Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Russ Meyer's most popular movie hasn't dated badly, and it serves as the best introduction to the mammary-mad director.
I wasn't too sure what to think when John Waters raved in his memoirs that FASTER, PUSSYCAT! was "the best film ever made". Chalk that up to Waters' love of high-trash cinema, I guess. Exactly how much credit, and for what, to give to Meyer is a seriously debatable question. One thing I don't doubt was that he made a campy, magnetic, high-energy movie that hasn't dated all that badly -- much better than many of the other movies he made at the time. (And because all the eroticism is implied, that makes it only smuttier and therefore more fascinating.)
FASTER, PUSSYCAT! gives us three go-go dancers who head out into the desert to race their cars. (I couldn't help thinking that Meyer would have had endless fun with a scene where one of them explains her ambitions to eventually enter law school, making love to a support pillar during the whole conversation.) After meeting up with a whitebread-innocent couple, Varla (Tura Satana) gets fed up with being one-upped, and kills the guy with a few well-placed karate blows. They kidnap the girl and keep her sedated while trying to figure out what to do next -- although it sort of hits them over the head: at a gas station, they learn than a weird old cripple and his sons live in the area, harboring a massive fortune. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
The movie's loaded with things that have since become pop-cinema staples: bizarre camera angles and editing, improbable character pairings, bizarre fights. One of the most memorable scenes has Satana vs. one of the old man's sons. She's trying to run him into a wall with her speedster, and he's holding her car at bay with his bare hands, the wheels digging a huge ditch. Satana's idea of karate has nothing on Jackie Chan, but it's not hard to see how a woman using violence against a man in the late Sixties, on-screen, could be construed as *really* shocking. She isn't flashy; she's trying to do damage. She means business.
As the model (or at least the center of inspiration) for the rest of the women in the film, Tura Satana eats up the screen without even trying. She reminds me of the extremely fetishistic, almost representational ways women are depicted in X-rated Japanese manga: gigantic chest, mask-like face, drill-instructor's voice. She reportedly received a deluge of fan mail after the movie came out, mostly from men who either wanted to marry her or be flogged by her. Most of the reason you can't look away from the screen is her, and it's not because she's attractive, or even sexy. She's terrifying, especially when Meyer shoves the camera down on the desert floor, somewhere between her toes, and has her stare down at us.
What we wind up with, incredibly, is probably the wellspring of almost every butch-femme empowerment image. I'm not sure Madonna or Pat Califa would exist as we know them, without something like FASTER, PUSSYCAT! as part of the ambient background noise in American culture. Then again, maybe I'm crediting him with too much. But then I watched Ralph Fiennes get the cheese kicked out of him by a green-haired punk girl in STRANGE DAYS, and thought: Maybe too much credit isn't nearly enough!
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