'shocking' and explicit as possible. The women are as amazing as usual (in a an exaggerated cartoon kind of way) for a Russ Meyer movie but if only everyone could have calmed down just a little then it may have been watchable. As it is, watching it just becomes a horrendous, never-ending, shrieking nightmare.

CelluloidRehab Where to start ??..... Yes, at the beginning... Russ Meyer. The man who combined the talents of Ed Wood, Roger Corman and Coleman Francis. If it was just this movie, BTVOTUV, his genius could easily be considered a fluke. But no, Motopsycho, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Vixens is proof enough that BTVOTUV was not a fluke. Now to the movie. The story is fast, and entertaining. Don't expect hardcore porn. Instead, expect a Skin-aMax flick. Imagine the documentary (that would have come in the late 1960's and early 70's - as a result of the beginning of deindustrialization in the US) of the diminishing small-town American town, complete with a "common town folk narrator" and characters that have sex as the end all be all. The plot is laughable. A main character that is oblivious to his hot, horny wife, but somehow likes sodomy. The wife being a woman (obviously)who must concoct some lame plan to gain her husband's attention through sex with various men throughout the town. We are give a documentary type descriptions of the town and its happenings through the narrator. You have to love Russ Meyer's choices for backdrops and locations , including : scrap yard, garbage dump, desert, car interiors, strip club, river, radio station, radio station bathroom bathtub. The narrator is great for his dry, documentary style monologue, yet comical for that same reason. I recommend this movie for people who like MST3k type films. Those films that are bad, but so funny. If possible see the other Russ Meyer movies. He's a rare .. very rare talent. Gotta love the names of the characters. One word to sum up BTVOTUV - "Zebulon" !!-Celluloid Rehab

DJ Inferno 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)