#50 — Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965)
According to Russ Meyer, the conception of the film was simplicity itself: “I had men kicking the shit out of women, so I thought, ‘Why don’t we do one where the women kick the shit out of the men?'” The seasoned exploitation director tossed the idea to crack screenwriter Jack Moran, who responded with a script he dubbed The Leather Girls. By the time Meyer was done with it, he had cooked up a snappier title, one that signaled the finished work had every element a good film needs: speed, sex and violence. Onto an unsuspecting public, Meyer unleashed Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

The film opens with sketchy jazz music and narration that announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence.” Eventually the screen is filled with arty, low-angle shots of go-go dancers gyrating with such amazing kinetic undulations that it seems they’ve been set into motion by those imposing devices used to shake paint cans into colorfast submission at the hardware store. These, of course, are our heroines: Varla, Rosie and Billie, played by Tura Santana, Haji and Lori Williams, respectively. In short order, it’s established that these comely, scintillating lasses favor hots rods kicking up dust in the desert, brawling behavior, copious amounts of liquor and language sharp enough to make Sam Spade himself clutch his hat and sheepishly shuffle his feet. “I’m of legal age for whiskey, voting and loving,” Billie announces. “Now the next election is two years away, and my love life ain’t getting much better, so how about some of that one-hundred-percent?”

Meyer makes sure the picture fires at one-hundred percent or more all the way through. It has a leering exuberance that’s downright irresistible, roaring past the blatant button-pushing of exploitation fare to become a celebratory hellfire hootenanny that plays like a ratification of the long-time promise of movies to deliver a little excitement to counter the dreary and dull outside the theater doors. Leaving people aghast at its violence and ribaldry at the time (of course, it looks tame now), it is the seismic id of cinema springing forth to frug atop social good graces. Over and over, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is like a dare to the senses, challenging the viewer with its unabashed hedonism. It’s not walking a tightrope. Instead, it’s taken the tightrope and fashioned it into a bullwhip that it keeps snapping against its curvy thigh. By the time the tawdry trio are terrorizing a virulent old man (with a hunky, dimwitted son who goes by the name of Vegetable, played by beefcake slab Dennis Busch) in hopes of stripping him of a hefty stash of cash, the movie has taken on a grand, sweaty fervor that can only inspire amazement.

In a weird way, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a wildly entertaining piece of protofeminism, letting Meyer gawk at his woman and elevate them too. The instigating notion, after all, was to put women in control, to cast them in the role previously reserved for men in Meyer’s earlier efforts. It becomes an odd corrective for the victimization of women that Meyer had previously perpetrated (and would again), an act of brass knuckle turnabout that is the sort of thing that Quentin Tarantino thinks he’s making as he types out the fantasies he deglazes out of the corners of his grindhouse-roasted cranium. Tarantino’s a frothing imitator, though. Meyer was the real deal. Maybe Meyer wasn’t the only filmmaker who could make a movie like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but surely no one else could have made it sing like this.