Welcome to the grand conclusion of Russ Meyer Month II here at B-Movie Enema!

We finish with Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. This 1979 sexploitation satire not only brings our journey through another month of Russ Meyer movies to an end, but it, more or less, also signals the end of Meyer’s career itself. This is the final non-documentary film the King of Sexploitation Films ever made. He would end up doing some additional tongue-in-cheek documentaries like Mondo Topless, Too, Melissa Mounds, and Pandora Peaks but he never did do another narrative film after this movie’s release.

The reason for that is rather simple. While Meyer’s films were still popular, and he was a likable figure in the realm of softcore films, the hardcore porn industry became, for a lack of a better term, mainstream by the 70s with hits like Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat, and Debbi Does Dallas becoming as close to household titles as porn films could get. Meyer did still mostly retire from film a very wealthy fella. He personally oversaw the management and licensing of his own library of films. It’s likely why so many of his movies do not still have HD restorations or Blu-Ray releases. The exact state of the rights to his movies isn’t clearly defined from what I could find after a cursory search. If you go to the right places and the right conventions, you can usually score a 22-film box set for not too expensive at all, but the films’ looks and transfers are not consistent. It’s why some of the pics I used during the course of this month have been a bit rough.

I’ll have more to say about Russ Meyer at the end conclusion of this article, but Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens also has two other very important figures in Russ Meyer’s career. First, this is the third, and final, script by Roger Ebert. By the time he wrote this script, he was already on public television with his movie review partner Gene Siskel. That show was WTTW’s Sneak Previews. It would be the start of what he would forever be known for – working, and sometimes arguing, alongside Siskel. By the time of making both Up! and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens with Meyer, Ebert was already an accomplished journalist and writer. In 1975, he became the very first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 Chicago Sun-Times movie reviews. Since, a few more critics have won Pulitzers, and one has won multiple, but Ebert was the first and he, and truly along with Siskel too, set the tone for popular film criticism that now, for better or worse, continues online on what seems to be thousands of YouTube channels.

In 2013, Ebert passed away. He famously wrote that he was not afraid of death. He received public tributes from everyone from Howard Stern to President Barack Obama and about a million film fans, directors, writers, actors, and producers in between. And, while I will never have his talent for words and the eye he had for reviewing film and art, I will always look at him as someone I admire a great deal as a writer.

The third important person involved in Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens was its star, Kitten Natividad. At the time, she was Meyer’s girlfriend. She did two movies with Meyer and Ebert, Up! where she played a sort of muse or chorus figure for the story’s narrative and this one in which she serves as the headlining star. Aside from working with Meyer, she had a famous bust. Her notable bust size was 44 inches which is… pretty massive. Meyer would call this film we’re about to dive into his favorite because of how sexually active he and Kitten were at the time. They remained a couple for fifteen years after she left her husband for Meyer. After this film’s release and Meyer’s subsequent semi-retirement, she moved into hardcore productions but remained in the acting business until about 2019. Kitten Natividad passed away almost exactly a year ago on September 24, 2022, at the age of 74.

Somewhere I have to imagine Roger Ebert is writing ethereal screenplays being filmed right now by Russ Meyer and starring Kitten Natividad, Haji, and Tura Satana.

Much like with Up!, this movie opens with a lot of German and, what’s more, Nazi, what have yas. We hear “Deutschlandied” which is best known for the first lines of the song, “Deutschland Uber Alles”. Then we go inside what appears to be a home with a coffin in it with a busty blonde playing Pong. The camera makes sure to point out when her game of Pong game against herself is now 6 to 9. The busty blonde bombshell is Eufaula Roop (Ann Marie), a local evangelist in the fictional (no shit) town of Small Town, U.S.A.

The man we see playing the piano in this house climbs into the coffin in the living room and the busty evangelist does a sexy dance before she mounts him and they fuck. That man playing the piano getting his rocks off in the coffin is a German. In fact, he’s Nazi party official Martin Bormann. So Up! gives us Hitler getting pegged by people who you might think he wouldn’t like. In this. Bormann gets fucked by a bimbo evangelist in a coffin.

