Verdict
Summary
If you were to cross A Prairie Home Companion with a porn film, you might get Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens, and that is high praise. It’s funny, sexy, offensive, and garish (and how!), but gosh darn it: It’s infectiously entertaining and goofy, and I liked it.
Plot:
Small Town U.S.A. has a lot of endlessly horny folks, itching to get laid over and over and over again.
Review:
There are no towns as purely American as Small Town U.S.A., and a perpetually chipper on screen narrator (played by the perfectly cast Stuart Lancaster) tells us the saga of husband and wife Lamar (Ken Kerr) and Lavonia (or Lola Langusta, played by the eye-popping Kitten Natividad at her peak perfection), a mismatched pair if there ever was one. Lamar has himself the finest piece of tail in the entire county, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Lavonia cavorts around the house in the nude, desperate for Lamar to just give it to her, and she resorts to using vibrators dipped in Vaseline to entice her husband, who’s much more interested in his calculator than what his amazing looking wife has to offer, and what’s even worse is that when he does give it to her, he’s only interested in anally penetrating her, which she hates (she kicks him in the balls to show how much she hates it). What sort of cinematic universe are we in? Is this porn? Well … sort of, but I guarantee this land of the free and the horny is more fun than you’re expecting. The narrator takes us on a tour: A horny “Junkyard Sal” (played by the massively bosomed June Mack who was murdered in real life a few years later) rules the roost at a wrecking yard where the grease monkey employees all hope for their chance to roll around the sack with her (she gleefully obliges any and all comers). There’s also a bazooka-breasted religious DJ who plugs in “Old Time Religion” 8-track cartridges while secretly lusting on the air for a man to come “fill in her what is empty.” There are other guys and gals in the mix, but what it boils down to is Lamar learning how to enjoy traditional sex with his wife, but first he has to endure the fact that she has sex with virtually everyone in town … because they have no problem whatsoever giving her what she requires.
If you were to cross A Prairie Home Companion with a porn film, you might get Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens, and that is high praise. It’s funny, sexy, offensive, and garish (and how!), but gosh darn it: It’s infectiously entertaining and goofy, and I liked it. It was written by Roger Ebert, which is hilarious, and Meyer deftly handles the playful camera and edits the film almost like a Monty Python skit. Natividad is absolutely stunning looking and always has a grin on her face as if she was having the time of her life playing this sex kitten (wink wink), and if you’re a straight guy then I don’t know how you won’t have a good time with this adult comic book come to life. It’s basically an issue of Cherry manifested in live action, but with much bigger boobs.
Severin has just released the first batch of their Russ Meyer titles on Blu-ray and in a 4K Ultra HD version as well, and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens looks fantastic in a painstakingly restored transfer. It comes with an archival commentary by Meyer, an interview with Natividad (who passed not that long ago), two bonus interviews, and a trailer.
