Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Russ Meyer, USA, 1965, 83 minutes

"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Violence. The word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favourite mantle still remains - sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn't only destroy. It creates and moulds as well. Let's examine closely then this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained within the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakeable smell of female. the surface shiny and silken. The body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don't drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs. Operating at any level, at any time, anywhere and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor's receptionist, or a dancer in a go-go club!"

Thus proclaims the mock-portentous open voice over to Russ Meyer's 1965 cult classic roughie, as we are introduced to our go-go dancing anti-heroines, Varla, Rosie (the incredible Turu Satana; the mysterious Haji) and Billie (the gorgeous Lori Williams). Taking some well-earned R&R in the salt flats outside of town, Varla, the leader of the gang, challenges hod rodder Tommy to a race and wins. Being a bad loser, he starts a fights and she promptly kills him with a karate chop. Thinking quickly, the trio kidnap Tommy's whiny girlfriend Linda (Playboy Playmate of the Month December 1966 and once husband of The Exorcist's Jason Miller) and head for the nearest homestead, inhabited by a lecherous old man and his two sons, the seemingly normal (or what passes for normal in a Meyerland) Kirk, and the hulking, mentally challenged Vegetable. To make things even more complicated, there's a fortune hidden somewhere there as well...

So, besides the obvious big breasted Amazonian women, what can you actually expect from Faster Pussycat! Kill Kill!? Quite a lot, actually: inventive camera angles, sharp editing, crisp black and white cinemagraphy, a cool soundtrack (The Cramps have covered The Bostwood's title theme, for instance) and a knowing sense of its own inherent absurdities and contradictions, not least as far as the co-mingling of male fantasies and fears around the female are concerned. So, in the end, it's not just all about big tits...

Review by Michel Gentil
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2006

'The sweetest kittens have the a sharpest claws!" claimed the ads, and these cats certainly do. A truly wild mad-movie, well within many conventions of the sixties groovy exploitation flick but nevertheless boasting a bizarre set of anti-heroines, and Meyer's typically warped yet expertly realised view of the world.

The magnificent Tura Satana, Haji and Lori Williams are a trio of homicidal go-go dancers. One's a bisexual sadist (Satana), another a nyphomaniac (Williams) and their leader's a lesbian (Haji), They karate-chop a man to death after a desert car race; kidnap his girifriend and head off. Hunting some stashed cash, they hide out on a remote desert farm run by a family of weirdos, with a lecherous paraysed grandad and musclebound son named only "vegetable".

Faster Pussycat..., one of the top cult films of all time, displays not only the hip sixties mentality, such as Lori Williams forever breaking into hot go-go steps whenever trouble looms, but also is testimony to Meyer's celebration of the amoral, the violent and the perverse. Fair enough the two "goodies" have to survive, but Meyer makes them boring and colourless, and they have a tough time against the grotesquerie of the three girls and weirdo family, who predate The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by almost a decade. Faster Pussycat... is an amazing variation on the road-movie genre, showing Russ Meyer to be a fine action director without a bare breast in sight. The road-movie's never been so far out...

Review by Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95
Mark Radice