Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Original poster
Directed by	Russ Meyer
Produced by	Russ Meyer Eve Meyer
Written by	Jack Moran Russ Meyer
Starring	Tura Satana Haji Lori Williams Susan Bernard
Music by	Paul Sawtell Bert Shefter
Cinematography	Walter Schenk
Edited by	Russ Meyer
Distributed by	RM Films International
Release dates	1965 (1965)
Running time	83 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$45,000
Box office	$36,122 (1995 US re-release only)

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a 1965 American exploitation film directed by Russ Meyer. It follows three go-go dancers who embark on a spree of kidnapping and murder in the California desert.

The movie is known for its violence, provocative gender roles, and its eminently quotable "dialogue to shame Raymond Chandler." It is also remembered for the indelible performance of star Tura Satana, whose character Richard Corliss called "the most honest, maybe the one honest, portrayal in the Meyer canon." Faster, Pussycat! was a commercial and critical failure upon its initial release, but it has since become widely regarded as an important and influential film.

Plot

Screenshot from trailer

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence." The narration over images of an optical audio track gives way to three go-go dancers—Billie (Lori Williams), Rosie (Haji), and Rosie’s lover, their leader, Varla (Tura Satana)—as they shimmy and shake their way through the title song before racing their sports cars across the California desert. They play a high-speed game of chicken on the salt flats and encounter a young couple out to run a time trial. After breaking the boyfriend’s (Ray Barlow) neck in a fight, Varla kidnaps and drugs his bikini-clad teenage girlfriend, Linda (Susan Bernard).

In a small town, they stop at a gas station where they see the wheelchair-bound Old Man (Stuart Lancaster) and his muscular, dim-witted son, “the Vegetable" (Dennis Busch). The gas station attendant (Mickey Foxx) tells the women that the Old Man was crippled in a railway accident, “going nuts" as a result and receiving a large settlement of money that is hidden somewhere around his decrepit house in the desert. Intrigued, Varla hatches a scheme to rob the Old Man, and the three women and their captive follow him back to the ranch.

At the ranch they encounter the Old Man, his elder son, Kirk (Paul Trinka), and the Vegetable, and they all dine together. At lunch, Billie taunts Rosie when Varla leaves with Kirk, hoping to seduce him into revealing the location of the money. Linda subsequently escapes the drunken Billie and runs away into the desert. The Old Man and the Vegetable pursue in their truck with obvious unwholesome intentions. The Vegetable catches Linda and seems about to assault her, but he collapses in tears as Varla and Kirk arrive. Kirk finally acknowledges his father’s lecherous nature and the Old Man’s hold over his younger brother, and he vows to have the Vegetable institutionalized. He tries to take the hysterical Linda into town in the truck, but the Old Man says that he has thrown away the keys, and Kirk and Linda set out across the desert on foot.

The film hurtles towards its conclusion in a whirlwind of violence. Varla drives back to the house and tells Billie and Rosie that they should kill the men and the girl to cover up Linda’s kidnapping and the murder of her boyfriend. Billie refuses, but as she walks away, Varla throws a knife into her back just as the Old Man and the Vegetable arrive. Rosie and Varla hit the Old Man with their car, killing him and knocking over his wheelchair to reveal the money hidden inside. Rosie is stabbed and killed by the Vegetable while trying to retrieve the knife from Billie's body. Varla rams the Vegetable into a wall with her car, injuring him. She drives off in the truck and overtakes Kirk and Linda, chasing them into a gully. Varla and Kirk fight hand-to-hand. She gets the better of him until Linda hits her with the truck, and she dies. Kirk and Linda drive off together in the truck as the end credits roll.

Cast

• Tura Satana as Varla
• Haji as Rosie
• Lori Williams as Billie
• Susan Bernard as Linda
• Stuart Lancaster as the Old Man
• Paul Trinka as Kirk
• Dennis Busch as the Vegetable
• Ray Barlow as Tommy
• Mickey Foxx as the Gas Station Attendant
• John Furlong as the Narrator

Production

The screenplay is credited to Jack Moran from an original story by Russ Meyer. The first draft was titled The Leather Girls and was written over a brief four-day period by Moran, who also collaborated with Meyer on Common Law Cabin and Good Morning and... Goodbye!. The screenplay went through a second working title—The Mankillers—and had already begun production when the sound editor, Richard S. Brummer, came up with the now-immortal final title. Although neither Moran nor Meyer overtly cited any prior works as inspiration, the plot has been called a “loose remake of The Desperate Hours, or possibly The Virgin Spring" by one prominent film critic and a “pop-art setting of Aeschylus's Eumenides” by at least one classical scholar.

Faster, Pussycat! had a modest budget of about $45,000 and was shot in black and white in order to save money. The film began shooting at the Pussycat Club, a strip club in Van Nuys, before moving on to the California desert later that night. The film's early racing scene was shot on the dry salt flats of Lake Cunniback, and the scenes at the Old Man's house at Ollie Peche's Musical Wells Ranch outside the town of Mojave. During principal photography, the cast and crew stayed at the Adobe Motel in Johannesburg.