After that opening, we meet a narrator of sorts who introduces us to the inhabitants of Small Town, U.S.A. and all their intermingling. Guess what I mean by “intermingling”… You betcha – fuckin’. We have Semper Fidelis, a salesman who goes around and manages to bedazzle lonely housewives into fucking him while their husbands work. There’s Mr. Peterbuilt, a trashman who likes fucking… a lot. There’s Junkyard Sal who fucks her employees. There’s Lavonia (Natividad) and her husband Lamar. Lamar rapes her in the butt after she attempts and fails to seduce him into having vaginal intercourse with her. You get the point. People like fuckin’ in this town and that’s what they do with most of their time available to them.

It’s said that Meyer’s films, as his career was drawing to a close, became more and more explicit. That’s certainly true with Up! and you could see that turn starting with the film that preceded it, Supervixens. Beyond the Valley of the Ultra Vixens was easily Meyer’s most sexually charged one. Honestly, that’s saying a lot for a guy who had Russ Meyer’s career. But, yeah. The movie starts with fucking. All the introductions of the other characters that will make up this film included some pretty explicit sex. I’m not going to go far enough to say we can see penetration, but there are some acts that it’s impossible to think didn’t involve penetration or oral sex.

When we get our first full scene of Lavonia, Meyer shoots the hell out of her totally naked body. We also see her playing with a vibrator that she places between her tits and plunges it into Vaseline. It’s implied that she begins masturbating with it but we don’t really see it. This movie is very in our faces with sex. The other movies covered this month portrayed other uses of sexuality in Meyer’s films. Common Law Cabin was likely the closest to the typical Meyer representation of sex as a natural and fun thing. Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers treated sex almost transactionally and was probably a little too innocent. Motorpsycho and Black Snake were a little less sex-centric but kept sensuality at their cores. Ultravixens is about as close to a full-on porno as you can get.

Now, don’t get me wrong here… Natividad’s character trying to entice her husband to have sex with her by playing with a vibrator to distract him from whatever he’s doing with the calculator is playful and very Russ Meyer in operation, but this isn’t the same as Common Law Cabin only showing naked breasts and outright sexual activity in a coy manner. That scene, as I alluded to earlier, ends with Lamar anally raping Lavonia. In recourse, she kicks him in the nuts and storms off after telling him, once again, she doesn’t like it in the butt.

Now alone, Lamar turns on the radio to get some good old-time religion from Eufaula Roop. Eufaula tells her listeners how they can save their souls by sending a dollar to her radio program. Meanwhile, Lavonia visits with the garbage man, Mr. Peterbuilt to get that good old-time vaginal sex like she wanted before her husband went a little too far.

Ann Marie is really good in this movie. When we first see her playing Pong, she was almost perfectly keyed in with her face and gum chewing. Then, when we actually get to see her being her evangelist character, her accent, her inflection, and her dialect is actually kind of perfect. She’s going all in on this performance too and it’s pretty great. She’s definitely selling the idea of that radio evangelist type.

The epicenter of Small Town is the junkyard that Sal runs. There, Lamar works hours to pay for his and Lavonia’s life – as well as his correspondence courses to get a degree. There’s an older black man who just mostly scats and dances all day and dreams of owning his own junkyard. There are two other employees, one young and dumb, the other racist and rude, who are almost absolute wastes of life and can’t even get accepted into a volunteer army. Junkyard Sal gives people work and through that work, she gives them purpose.

Also, of course, Junkyard Sal wants to fuck as much as possible and would like to give Lamar some extra work, if you know what I mean. There is a little bit of a dust-up at the junkyard on this day. The two morons have some not-so-kind words to say about Lamar as he talks to the boss lady. They figure he’s nothing more than the flavor of the month for Sal. The old black man at the junkyard, Zeb, stands up for his friend Lamar and gets punched out by Beau, the one that is the racist of the two dummies.

