Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra Vixens [1979] [DVD]

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If I’m remembering correctly, someone in the Meyer biography said that Janice Cowart thinks Meyer’s films are sleazy and sees no value in them. She won’t grant access to Meyer’s archives for film historians or writers unless she deems them important. She’ll sue – or at least threaten to – anyone who screens even clips of Meyer’s films or uses Russ’ name without her permission. For a while, she was going after the actors who were trying to make extra money by doing conventions and stuff. She initially claimed Meyer told her to do that, but he wasn’t of sound mind then and almost certainly had no idea what was going on. In reality, she just thinks the Meyer women are whores. This quintessential sex comedy – written by famed movie critic Roger Ebert under the pseudonym “R Hyde”– was Russ Meyer’s last movie as director, and it’s all here: insatiable mega-busty women, religion, necrophilia, comic violence, impotent bumbling men, chainsaws and Nazi Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland) in a coffin.

Attached to the front of the house was a sign indicating that the building was a hotel. I peered through the windows but the inside looked dark and empty. At the side of the building sat Russ’ weights bench, just a few yards from a still pristinely-maintained pool. Burning Bed, The (1984) This made-for-television movie from NBC was based on the true story of timid housewife Francine Hughes of Danville, Michigan, who was…

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Meyer's two movies prior to this one - 'Supervixens' and 'Up!' - are two of his best ever, and don't receive the attention they deserve. 'Beneath..' follows a similar format to those two classics but does so with more coarseness and less fun. Meyer takes advantage of the more liberal censorship laws of the late 70s and makes his most explicit movie yet, but loses much of his sense of smutty joyfulness. Bullseye! (1990) Bullseye! saw Roger Moore and Michael Caine work together onscreen for the first time. Great friends in real life, it…

Jiggling Ann Marie and Uschi Digard are along for the roller coaster ride through Meyer’s lusty Small Town USA landscape (the film is set in the desert community of Rio Dio, Texas). And yet, despite his movies’ box office success, compounded by cheap-as-chips budgets, Russ’ career was like his house: situated beneath the Hollywood mainstream, in a barely noticed sub-genre under the shadow of glamorous moviedom. Somehow it seems fitting that Russ Meyer’s final home was situated right under the Hollywood sign, in a barely noticed area in the shadows of the iconic emblem of glamorous moviedom.It was clear that Janice was ready for me to leave. I thanked her for her time, before she offered one more clue.

The director plays himself in this satirical semi-autobiography, which has a strong moral code at its soft-core centre. As usual, another amazing and insightful post. Love the photos. I became an unlikely Meyer fan years ago after catching Beyond the Valley of the Dolls on TV late one night. That film left me discombobulated to say the least, but I had to seek out everything that madman made and I did! I found his biography a few years later for a whopping 50 cents. It’s flawed but I highly recommend it as it’s about the most definitive account of Meyer and his films.

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Knowing nothing about how a moviola that used to belong to a west coast sexploitation legend works, I needed an east coast sexploitation legend over to give me a crash course. Russ continued to live in the same house until he passed in 2004. By then his life had changed, his brain addled with dementia, his films neglected, and his business affairs sewn up by a housekeeper-turned-assistant-turned administrator-turned-conservator-over-his-physical-being, named Janice Cowart. The girls sport equally interesting names, such as Eufaula Roop (a DJ at a religious radio station) and a nurse called Flovilla Thatch (Sharon Hill). And then a car swept into the driveway. The door opened, and a woman I recognized as Janice got out: “What are you doing here?” she asked. By the time he bought the handsome A-frame house at 3121 Arrowhead Drive in the mid 1970s, Russell Albion Meyer had made thirty or so feature films. Or magnificent mammary melodramas, as he might term them. They had several distinguishing features: for one, Russ was an independent auteur, directing, producing, writing, and shooting almost every one of his movies.

As I said above, the films are available. They’re just shoddy releases that are wildly overpriced. So I guess the estate is making some money, but certainly not as much as it could if it were run by someone who cared even a bit. I don’t think Cowart’s end game was to ever make gobs of money. I think she simply wanted to seize control of something important and then wield power over people. She adored her friends, cats, family and fans,” her sister Eva wrote in a statement on Facebook posted by Perry. Chris Penn, who had starred in “The Wild Life,” hired her to perform as an erotic dancer the night before his brother Sean Penn married Madonna, and she appeared in a music video for Peaches. Almost 20 years after his passing, I heard that the Arrowhead Drive house was still owned by Russ’ estate, though it had sat empty and neglected since his death. I wanted to see the home that had been used prominently in ‘Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens’. So on a trip to Los Angeles, I drove across town to visit it.The house will be sold soon. It’ll probably be bulldozered and replaced with a new construction – no one is interested in this type of home anymore.” she said. And Russ was the editor too. Ah, the editing. Russ had started out as a still photographer, and it shows. So terrified of anyone blinking on his watch, his films are cross cut in a dizzying manner, presaging the modern action films of a John Woo or Michael Bay. His montage is an epileptic strobe effect, a Picasso painting simultaneously depicting different points of view on the same plane. Visiting it today was like entering a time warp. To my surprise, Russ’ van was still parked in front of the house, almost 20 years after his passing, this time in an open garage next to the residence. Dustier and older, but still there waiting for Russ to re-appear, jump in the driver’s seat, stomp on the gas, and head for a spartan shoot in the desert hills.