Angels of Death Special Edition VII: FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!

"Welcome to violence... wrapped up in the flesh of woman," a deep raspy voice grabs us right from the get-go, the soundwaves of his voice on the tape measured out for us in some macabre dance of manly depth. At the mention of the threat posed "even by dancers in a go-go club," the music explodes as we cut to three uninhibited dancers in the midst of enflaming male lust. The audience is puffy with hick-ness, drink and desire, the kind of mugs not even a mother could love, frenzied with cigars and darkness, shouting: 'Go baby go! Go! Go!" The girls wail and rock in their bikini ensembles (no stripping), the music builds, the shouts intensify --until it all explodes into sunshine with a maniacal laugh and the title credits come rolling up as the dance continues into a sunny race down the open American highway; the girls are out of that darkened cesspool, speeding forward into the wasteland (the open roadster-ready planes of the the Mojave Desert, where you can see a cop--or anyone else-- coming from ten miles away). Each woman is in her own little souped-up roadster, leap-frogging each other and blasting their way freer and freer. The theme by some garage outfit called the Bostweeds roars under them like a souped up engine: "Pussycat is living reckless / pussycat is riding high / if you think you can tame her / well, just you try!"

Already we're in love with these maniacal girls and their movie. We'd never dream of trying to tame any of them, or this film, all we can do is hang on. It's Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, a 1965 drive-in aimed by Russ Meyer, the brilliant chronicler of big-breasted, sexually voracious, tough-talking women burning through men with uninhibited carnality.

Before this big breakthrough, Meyer, 'nudie cuties' and southern-fried gothics (like Mudhoney, and Lorna), the kind of things made in pursuit of the long green accorded trash hits like Poor White Trash that had been playing the tail end of drive-ins for decades, and, also in 1965, Motor Psycho (a kind of The Searchers, but with bikers instead of Apaches). Pussycat was something else altogether-- there was no precedent for it, no antecedent. Cinema had never seen women like the three wild go-go dancing, off-road dragging thrill-seeking maniacs, nor would it, sadly, ever again --a few random female characters roaring through life aside.

The threesome are now the stuff of grindhouse legend: Varla (the terrifying Tura Satana), the tough butch sadistic leader, in the black Porsche, who shouts her lines in a haughty monotone; Rosie (Haji), her right hand underling/lover, who speaks in a low-key Chico Marx accent; and the wild card/joker, Billie (Lori Williams), the curvy fun-loving sexually carnivorous blonde who tags along with this duo for the wild kicks they provide. (Hell, we would too).  Wild stuff happens wherever they go. And besides, if Billie's antics get her into trouble with--say--go-go patrons stalking her, she can rely on Varla to beat the shit out of them.

There is never any mention of their being in any gang. They have no matching jackets or tattoos, not even weapons, aside from Varla's switchblade (Rosa carries it for her). There is no posing or growling or trying to act tougher than they are for these three girls - they're the real deal. We learn this pretty early on, when--and some might say he deserved it for hitting her when she was already letting him walk away--she breaks a young all-American boy Tommy's (Ray Barlow) entitled little neck.  For thrilled first time viewers we're suddenly in brand new territory. We have no idea what's going to happen, all we know is, any man who crosses them better watch out. And it's pretty easy to hide a body in the dead of the afternoon in a big empty like the Mojave.

Susan Bernard worries she might be hogging all the oxygen. 

THE DANGER IN EMPTINESS

Replete with tire markers for boundaries used for racing and timing trials, the Mojave is the kind of place that is usually deserted for miles and miles in all directions and, well, if you've never been way out alone in the middle of a desert before, then you know how eerie and ominous it gets, how long you can go without seeing another living soul, and yet how far you can see in all directions. It's an eerie feeling, how quickly the law and order of the country can be left far behind, and horrible crimes could occur right there in the open, for hours and hours, and no one would know, and even if you tried to escape, there's nowhere to hide. Even if you manage to get in your car and drive away, your pursuers have miles and miles in which to catch up and run you down. This sense of lawlessness brought on by isolation is something understood by Peckinpah (Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia), Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West), George Miller (Mad Max, the Road Warrior), and Wes Craven (The Hills Have Eyes), among others, but not everyone - you have to experience it to know about it. You have to feel the danger in the air to know that you can't cart your civilized obliviousness into the wilderness. Even if it's just to run some timing trials (or score drugs), you have to be ready to defend yourself, and you should never be dumb enough to let yourself be led to far away from your trailer or homestead, leaving your children and/or hot wife unprotected so a bunch of guys on bikes (or horses) can just ride up and run riot while you're off chasing a decoy. Unless you're going to track them all down  kill them yourself there's not a damned thing you can do about it all, except run feebly back towards your burning house.

