When the iron curtain was crumbling in the late 1980′s I valued every single issue of a magazine about music that reached me. It bear the name Option and covered everything but mainstream music, including underground, world, industrial, experimental. I read about hundreds, sometimes thousands of bands in a single issue. One of them was called “Faster Pussycat”. As none of their recording reached me, and they seemed to be playing basic rock music, I dropped them out of my mind. At the time I didn’t know that the band got its name from Russ Meyer‘s movie: “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”. That was another cultural reference I was totally missing as Meyer’s name and movies were not known in Hungary or ate least in the circles I was moving. (At the same time I liked the pre-grunge band Mudhoney, not knowing that they also got their name from the title of a Meyer movie.)
After I learned about Meyer and his role in cinema history I still resisted watching his movies out of snobbery. Why should I care for sleazy exploitative flicks? But as the movies was on the 1001 film list I recently sat down and watched it. I was pleasantly surprised. Yes it had everything I was warned about in advance: women with big boobs, violence, fast cars and loud music. What I wasn’t prepared for how tame this 45 year old movie seemed compared to today’s standards. But what really got me was the camera angles and the editing. A lot of the techniques that Meyer developed became part of the visual cultures and can be seen in all sorts of movies and music videos.
One cannot avoid talking about female empowerment, when thinking about this movie. Tura Satana, the actress who played the lead role of Varla was wearing all black all the time, never smiled, started a good fight for fun whenever she wanted, her words often sounded vicious, rode her vehicle extra fast with enjoying the adrenalin rush, looked “cool” lighting a cigarette and treated man like dirt. Except for the reversed gender this sounds exactly like the prototypical image of the leader of a biker gang. Satana once said in an interview: “I took a lot of my anger that had been stored inside of me for many years and let it loose. I helped to create the character Varla and helped to make her someone that many women would love to be like.” And she did a great job at it, including using her own cloths as costume, creating and doing her own make up and using her martial art skills.
I don’t know how many women would like to be like Varla, but she surely managed to show us a mirror of the characteristics we endow dirty heroes with. Reading her bio I realize that one of the reason the image worked, because she was authentic. You have to value that as it such a rare condition nowadays when celebrities are just clones of each other. Watch this movie for Satana’s character and Meyer’s low and high angels along with his speedy intercuts.
IMDB’s summary: Three strippers seeking thrills encounter a young couple in the desert. After dispatching the boyfriend, they take the girl hostage and begin scheming on a crippled old man living with his two sons in the desert, reputedly hiding a tidy sum of cash. They become houseguests of the old man and try and seduce the sons in an attempt to locate the money, not realizing that the old man has a few sinister intentions of his own.
Trailer: