Ed’s Note: When Netflix first started its streaming service, it offered a wide range of movies from new releases through studio classics and weird foreign cult movies. They even had the rights to the Criterion collection. Since then, contracts have fallen to pieces, the Criterion Collection split off to be with Hulu and left Hulu to hook up with Turner Classic Movies to make FilmStruck. The number of old and new cult movies have fallen by the wayside. Netflix has decimated its classic movie collection in order to focus on premiering original films and television shows. As of this past weekend, they had fewer than 70 films made before 1970.
One of the lessons of the streaming decimation is that online channels are no replacement for a physical library and video stores. What may be available now, can be taken off at the end of the month. As such, we want to focus not only on television and the internet, but also on physical discs that present movies which may or may not be on a streaming service somewhere.
Russ Meyer was an exploitation auteur whose movies appeal and thrill across broad cross-sections of America. His movies specialized in tough-acting large breasted women making their way through the world, possessing a free-wheeling attitude toward sex and violence. Though many of his movies are exercises in campy excess, it’s perhaps his most straight-forward movie, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! that has become his most iconic.
A literal battle of the sexes, Faster, Pussycat! pits four of the toughest go-go dancers against the world. Led by Tura Satana, this gang of badasses race cars in the deserts, get into fights with men, kidnap women, seduce hot guys and scheme to steal money so they can break free of their exploitation. The women are in roles that would usually be reserved for men, possessing a cinematic moral corruption that breaks through the screen and lands right into your brain.
Opening with “Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to violence,” the dialogue of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is as electric as its title. Jack Moran and Russ Meyer wrote hard-boiled language that can cut the best noirs into soundbites. Varla sneers at one of her foils, “I never try anything; I just do it. And I don’t beat clocks, just people. Wanna try me?” Billie complains “You really should be AM and FM. You one-band broads are really a drag.” Faster, Pussycat can be chopped into soundbite after soundbite as the body count rises.
Much of the credit for Faster, Pussycat! should go to lead badass, Tura Satana. A martial arts badass who kicks as much ass as the men, Satana is a bombshell in both senses of the word. And that was her on screen and off. She tormented one of the co-stars because that co-stars mother started crap on set. Russ Meyer told people not to fuck with Tura Satana. And, her actual history is filled with devastating tragedy and triumph of sorts.
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is the one of two Russ Meyer movies available on blu ray (the other being Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Russ Meyer’s sole venture into studio filmmaking). It’s only available through Russ Meyer’s website, and should be possessed by any fan of badass cinema.