"you don't have to believe it --just act it."

Into this wasteland, LA's own Mojave, came the hot rods. Teenagers were souping up dad's hand-me down Studebakers and drag racing out there. It's a distinctly American, distinctly mid-60s, pre-summer of love / post-big studio system phenomenon, when southern California car culture was all the rage (ala American Graffiti) and drive-ins the perfect place to see violence, sex, and speed and submarine races while getting it on in the back seat. Don't forget too that the mid-60s marked the time when the bikini--long a staple of French beaches--finally gained acceptance in the States. It was new-ish, so just having the word 'bikini' in your title, could guarantee box office interest. This was coupling up with teenager mobility and customized hot rods, as seen in AIP pics from the same era, like Velvet Vampire with its flashy yellow dune buggy, or climactic car chase scenes in Dr. Goldfoot, Bikini Beach, etc. It was also the dawn of the transistor radio, so not only would we now the voluptuous young bodies in all their splendor on the beaches, but they could bring their garage band radio stations and dance the frug or whatever and hula hoop until the sun went down. Old duffers like Buster Keaton scrambled for fishing-related excuses to get out there and discreetly ogle.

Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) - Bonehead dates a Mermaid

But over away from the relative safety of AIP's beach movies and The Horror of Party Beach, was the adults-only tail end drive-in entree. A nice-looking All-American boy, a "safety-first Clyde" and his groovy obedient chick come roaring up to where the girls are: 'the best measured strip of land around' for timing trials ("It felt fast.... real fast!"). Were headed for trouble from the moment Tommy gets out and stretches a little too patriarchally before them, as if to say, I'm the only man here so naturally I'll be in charge. His girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard) comes out when Varla notes of his bomb re: timing trials: "you could time that heap with an hourglass" ("did someone mention my figure," she says all cute. Then adds "shall I set up shop here, Tommy?" and already you can't wait to see him get roughed up). But soon squabbling and chicken runs will give way to something darker.

With each trip to the well, my cup to fill, I come away with no admiration for what may well be the Big Sleep of 60s drive-in exploitation - a favorite that makes me feel just a little cooler every time I watch it (and I feel pretty cool). Luminaries of the trash arts like John Waters (who first turned me onto it through his book Shock Value), and feminist film critics like B. Ruby Rich alike, recognize the film's genius and can convey it more cogently perhaps. I sometimes have trouble writing about my favorite films, as if afraid I'll somehow spoil them for myself. I can only agree from my dozens of viewings that, as Waters says, "it ages like fine wine."

Even now, mew elements are coming out in that bouquet. From the sound mixing to the framing, the gutsy brawling saxophone of club jazz combo score -- always somewhere between a tough TV cop show and a strip club, and editing, everything is surprisingly professional and opened up -- there's no canned audio dubs; there's nothing primitive in its execution. Sure they shout all their lines when outdoors, to make sure they're heard - but they never sound muffled and sloppy, like they would in, say, an Al Adamson movie, or all canned and overdubbed, like in a Doris Wishman and -oh! oh! What delicious lines! Jackie Moran's gonzo script roars by like a half-beatnik version of Ben Hecht and punch-drunk George Axelrod. You can feel and hear the air between the actors and the cars, the voices, that blowsy wailing saxophone giving everything a groovy edge. The acting may be flat, mostly (only Haji and Stuart Lancaster seem born for this weird style of dialogue, almost like Samuel Jackson was born for Tarantino's), but the dialogue is hilarious so it works perfectly anyway.

Speaking of Haji- I never really paid much attention to her until around the 12th viewing, being too enthralled by the statuesque curves of Lori Williams, and the evil of Tura Satana. But then, Marx Brothers fans like myself don't really appreciate Chico Marx, either --he's not as anarchic as Harpo or as intellectual as Groucho. But without him, it falls apart. His presence makes them 'the brothers', the way Haji makes it a girl gang even with just three people. Her Rosie defines what they are and aren't. She never seems too be hamming even with that weird accent. She sticks with Varla, but she's also very aware of the danger they're in, that this time her lover/leader may have gone too far. She's not as freaked out as Billie, but she's also clearly got some kind of moral conscience. And she makes the best use of any line she's thrown. While Tura and Lori both shout their lines like they're yelling over a lawn mower, Haji purrs, low, almost halfway to herself, comments like "his car's okay.... only the color needs changing.. ..like maybe yellow?" and my favorite line of all, when Linda offers them a soft drink. "Soft drink, she asks?" notes Rosie, incredulously, "we don't a-like nothing soft --Everything a-we touch is hard."

