by Russ Meyer, 1965.
Starring: Susan Bernard, Dennis Busch, Haji, Stuart Lancaster, Tura Satana, Paul Trinka, Lori Williams.
Rating: 10/10, 7.5/10.
Kirk: What do you want?
Varla: Everything. Or as much as I can get. Right now you’re first on my list—and I always start at the top.
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is the story of three extraordinarily top-heavy go-go dancers in California. We have Billie (Williams), the fun-loving blonde, Rosie (Haji), the angry and violent Italian, and Varla (Satana), the sadistic ringleader. They’re having a friendly (kind of...) game of three-way chicken in their cars out in the desert when a man and his girlfriend (Bernard, swimsuit-clad for the whole film) show up, wanting to run speed tests on the man’s car. Varla provokes a fight—"What’s your point," he asks her at one point in their verbal play, to which she responds, "It’s of no return, and you’ve reached it!"—and ends up killing him with her mad karate skills. In a panic (kind of...) they knock out the girlfriend (whose name, by the way, is Linda) and drive on. At a gas station, filling up, Billie sees a gigantic hunk of man-meat carrying a frail old man to a pickup, so she asks the overly talkative gas station attendant about them. This is how they find out that the man is a disgusting creature, but on his large desert property, somewhere, he has hidden an immense fortune. The rest of the film revolves around the women’s various attempts to get the money.
Before I saw this film, I always thought John Waters was a total aberration, coming out of nowhere and absolutely bonkers. Now I know better. His films are almost just variations on this one (probably the rest of Russ Meyer’s movies, too, but I haven’t seen those, so I can’t say). The overdone, stylized acting, the shock value, everything is very Waters. Hatchet Face in his Cry-Baby, for example, is pretty much exactly an uglified version of Rosie here. Of course, this all begs the question of where Russ Meyer came from, and that I have no idea.
Actually, I think more than I had ever realized was inspired by Meyer. I’m certain Richard O’Brian had this movie in mind when he wrote The Rocky Horror (Picture) Show, for one thing. The moods of the two are very similar all the way through, but I especially thought so during a lunch scene in Faster Pussycat, where people show up very underdressed, tensions run high, and eventually it all goes to hell...all much like in Rocky Horror. I almost expected Varla to suddenly whip away the tablecloth and reveal that they were eating a human, but no. That all came from a different twisted brain. But even aside from Waters and O’Brian, I think that, for example, a lot of musical personalities—from Madonna to Marilyn Manson—would have been...not impossible, but improbable without Meyer. I see the influence in the whole punk-rock movement, in Amy Sedaris’s brilliantly subversive sitcom Strangers With Candy, in the manipulation of female sexuality by the likes of Debbie Harry, kd lang, and others like them. It is everywhere.
And for such an influential work, it’s really just primarily big lots of partially guilty fun to watch. These ridiculously exaggerated women in their ridiculously exaggerated makeup, driving their ridiculously exaggerated cars, saying their ridiculously exaggerated lines—it’s great. Some more of my favorite lines: after Varla tells Billie and Rosie how they’ll explain what Linda’s doing with them (some made up story about how Linda ran away and her family sent the three after her), Billie, looking directly at Varla’s...um...ample bosom, says "That’s so phony, it’s almost believable," making a brilliantly layered metatextual statement not only about the current situation and Varla’s breasts, but also about the film itself. At lunch, Varla notices that Kirk is doing more eating than talking, and, sexily eating corn on the cob (of all things) at him, she says, "I like men with big appetites. Only I could never find one to match mine." At the very beginning of the film, an Outer Limits style narrator talking about violence, and a "new breed" of sexually violent women, says something along the lines of, "Who are they? They could be anyone, anywhere. She could be your secretary, or your doctor’s receptionist. Or—a dancer at a go-go club," at which we immediately cut to Varla, Billie, and Rosie dancing at a go-go club. This campy brilliance even extends to the packaging the video comes in, where in place of the more traditional "Filmed in glorious black and white!" we get "Filmed in glorious black and blue!"
Though interesting, I think I’ll leave all the women’s issues in the film to others. For one thing I don’t really know what to make of them, and for another thing, I don’t particularly care. The film is clearly at least sympathetic to women, and that’s really enough for me. I think anyone can get just about everything they want out of this movie. As for me, pure entertainment was first on my list—and I always start at the top.
read roger ebert's insightful review