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 ! -----== posted via deja news , the leader in internet discussion ==----- <a href= " http : //www . dejanews . com/ " >http : //www . dejanews . com/</a> now offering spam-free web-based newsreading 
