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Movie: Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!

Date: 1965

Category: Camp

Director: Russ Meyer

Big Stars: Tura Santana, Haji, Lori Williams

Trashy and lurid. Overripe and exagerated. Faster Pussycat is trashy action made for it's creator, Russ Meyer. Made with wild glee, the film is amazingly fun, psychotic, low-budget and full of buxom female anti-heros. Tura Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams have terrific screen presence as the three tough-as-nails villainesses. They're the kind of deliciously over-the-top antagonists that you root for, especially since the nominal heroine (Sue Bernard) is a ridiculous dimwit who couldn't act her way out of a paper bag.

From Roger Ebert's review:

"Tura Satana, as the black-clad dominatrix, is racing her Porsche in the desert against cars driven by her female lover (Haji) and another go-go dancer (Lori Williams). They kidnap a young girl (Susan Bernard), after Satana breaks the back of her boyfriend with one swift karate move. They stop for gas. The talkative attendant (Mickey Foxx) chatters away about "seeing America first," his eyes glued to Satana's cleavage. "You won't find it down there, Columbus!" she sneers. He tells them that an old man, who lives in the desert with his two sons, has a hoard of money hidden on his property. One of the sons, who is named Vegetable (Dennis Busch), is muscle-bound but dim-witted, and they see him carrying his father to their pickup truck.
Following the truck to an isolated desert shack, they concoct a story to explain their prisoner, and the lustful old coot (Stuart Lancaster) orders lots of fried chicken prepared. The coot and his sons sit down at dinner with the women (all dressed in bulging bikinis, halter tops, etc.), and when the go-go dancer says something Satana doesn't like, the dominatrix simply stands up and belts her. How does the father respond? With a tolerant chuckle: "Women! They let 'em vote, smoke and drive - even put 'em in pants! And what happens? A Democrat for president!"

Meyer's extraordinary women are of course fascinating to those with breast fetishes, but look a little longer and you will notice that the breasts are not always presented as centers of desire. Instead, they're weapons used to intimidate men. Tura Satana, who plays the lead in Faster, Pussycat, is extraordinary in appearance: Her makeup, with its slashes of Kabuki-style eyebrows, looks terrifying. Her black costume seems suited to a motorcycle gang. She never smiles. And her abundant cleavage seems as firmly locked in place as a Ninja Turtle's breastplate. One cannot think of her as fondleable.
What deep recesses of the psyche do these images address? The feminist and lesbian film critic B. Ruby Rich, writing at length on "Pussycat" in a recent Village Voice, said she dismissed "Pussycat" 20 years ago as just a skin flick. Seeing it again during its revival at New York's Film Forum, she had a different reaction, viewing it now as female fantasy, its images of "empowerment" fascinating to her. Meyer, from the beginning of his career and almost without exception, has filmed only situations in which women wreak their will upon men."

Roger Ebert wrote the another Russ Meyer classic, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,