Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Cult Film | Director: Russ Meyer

Russ Meyer really liked boobs. His favourite Hollywood actress was Dolly Parton, he described 39DD-toting Anita Ekberg as “the most beautiful woman I ever photographed,” he had a penchant for casting women in their first trimester of pregnancy (gross), and his two favourite expressions were “gravity-defying” and “cantilevered.”

Meyer was the most famous exponent of the film subgenre known as “sexploitation.” Sexploitation had a very simple formula: a) boobs; b) campy dialogue; c) violence; d) boobs; and DD) boobs. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is Meyer’s most celebrated creation, an 83-minute slab of brutal, overblown, ridiculous male fantasy.

Following an afternoon of playfighting and driving fast cars, three thrill-seeking go-go dancers (their hierarchy clearly established by boob size) encounter an all-American car enthusiast and his scantily-clad girlfriend, Linda. After beating Ken in a race, Varla (Tura Satana), the trio’s aggressive leader, kills him with her bare hands. The dancers then take young Linda hostage and bring her to an isolated ranch. While they hunt for the lecherous rancher’s hidden fortune, the rancher tries to use his gargantuan, retarded son Vegetable to keep Linda at the ranch as a slave.

See what I mean?

Meyer’s obsession with “Amazonian” or “Junoesque” women tended to overshadow his actual work, and by his later films (when, ah, surgical techniques had improved) he was heavily criticised for turning women into mere “tit transportation devices.” Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is the only Meyer film that non-fans will recognise, partly because it has had an easier ride with the censors (there is no actual nudity, just light years of cleavage) and partly because it basically represents the Meyer ethos in excelsis – in particular, Varla is seen as the epitome of Meyer’s tastes in women (by most accounts, Satana basically played herself).

For the finest in campy dialogue (“you look to me like a gal with a big appetite for everything”), cars driving around in circles and hitting things, and mammarific warrior goddesses, look no further than this consummately trashy gem.
This article first appeared in Issue 6, 2013.
Posted 4:40pm Sunday 7th April 2013 by Kathleen Hanna.