This has been my least favorite of Russ Meyer's 'Vixen' movies - not due to a lack of nudity, but rather to a less coherent story - the comedy also isn't as funny. The only saving grace is the absurdly sexy Kitten Natividad - she's my second favorite vixen, next to Shari Eubank.

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

This 1979 movie was co-written, produced, and directed by Russ Meyer. Stuart Lancaster, credited as the Man from Small Town U.S.A., is the on-camera narrator of the movie. Early in the movie, Candy Samples appears briefly as the Very Big Blonde. Like everything else in this movie, she's larger than life. Lamar Shedd (Ken Kerr) can't satisfy his wife Lavonia (Kitten Natividad), because he can only climax in an unconventional way. Lavonia, with the aid of a wig and a Mexican accent, becomes a sexy stripper named Lola Langusta. Lola proceeds to bed down men with more standard sexual tastes. Lamar is put through a series of cures, culminating with the laying on of hands by a radio faith-healer named Sister Eufaula Roop, played by the super-stacked Anne Marie (67-25-36). Near the end of the movie, Uschi Digard has a cameo as SuperSoul. Russ Meyer himself appears at the end of the film to wrap up the movie. 1972 was a watershed year for adult movies, with the release of "Deep Throat" and "Behind The Green Door." Even though this was the most graphic of Russ Meyer's movies, it seemed tame by comparison. At the end of this movie, it says to look for the further adventures of Lola Langusta in "The Jaws Of Vixen." Unfortunately, that movie was never made. "Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens" was the last of Russ Meyer's theatrical feature films. The Russ Meyer "Pandora Peaks" documentary was a direct-to-video release in 2001. Sadly, Russ Meyer died on September 18, 2004.

Beneath the Valley is one of Meyer's better known works, largely due to its broader distribution, over-indulgence of feminine beauty and crass humor. These are all time-honored features of Meyer in his films, but as his last feature (Pandora Peaks typically isn't counted in terms of conventional Meyer timeline), everything gets laid on extra thick. Meyer tests the boundaries of just how far he can go before the viewer reaches sensory overload. Nonetheless the impeccable Kitten Natividad and the often unmentioned, but still unforgettable Ann Marie stay true to Meyer fashion and manage to suck in the viewer while Meyer dishes out social taboos and common problems associated with the modern couple. Nobody is safe from his scathing satire. The homosexual professional, the self-defeating redneck and the two-faced nature of radio/TV evangelism all get a thorough walloping in this film. This film also serves as the epitome of Meyer's work with photography and cinematography. His virtually-patented "up through the bed springs" shots are unmistakable and this film serves as the perfect showcase and record of this unique, yet effective technique. Never before has any director opted to shoot the love scene from the mattresses point of view! Although this film does indeed lack in comparison to Supervixens or Up! as one of Meyer's late '70s style flicks in terms of dramatic story complexity, it's still Russ Meyer, and that alone makes the film worthwhile.