But while Rosie is to be fathomed for her middle child subtlety, Varla is one of the most amazing and badass characters in all of exploitation cinema, a force to be reckoned with. Tura Satana's a giant, beautiful in a weird almost alien way - half-Japanese yet towering, pale skin dark hair fierce eyes, flattish face, a sneer that seems to melt into the fourth dimension. We wouldn't see a smile that scary again until the alien smiles down a Harry Dean Stanton in the Nostromo docking bay. Yet Tura is never not all woman, even belting out hammy jujitsu moves or swinging her head around in a crazy kamikaze driving style - it's clear early on she'll go to any lengths to get her fierce kicks. We never learn why she's such a crazy bitch, but who cares? She doesn't seem to have got that way by suffering past male abuse, but just by being a true Woman, stripped of all phony decency.

Then there's Lori Williams' Rosie, who gets all the best lines and looks the sexiest in her white go-go buts and hip-hugging white shorts. Her lust after 'the Vegetable' the brain damaged body builder who the old man (Stuart Lancaster) uses like, as he puts it, "a piece of mutton", is truly hilarious ("I don't know what you're training for, but as far as I'm concerned, you're ready." What Williams lacks in subtlety she more than makes up for in giddy oomph. When she's getting drunk at lunch with Stuart Lancaster (as 'the Old Man') she sounds like she really is drinking (there ain't iced tea in that Cutty Sark bottle), noting it's "it's been known to be passin' out time." With Varla out back seducing Kirk to get the loot location and Varla jealously spying, and the Vegetable taking Stuart up to his room for a nap, it's time for Linda to make a dash for it, but this is still the desert, and walking anywhere on foot without a day-long head start, you just wont outrun a jeep, especially if driven by a pro like Varla.


For those who aren't familiar with it (and it can become hard to track down since the Meyer estate keeps the rights notoriously close to the vest) Pussycat is slightly easier to find than the rest of his films (aside from the studio-made Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) though they're sold on the Russ Meyer website, the DVDs aren't the best - they look like merely remastered from old tapes rather than source prints. So why someone like Arrow doesn't do a deal with them is a lingering mystery. I hear there's been a Blu-ray thing in the works for years now, but who knows why it's taking forever? (Apparently the original negatives are long lost and video masters are all that are left, which is too horrible to contemplate).

The film's been compared in more ways than one to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and indeed there's a kind of bent similarity but it's one with a feminist throttle all the way open, for the buzzing isn't Leatherface's chainsaw but Varla's wheels driving a car against 'the Vegetable' smashing him against the wall until he's a crinkled mess. They'll have to send him away "from a lot of things" and we imagine suddenly that Carmen Sternwood would be a great candidate for this gang, to take Billie's place, as would Claudia Jennings from Truck Stop Women (1974). Well, we can't have everything, unless we want to make a movie ourselves. I'm not trying to put any ideas into anyone's heads, but it seems to me a badass girl gang crashing a lot of different genres would be just the thing. A lot of folks have tried and they end up being the usual overwrought nonsense with one too many well-scrubbed thugs locking girls in trunks, strippers with sun-damaged silicone lugging bags of cash in and out of hotel lobbies, sunglassed douchebags smirking into rearview mirrors, abusive backstory, flashy meaningless over-editing, in other words missing the whole point. The only film of late I can see even coming close is the 2010 low budget Aussie pic, El Monstro Del Mar (which is kind of like the Faster Pussycats vs. the Sea Monster).

BEFORE AND AFTER (THE MEYER CANON):

Faster is so good it's natural to want to explore more Meyer films. Alas, while the quality of the filmmaking is always superb, the films aren't restored, leading to blurry colors (which is why hiw black-and-white films hold up better). But even taking that into account there's no film quite as perfect as Pussycat in the Meyer canon. After this, he moves to color and off-road mayhem gradually mixes down to roaring soapy bedroom farce. His earlier backwoods lustful Erskine on the Half-shell insanity tempered down into historical epics (Blacksnake) and generally insane softcore farmer's daughter style rutting (Up!, Beneath the Valley of the UltraVixens)

These days I have a whole new appreciation for Haji's Rosie, The co-star of Motor Psycho, her gorgeous breasts ever hanging out of a torn blouse as she bounces around in Rocco's truck through the desert on their quest for vengeance. 