Meanwhile, Semper Fidelis stops by Lavonia’s place after she had a romp with an athletic virgin in town, Rhett (played by Steve Tracy – more about him in a minute). Semper doesn’t just sell normal old garbage stuff that door-to-door salesmen do. No, he sells lingerie. But not just any old lingerie. He sells for Federico’s of Wisconsin, some highfalutin shit. This pleases Lavonia.

Considering this pleases Lavonia, it also pleases Semper.

Now, we’re a little over one-third of the way through Ultra-Vixens and you might be wondering what this movie is really about. We’ve spent that entire thirty minutes seeing Kitten Natividad seek out sex at any cost and for anyone. We’ve also seen other members of the burg of Small Town, U.S.A. We’ve also heard some of Eufaula’s preaching. So… What’s the movie about? Well, it’s possible it’s mostly going to be about the actual pursuit of sexual happiness. That’s my best guess in these first 30 minutes. I do know that Lavonia’s getting some ideas from what Semper’s got to sell her.

Primarily, she’s thinking about using the silk dress, the wig, the choker, and the book that will teach her Spanish quickly to moonlight as a stripper named Lola Langusta.

We’ll come back around to the birth of Lola Langusta in just a moment. I wanted to bring up Steve Tracy who plays the young stud Rhett in this movie. A year after this movie, Tracy would get the role he would be best remembered for, Percival Dalton on Little House on the Prairie. His character was married to Nellie, played by Alison Arngrim. The two became very close. Arngrim became an AIDS activist after Tracy passed away from AIDS complications. Arngrim was very close with Tracy and was the only one on the set of the show that knew he was gay. They remained close until his passing.

Alright, so back to the movie. Lavonia now has a whole slew of new lingerie and naughty things to wear in her pursuit of sex and fun. Meanwhile, at the junkyard, Lamar has a bit of a conundrum. You see, the boss lady really would like for him to please her like her other employees do. He’s not exactly as interested in that idea as she is. But what is he to do? If he refuses, he risks his job and any real gainful employment in the whole town. However, if he was to partake in Sal’s bountiful booty, well, he would be cheating on his wife (not that it would really bother Lavonia I don’t think).

Lamar goes for the sex. Besides, if he loses his job, he can no longer afford the correspondence classes he’s been doing to better himself. Lamar seems to only be able to really enjoy sex if he does it in the butt. After struggling with Sal for sex her way, he finally dominates her and fucks her in the butt. However, when the peeping Beau and Tyrone interrupt them, Lamar goes outside and beats them up.

Sal fires Beau and Tyrone and issues a warning to Lamar – either get with the idea that things around here are done her way or hit the bricks too. She hates a man who can’t look a good fuck in the eye.

It’s Friday night and Lamar decides to stop off at a bar to unwind before going home. It was a tough day at work. His boss seemed pretty deadset on him fucking her. He got into a fight. He just needs a drink, okay? He decides to stop in at a very specific, and coincidental, bar to get his drink – a strip club (which I think would just be a normal bar in a town set in a universe governed by Russ Meyer). There, performing on stage to a sea of entranced men is Lola Langusta. She’s the new alter-ego of Lavonia using the things she got from Semper Fidelis.

The narrator says this is an idea she got thanks to Semper. That’s true. He also says that she hopes this would turn the tides of her marriage to Lamar and get him away from constantly wanting to do it in the butt. I’m not exactly sure how that would work, but not only is Lamar not able to recognize Lavonia, but he’s barely even paying attention to her.

She then moves to Plan B which involves her kicking over his beer and she orders him a new one that she spikes and knocks him out. She then ties him to the bed and mounts him. One way or another, she will get him to look a good fuck in the eye.

