# Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

### reviewed by
Shane Burridge

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) 83m.

One of those rare things: A movie that is as good as its title. However, such is its fame that first-time viewers may be expecting more than it can deliver. The first time I saw it was at a double-bill with UP! which played to half a dozen people. My second viewing, a few years later, was at a film festival with a full house. What a difference an audience makes!

Russ Meyer's drive-in classic had considerable impact on many viewers back in '65 (among them cult director John Waters) but didn't get a stronger international presence until the early 80s, when cinema buffs who had seen B-Grade and Z-Grade films as youngsters began championing their favorite films in print. What Meyer did to make his film so memorable was to transfer the film-making sensibilities he had developed in his earlier exploitation films to the limitations of commercial cinema, reshaping the B-movie and introducing his independent streak to new audiences. As well as disregarding the conventions of studio pictures he also abandoned many of his own trademarks, among them flashbacks, flash-forwards, rapid intercutting, wraparound narration and fetishistic inserts of props. Perversely, the removal of nudity and sex - one of Meyer's most obvious selling points - gave the film-makers greater freedom, not less: without the distraction of obligatory flesh scenes Meyer and co-writer Jack Moran were able to keep the events on screen in service of the story.

In a gender reversal of Meyer's previous film MOTOR PSYCHO, PUSSYCAT opens with three free-spirited go-go dancers speeding their sports cars along a desert road (this image seems to endorse the film's title from the outset) where they meet a young couple performing time trials on a makeshift racetrack. Varla, the leader of the trio (the role that established Tura Satana's place in cult history) provokes the boyfriend of petite, Gidget-like Susan Bernard into a fight which turns ugly. The gals flee the racetrack, taking Bernard with them, only to find themselves on the property of a misanthropic old man and his two sons. The rest of the film is a rondo of lechery, betrayals, bitching and plotting, as the volatile personalities of the assorted players all strive to outfox each other.

It's the women of PUSSYCAT (Satana, Lori Williams and Meyer regular Haji) that provide the basis for its fan following - they are assertive, brash, sexually uninhibited and as tough as nails, and in a post-1966 climate of political correctness they celebrate all that is 'right' about being 'wrong'. Satana steals the show as the constantly vicious, karate-chopping Varla, but interestingly, the more vulnerable Bernard is equally as memorable. Dwarfed by the three Amazons that have abducted her, Bernard is convincing in a role that requires her to be constantly traumatized. She also provides the film with its time element: everything is contingent upon an escape from what has become her nightmare. Her attempts to run and reason her way out meet with failure each time, and only by confronting the story's 'monster' head on is she able to bring her ordeal to an end.

There's more to the central casting of PUSSYCAT than the attributes of its leading ladies, however - Meyer knew that he would be able to get away with much more in the story if he made the 'car club' female. Consider the alternative response if it had been a male trio that had kidnapped the small, defenseless Bernard and put her through hell. In fact, it's all something of a con: apart from a couple of seduction scenes, the women's roles in PUSSYCAT could be switched to men's with hardly any change of dialogue (in much the same way that Sigourney Weaver's role in ALIEN was originally written for a male lead). To enforce the strength of the women, Meyer emasculates the men in the film by making them witless, bookish and disabled; furthermore the women kill and maim in distinctly male/phallic ways (using knives and cars) and all but one of the murders in the film are committed by women. And then of course, there's that dialogue, made up almost entirely of double entendres and vicious putdowns - the dinner table scene is more shamelessly smutty than any other mealtime gathering you're likely to have seen. In spite of all this, PUSSYCAT never come across as sleazy - at no point do you feel uncomfortably exposed to a low-rent exploitation flick. Instead PUSSYCAT looks like a B-movie that somehow slipped sideways into cinemas through a crack that nobody had noticed at the time. That opening has since sealed itself shut, so we can count ourselves fortunate that films like this live on to be viewed today.

sburridge@hotmail.com

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