Even his vehicular homicide film from the same year (1965) wasn't in the same league as Faster - by keeping the bad guys men, it becomes a 'roughie,' part the short rape/revenge trend in mid-60s exploitation. Now it's notable mainly for a chance to see Haji in a more prominent role, as an aid to bereaved vengeance seeking vet played by Alex Rocco (!). After the gang harass and/or kill enough gorgeous ladies, found lolling around in revealing outfits, Haji and veterinarian and Alex Rocco drive off to take revenge.  The Mulveyan male sadistic gaze meanwhile must watch in horror as the bikers act on our eye's desires (the girls are very shapely), almost like they're our own monster of the Id (from Forbidden Planet). Very Clockwork Orange in that respect - as all our libidinal leering comes back to haunt us. We'd never get quite that uncomfortable in that way today, when Hollywood films sexual assaults in such a way as to leave us feeling personally violated, traumatized, but never uncomfortably complicit through our own ogling desires. Either way, it's the polar opposite effect of Pussycat. Sigh, I wish there was a whole Pussycat series.

we may not approve of their methods- Motor Psycho

But no.. Drive-ins no longer wanted black-and-white, so- Meyer moved into color and relaxing censorship let him drift ever closer into hardcore. One of his other films of his I do have, SuperVixens (1975) has scenes like the one with mail order bride Uschi Digard running around the farm naked but for feathers in her hair and waving ears of Indian corn outstretched as if auditioning for some X-rated margarine box cover, while Stuart Lancaster naked but for a chicken over his groin runs in an intersecting direction - breaking up a montage of them screwing in all sorts of farm locations. It's funny and strange but shows Meyer's confusion with loosening censorship via both sex and violence. Everywhere our hapless hero goes 'Super'-sized glamazons throw themselves at him and he seldom wants to reciprocate, either trying to fight them off and arousing the ire of their kinky boyfriends (who like to watch, like John LaZar) or angering the farmer or hotelier into chasing him with a shotgun. Violence explodes from the wild cartoon fury of nymphomaniacal Super Lorna (who takes an axe to his man's car in a jealous rage and then is later killed in the bathtub by Charles Napier after she taunts him for not getting it up). This becomes the norm for Meyer, killing of women an extension of sexual frenzy wherein everyone loses/ And even in Meyer's big budget Beneath the Valley of the Dolls two women get a pistol shoved in their mouths for being lesbians.

Uschi Digard in SUPER VIXENS - the Mail order Milk Maid Fantasy cranked to cartoonish extremes
enough to make Jayne Mansfield blush; (but we see the problem with color film vs.
black and white as far as preservation - it's all muddy, especially without the negatives to strike a restored
print from for  a good DVD or Blu-ray

Our hero is very rude not to indulge the weird come-ons of Super Cherry while her boyfriend
(John Lazar) watches excitedly from the driver's seat.

It's violence but the wrong kind, not the badass liberated gangland karate of Varla, but a kind of extension of pent up sexual madness -- it's not 'constructive' as a machination for kicks as is the violence is in Faster Pussycat. We don't 'feel' the violence in Pussycat or Linda's frustrated terror at the macabre luncheon ("she's a sick girl, pops"), or Tommy's humiliation after the race around the track. We're meant to view this pair of clean-cut normies with a kind of savage's eye; their small world has been enlarged, their sense of middle class entitlement blown clear and loose, by this experience. We wouldn't be in a similar position until Alberto Di Iglesia's Perdita Durango (Aka Dance with the Devil), a film a highly recommend


TOO FAST FOR SEX

One of the unusual aspects too of  Faster -- there is no sex in it whatsoever, yet there's implied lesbian pair bonding and -- in the house of the three men, some implied (but never seen) rape/murders done in the past by the Vegetable with the Old Man as instigator/spectator (revenge for a past slight done - when he crippled himself rescuing a girl off the tracks, who didn't even stop to see if he was all right). According to interview, Haji didn't even know she was playing a lesbian until the shoot was almost over, but that's okay- this is 1965, after all, that they don't wear it on their sleeve is quite realistic for its time. We wouldn't really notice if not for Billie's pronouncement that 'I can turn myself on a dozen different ways while you only got one channel, and your channel is busy tuning in outside," adding "you really should be AM and FM... you one channel chicks are a drag."  And when Varla tells Billie, "Rosie and I are going to take a walk..." and somehow we imagine there might have been a softcore lesbian moment if this was 1969 instead of 65, or if Meyer had time, and the girls were down. But who cares in the end? There's no time for such stillness in this fast-moving film. After all it occurs in a barely a half a day; it starts in the morning and is over shortly after lunch.

It all moves too fast to find out just where and what goes on between them, there's no time for sex, even implied in this film -- the few times (straight) sex is tried it's interrupted either by either a train (which throws the Vegetable off his rhythm) or a scream from Linda (which interrupts Varla and Kirk), and at the end, a rape the Vegetable is too upset to perform despite his lecherous old man's shouts.