Well, maybe more accurately, the narrator says that Lola is using Lamar’s whole body as a living dildo. Basically, this whole plot is about trying to make it so that Lamar engages in vaginal sex. He is, in so many words, addicted to anal sex. That might be something he enjoys but it really doesn’t give her, or other women he’s been with, any satisfaction. So, yeah, she had the playfulness of earlier that only ended with him doing it in her butt when she didn’t want it. Her next attempt to “correct his ways” was to do the whole elaborate setup of becoming a stripper at a bar that he would just so happen to walk into to unwind after a tough day at work and she would then have to drug him and then basically rape him to get the satisfaction she wanted and hopes that his drugged brain puts all the pieces together so he would then want to have vaginal sex with her all the time.

About as easy of a plan as I’ve ever heard of!

So, “Lola” sends Lamar on his way to go home. She then rushes home herself with help from Peterbuilt, who she can’t resist fucking… so… well, she does. Vigorously. The problem, though, is that Lamar gets home and catches Lavonia in the throes of passion with the garbage man, and screaming in Spanish. Oh, and he also finds her Lola costume. He confronts her about what went down at the strip club while she’s fuckin’ Peterbuilt. He doesn’t even notice him right away. He tries attacking Mr. Peterbuilt but the trash man fights back and he’s considerably stronger than Lamar. Thankfully, Lavonia is quick on her feet and uses a hot lightbulb to burn Peterbuilt’s balls.

Lamar says there is only one person who can save their relationship, and that’s Dr. Asa Lavender. Lavender is Small Town’s dentist and part-time marriage counselor. He’s also portrayed very fay. Lamar explains that he can only get off when he’s rimming Lavonia. Dr. Lavender takes Lavonia with him while leaving Lamar in the capable hands of his nurse, Flovilla Thatch.

Nurse Thatch is played by Sharon Hill. I almost HAVE to wonder if she really was a nurse because she only appeared in eight films. But in half of them, she played a nurse of some sort. She was a nurse in this, as well as playing a nurse zombie in Dawn of the Dead in 1978. She then played the role of Head Nurse in The Kid Brother in 1987 before playing Blonde Nurse in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth.

While Lavender works on a cavity in one of Lavonia’s teeth, Nurse Hotpants works on Lamar. This ends up with him screwing her in the ass. On the intercom between the two rooms, Lavender hears Lamar asking why can’t women be more like men. This sends the obviously gay doctor into a rather excited state. So he goes after Lamar thinking that Lamar being gay is why he only likes anal. Meanwhile, Nurse Thatch goes to talk to Lavonia and it’s fairly obvious Lavonia is interested in trying out some lady-on-lady sex today.

While Lavender tries to lure Lamar out of the closet (that’s not me being clever – Lamar is hiding in a closet to stay away from Lavender), Thatch and Lavonia share a 17-inch, double-sided dildo.

Okay, so that whole counseling scene is fairly of its time. There are some unfortunate handling of the gay character that is Dr. Lavender. He’s overly fay. He’s overly excitable over the potential that Lamar might only like butt sex because he wishes women were more like men. It’s a zany scene. Everything with Lavonia and Nurse Thatch, though, was aces, but the scene isn’t that great of a thing in the year 2023. On a very surface level idea, there is something to explore about addiction to anal sex and a person’s desire for women to be something closer to men in terms of being comfortable with them, but I’m not entirely sure a madcap, zany Russ Meyer sexploitation film is the right place to really explore that nuanced concept.

As Lamar and Lavonia drive away from Lavender’s place, they listen to Eufaula Roop’s sermon on the radio. Lamar decides to see if maybe he needs some faith to fix him. He walks into the radio station, drops his trousers and Eufaula immediately puts the show on a break so she can “save” Lamar.

Eufaula works on Lamar in the radio station’s “Tub of Joy” where she tries to cleanse his soul. She baptizes Lamar by basically raping him and nearly drowning him in the Tub of Joy. Meanwhile, Lavonia’s getting her own soul salvation by inviting Mr. Peterbuilt over to make up over that hot lightbulb to his nuts thing earlier. Eufaula does indeed save Lamar. He runs home to finally have sex with Lavonia. He gets home, punches out Peterbuilt, and finally satisfies his wife.

