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

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There’s also a garbage driver called Mr Peterbuilt (Pat Wright), a travelling salesman named Semper Fidelis (Michael Finn) and a gay dentist-cum-marriage counsellor called Asa Lavender (Robert Pearson). It was clear that Janice was ready for me to leave. I thanked her for her time, before she offered one more clue. Stuart Lancaster in front of 3121 Arrowhead Drive, in ‘Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens’ (1979)

On the way to Russ’ house, I passed a familiar building, a medical and dental center I recognized as having featured in ‘Ultra-Vixens.’ Over 40 years had passed since Russ shot scenes there, but the place was unchanged, and still a medical and dental center. 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. Bullseye! (1990) Bullseye! saw Roger Moore and Michael Caine work together onscreen for the first time. Great friends in real life, it…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. Bellboy, The (1960) Stanley (Jerry Lewis) is just one of an army of bellboys at a luxury hotel in Miami. But, unlike the… 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. 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. 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 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. 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.Natividad guested on “The Dating Game” and “The Gong Show,” and had small parts in films including “My Tutor,”“Airplane II,”“The Wild Life,”“Another 48 Hours,”“The Double-D Avenger,” in which she appeared alongside two other former Meyer stars; and Adam Rifkin’s “A Night at the Golden Eagle.” The director plays himself in this satirical semi-autobiography, which has a strong moral code at its soft-core centre. 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. 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.

Francesca “Kitten” Natividad, the go-go dancer who became a cult pop culture figure when she was cast by sexploitation film director Russ Meyer in “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens,” died Saturday of kidney failure after suffering from cancer at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, according to her friend Siouxzan Perry. She was 74.Of course, I zeroed in on the moviola editing bay. My heart burned for the moviola. That is where the films I grew up with took shape, where the kinetic and frenetic cutting was assembled. This was the very equipment where nearly every one of his films had come to life. I’d heard stories of how Russ would wheel it outside to the swimming pool to work on his latest movie, or disappear for weeks at a time while cutting together his footage. Janice giggled. “No. That’s a joke. Russ attached it years ago. He put it there to throw people off the scent. It’s never been a hotel.” 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. Natividad and Meyer never married, but they lived together for some 15 years. While the remainder of her career was largely devoted to burlesque appearances, nude modeling and starring in porno films, she continued to appear on TV and in mainstream movies. She adored her friends, cats, family and fans,” her sister Eva wrote in a statement on Facebook posted by Perry.