This lack of sex marks a key turning point for the Meyer canon. From henceforth, sex will become Meyer's obsession. Feminism and amok 'super'-sizing will all be in service of sexual fulfillment which never seems to come.  The cars will still zip by, but our heroes will be settled in cabins ant tract homes, at least until their horny broad burns it down in a fit of horny pique, or he comes home to find her making it with the milkman, unless that sort of thing turns him on.

"You girls nudists, or just short of clothes?"

As for the rapey duo of Vegetable and old ma, we never really get the details of one ominous pronouncement that they have "all the land to hide those pretty ribbons in when we're done with 'em" but we wonder how the good brother, who doesn't seem to have any kind of a job except nursemaid to the pair of them, can stand back and let these kind of atrocities go on. It's fine that the script doesn't bother explaining that: it's too busy tossing out one great line after the other.

It's also perfect to drink to, as there's copious opportunities and justifications, such as when the old man grabs the Scotch bottle out of the grocery box Kirk is bringing in from the store. "It's a little early for that, old man!" notes Kirk. "The train is late!," Stu snaps. "Nothing's on schedule today!" When I watched this over and over in a drunken euphoric bender haze on a 6-hour tape with Mesa of the Lost Women, Cat People of the Moon, and Spider Baby. Can you imagine how perfect?

Linda realizes her 'rescuer' is taking
her back to where she just escaped from

In the end it doesn't matter what the old man instigated or not SPOILER ALRT -- he will be dead before nightfall, his wheelchair overturned, his long greenbacks fluttering in the wind. Something else is gone forever, too. Movies will never feature this much crazy thrills packed into Hawksian 'enhanced' real time again. There'll never be a character as unhinged and gleefully butch mercenary as Varla, not in the Meyer canon, not anywhere.  This is the steep price of civilization. Nowadays producers would be too worried about arousing feminist / lesbian film scholar ire, actresses too worried about their image. When there are badass females, they 'got that way' because of child abuse or some other male thing. They're not just wild... untamed... violence in the form of woman.

Welcome to violence, the word and the deed, that narrator said back at the start (and is never heard again). But the stay is short, like a delicious lap dance to a short song, the film ends much too quickly, leaving us with the only two 'other' boring characters in the film: Linda and the 'good' brother (Paul Trinka), who buys lots of big hardcover books over mail order -"and they're ain't a picture in one of them." But irregardless, the others are all dead now (or 'destroyed' in the biceps) and it's not even dark yet. The film is over so fast we need, want to keep the electric thrill of it going with another film. But what comes close, if, as I said above, the Meyer films tend to drift off into rape and bedroom farce rather than badass bitches tearing up the swinging' miles.

That's the saddest part of Faster, the realization there's almost nothing else like it, anywhere. And there should be. It's a damned conspiracy. Women are becoming more equal, but for my money that's missing the point. Equal to what? The point is of no return, we're reaching it.

---


FURTHER EXPLORING

Actually -For some Meyeresque thrills, make sure to get the DVD set of Honey West starring Ann Francis. Lori Williams has a poolside cameo in the first episode (left)! Francis plays detective Honey as a capable swinger, both Emma Peele and John Steed rolled into one -- her handsome boy Friday may do the heavy stunts, but she's the lead and never lets him forget it (and there's no romance of male dominance - she calls all the shots). Each episode is only a half hour, so no time for the filler that sometimes eats up the first half hour of Charlie's Angels episodes. And of course:  Julie Newmar as Catwoman

SEE ALSO:

In Praise of Red Queens

ANGELS OF DEATH - I

ANGELS OF DEATH - II: Great Women of Horror

ANGELD OF DEATH III: Badass Brunette Edition

ANGELS OF DEATH IV: Lynn Lowry Special Edition 

ANGELS OF DEATH V: Magic Slut Split/Subject Maenad Edition

America of Ghosts: Why Lana del Rey is the New Val Lewton

Hot German Blondes Rule Space: STAR MAIDENS, ELEOMA

Square in the Maenads: 68 KILL (2017)

Bolling Straight: TRIANGLE, BONNIE'S KIDS

NADJA, A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, THE ADDICTION

Head Under Heels: GIRLY (1970)

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, Summer's Isle: THE WICKER MAN (2006)

Ballin' the Jacks: TRUCK STOP WOMEN (1974)

Up from the Meyer: EL MONSTRO DEL MAR (2010)

And Trash Classics I love:

MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)

CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)

DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS (1954)

DEMENTIA (1955)

SPIDER BABY (1964)

SPECIES (1997)