Lamar once again punches out Peterbuilt when the garbage man is enraged when he hears Lavonia say Larmar is better than him. Meanwhile, Eufaula has one more sexual encounter when young Rhett climbs out from under Eufaula’s desk after satisfying her. We meet one final resident of Small Town. When our Narrator returns home, we see he is married to a younger woman named SuperSoul, played by Uschi Digard, who we last saw in Supervixens.

Fittingly, Russ Meyer himself brings his final movie to a conclusion by reiterating how normal sex is and how each of the characters eventually got something they really wanted. He even clears up that sometime after World War II, the teeth and gums of Bormann were discovered, but the rest of him never was. Well, nearly 20 years after this movie was released, the remains that were found were conclusively determined to be Bormann. So, how’s that. Meyer was just having a little fun with a historical mystery of sorts.

Is this a good movie? Despite some less-than-savory handling of a gay character, and how much more explicit the film is compared to his others, Ultra-Vixens is every bit the Russ Meyer movie you think it could be before watching it. Sure, it deals with a character who anally rapes three women because he is unable to perform vaginal sex. What’s interesting is that his salvation comes from being raped himself. So it’s a very Russ Meyer thing that he basically got as good as he gave. In the end, the movie isn’t in the stratosphere of Meyer’s best work, but it’s got his sense of humor. It’s got characters running here and there and everywhere to get laid. It’s got beautiful women with gigantic boobs. What more could you possibly want from Russ Meyer?

This might be a good time to reflect on Meyer as a filmmaker. I still have some films of his to cover, but not enough to really plan a third month-long tribute like these past five weeks. As I said, the hardcore adult industry basically crowded him out by the mid-70s. Still, his films are enjoyed by connoisseurs of the more innocent days of the nudie cuties. There is, without a doubt, a true appreciation for sex and the act of sensuality, and the presentation of the female form, in Meyer’s films. I’ve mentioned this in past articles when I covered his movies, but he treated his stars well and he never asked them to do something they weren’t comfortable with. Sure, there may have been times in which his intentions and the actress’ interpretation of what would be asked of them didn’t exactly line up, but there are no actresses from his films coming up with any kind of “Me Too” movement around him. He really did truly appreciate women.

In the 90s, Meyer began to struggle with memory loss. By the dawn of the 21st century, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Just a few years later, he passed away from complications due to pneumonia. At the time he passed, he was not married, had no children, and didn’t have anyone to hand over his wealth to, so he charged his caretaker in his final years, his secretary, to be the executor of his estate. She was ordered to release his money and anything sold in the estate sale to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in honor of his mother.

Meyer did live until he was 82. He had an incredibly full life of getting to do what he wanted from photography to making films to being surrounded by some of the most voluptuous and beautiful women the world of film ever knew. It’s fitting he passed away in the early 2000s. By that time, there was porn and there was this almost chaste attitude in mainstream movies. His boyish love of naked women and sexual escapades, mixed with his ability to straddle the adult film and the mainstream, was a thing of the past. 42nd Street was gone and turned into a vacation spot by the time of his death. The old grindhouses were long gone. The drive-in was, to be kind, on life support. Hell, you couldn’t even count on horror films being rated R anymore, and I would defy anyone to expect to have seen a single boob in those movies either. His era had passed and he passed away as an important figment of a time in which he was the King of the Sexploitation Films.

I think with that, it’s time for this month to pass too. Next week, we kick off a classic tradition at B-Movie Enema. That’s because next Friday will be October. That means it’s a whole month of horror films to get us in the mood for the greatest of all holidays – Halloween! As is the custom, I will be featuring four movies on each of the four Fridays in October, and I will also release a special Halloween day article that also happens to be the 400th B-Movie Enema review. To get things started, October 6th will see us spending another sleepover as we try to survive Night of the Demons 3!