The original elements for this film gad been stored in less-than-optimal conditions. As a culture and, well, let’s get hyperbolic and say as a people, we’re so blessed that Severin Films devoted months to the painstaking restoration of its weather-damaged negative before scanning it in 4K and compiling over two hours of new and archival footage, all with the blessing and cooperation of The Russ Meyer Trust.
Every Russ Meyer movie I haven’t seen before becomes my favorite of his movies.
Co-written by Roger Ebert, this feels like Our Town but with so much sex.
Except, unlike that play, we meet everyone in this small town clothed and unclothed.
There’s radio evangelist Eufaula Roop (Ann Marie, who was in the last Meyer movie that became my favorite, Supervixens), who is first shown mounting Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland, Otto from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and also Bormann in Supervixens; I find it amusing that Meyer both shot war footage as part of the 166th Signal Photographic Company, the official photo unit in General Patton’s Third Army during the Second World War*, and named a major character in his movies — twice — after the private secretary to Adolf Hitler) inside a coffin. We also see a salesman going door to door, making love to every wife in town, starting with one played by Candy Samples (she’s listed in the credits as The Very Big Blonde and lives up to that; her adult career lasted from 1970 to 1989). And oh yes, there’s Junkyard Sal (June Mack), who sleeps with the men she orders around in her scrap heap.
Our hero, if there is one, is Lamar Shedd (Ken Kerr, who not only was Fred in Up!, but was the assistant director on Roar and a grip on Eaten Alive; that isn’t a pun), who is on again and off again with his wife Lavonia (Kitten Natividad, a former maid for Stella Stevens and the star of many an adult film up until 2011; she’s also in Airplane and The Tomb). Either she’s trying to get in his pants while he’s trying to study or he’s trying to go into the tradesman’s entrance. Congratulations! If you didn’t have to look that up, you’re also a pervert.
Lamar goes to work at the junkyard, while his wife nearly drowns and sexually assaults a fourteen-year-old boy named Rhett (Steve Tracy, whose career and short life found him in eleven episodes of Little House On the Prairie, as well as the Tom DeSimone-directed gay porn movie Heavy Equipment). Then, she finds that salesman and balls him too.
Note: In 2025, my goal is that more people use ball as a verb in sentences. Please help me make this dream a real thing.
As for Lamar, he’s trapped by his boss and forced to please her while his co-workers watch from outside. He’s desperate, as he’s trying to better himself with an education. It ends up with everyone being fired and Lamar heading for a strip club where he’s slipped a mickey by Mexican exotic dancer — meter algo en la bebida de loc — Lola Langusta, who ends up being his wife. They fight again, she sleeps with a truck driver and he returns home in time to fight the guy. She saves him by burning his ballsack with a lightbulb. Yes, really.
In an attempt to make things work, the couple visits dentist/marriage counselor Asa Lavender (Robert Pearson, Claws). It ends up with Lamar sleeping with nurse Flovilla Hatch (Pittsburgh adoptee Sharon Hill, who was an actual nurse in town before playing one of the lead zombies in Dawn of the Dead; she also appears in Knightriders and has done location casting for lots of Steel City shot films, like Rappin’, Gung Ho and Lady Beware), the nurse sleeping with Lavonia and the dentist trying to have his way with Lamar. After this, Lamar decides to find God, which means that Eufaula Roop baptizes him and nearly drowns him as she mounts him. Lamar leaves, finds the truck driver Mr. Peterbuilt (Patrick Wright, who was also a truck driver in Graduation Day) in bed with his wife again, knocks him out and finally makes love to his bride.
Meanwhile, Zebulon (DeForest Covan) crushes everyone in the junkyard and takes it over, Eufaula makes love to Rhett, who goes home and makes love to his father Martin Bormann’s wife SuperSoul. Yes, Uschi Digard, playing the same role she had in Supervixens. As narrator Stuart Lancaster closes his words, we see Russ Meyer filming in the distance and Digard’s lovemaking powers cause an earthquake.
This was Meyer’s last movie until he would return in the 2000s to make Russ Meyer’s Pandora Peaks and the Playboy video Voluptuous Vixens II.
By the 80s, breasts could be surgically made to create the woman that Meyer loved most. Hardcore pornography had taken over for softcore. And so Meyer retired a wealthy man. He owned the rights to nearly all of his films and made millions reselling them on home video, working out of his home. If you called the phone number in ads to buy one, you were probably talking to him.
His grave says, “King of the nudies. I was glad to do it.”
*Meyer was given to carny flimflam — which is the best kind — and claimed to have seen soldiers in a stockade being trained for a suicide mission during the war, then told E. M. Nathanson who wrote The Dirty Dozen, which Meyer was given 10% of. He was also part of a team that planned on assassinating Hitler and Jospeh Goebbels, with Meyer supposedly shooting the evidence of the leader’s death. He also lost his virginity to a girl named Babette — I imagine she had the kind of breasts that eclipse the sky — that was paid for by Ernest Hemingway. I’ve also heard Meyer shot the flag raising at Iwo Jima, but there’s no way all of these things can be true.
Actually, yeah. It’s Russ Meyer. They can all be true.
The Severin release of Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens has an archival commentary by director, co-writer, producer, cinematographer and editor Russ Meyer; an interview with “Latin Brünhilde” Kitten Natividad; Talk It Over, a Tucson talk show where Ellen Adelstein interviews Meyer and a new interview with the host and a trailer.
You can get this from Severin.
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