Meyer, who got his start making movies while serving in the US Army's 166th Signal Photographic Company during World War II, had a reputation for running strictly regimented film shoots with a small crew composed largely of former Army buddies. Actor Charles Napier, who appeared in five of Meyer's films, said that "Working with Russ Meyer was like being in the first wave landing in Normandy during World War II." Meyer considered the Faster, Pussycat! shoot no different, saying "It was the usual thing with me. It's like being in the military. Everybody has to get up and do their jobs to get things together, and that's it." Meyer's directorial style and the rules he imposed upon cast and crew caused clashes with his equally strong-willed star, Tura Satana. There was also friction between Susan Bernard and her director and co-stars, much of which they attributed to the presence of her mother on the set (necessitated by Bernard being a sixteen-year-old minor at the time). Bernard has said in interviews that she was truly scared of Satana, and some have thought that this contributed to her performance as a frightened kidnapping victim.

The film's title song, "Faster Pussycat!", was performed by California band the Bostweeds. The lyrics were written by Rick Jarrard and the music was written and sung by Lynn Ready who formed the Bostweeds and sang leads. The track was never released commercially, but it did appear in February 1966 as a promotional-only 45 single without a B-side.

Reception and influence

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! premiered in Los Angeles on 6 August 1965. Atypically for a Meyer film, it was a box office failure upon its initial release, and it was generally dismissed as an exploitative "skin flick" by the few critics who took any note of it at all. John L. Wasserman of the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reviewed a double bill of Faster, Pussycat! and Mudhoney in April 1966, saying that "Pussycat has the worst script ever written, and Mudhoney is the worst movie ever made."

In the years since, the movie has been regarded more favorably, gaining in both commercial and critical stature. As of April 2015 it holds a "fresh" rating on film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, with 73% (nineteen of twenty-six) critic reviews positive. In his review of the 1995 re-release of the film, Pullitzer Prize-winning critic and sometime Meyer collaborator Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars. Noted feminist and lesbian film critic B. Ruby Rich said that when she first saw Faster, Pussycat! in the 1970s she "was absolutely outraged that [she'd] been forced to watch this misogynist film that objectified women and that was really just short of soft-core porn." Upon viewing it again in the early 1990s, however, she "just loved it" and wrote a piece in the Village Voice reappraising the film and discussing her change in opinion. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is currently number 674 on the tenth edition of the often-referenced "1,000 Greatest Films" list and 377th on the Sight & Sound "Greatest Films Poll." It is frequently mentioned on lists of the best B movies and cult movies of all time.

The movie has also been influential on other filmmakers. Writer-director John Waters stated in his book Shock Value that "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future." He later said on its re-release that "it ages like fine wine." Music video director Keir McFarlane acknowledged that a scene in the video for the Janet Jackson song "You Want This" was a direct homage to Faster, Pussycat!, showing the Porsche-driving singer and her female companions driving circles around two men in the desert. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino referenced the movie and thanked Russ Meyer in the credits of his film Death Proof, and it was reported in Variety in 2008 that Tarantino was interested in remaking Faster, Pussycat!.

In popular culture

• American glam metal band Faster Pussycat took their name from the film.
• Audio samples from the movie are featured in four songs by metal band White Zombie on their third album, La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1. The dialogue "You're all shook up, aren't you, baby?" and "I never try anything, I just do it. Wanna try me?" are used in the song "Thunder Kiss '65." "You're all shook up, aren't you, baby?" is also used in the song "Cosmic Monsters, Inc." and the line "Now let's move, but let's take the back door" in the song "Welcome to Planet Motherfucker/Psychoholic Slag." Another line, "I work on this baby the same way, trying to get maximum performance," is used in "Black Sunshine."
• The title of Daniel Clowes's graphic novel Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is taken from a line in the movie describing Varla.
• The film's title song, "Faster Pussycat!" has been covered several times, most notably by American punk band the Cramps on their 1983 live mini-album Smell of Female.
• In the 2007 Quentin Tarantino movie Death Proof, the character Shanna is wearing a t-shirt featuring Tura Satana's character Varla with the words "BADASS CINEMA" underneath it. Russ Meyer is also one of the directors Tarantino thanks in the end credits.
• The film's over-the-top title has become iconic and is frequently referenced or played upon in other popular culture:
  • The 2008 song "Funplex" by The B-52's features the lyrics "Faster pussycat, thrill thrill," an allusion to the film's title.
  • In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Passion," Xander Harris encourages Buffy and the others to go after the vampire Angelus, saying "If Giles wants to go after the, uh, fiend that murdered his girlfriend, I say, 'Faster, pussycat, kill, kill.'"
  • An Itchy & Scratchy short entitled "Foster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" is shown in the Simpsons episode "Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily."
  • The title of the hit 2006 single Faster Kill Pussycat by Paul Oakenfold featuring Brittany Murphy is a play on the title of the film.
  • The film is referenced by protagonist Max Caulfield in the 2015 game Life Is Strange.

See also

• List of American films of 1965

External links

• Original trailer and video clips at Turner Classic Movies
• Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! at IMDb
• Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! at AllMovie
• Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Fansite