Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Faster Pussycat's parade of quotable one-liners was the work of scenarist Jack Moran. As a child star in the 1930s, Jackie Moran had appeared as Huckleberry Finn in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) and as Buster Crabbe's juvenile amanuensis in Buck Rogers (1939). Working for Writer's Guild minimum and a bottle of booze, Moran turned out a script titled The Leather Girls in four days. When Eve Meyer read Jack Moran's script, she was reluctant to produce the film. The film's opening go-go sequence was lensed at The Pussycat Club, on Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys, California, with Meyer's crew playing the popeyed patrons. The film's desert sequences were shot in the Mojave Desert, around the towns of Randsburgh and Johannesburg. The dry lake scenes were shot on the lunar surface of Lake Cunniback. Tura Satana did not get along with Susan Bernard and exploited the tension between them to get Bernard to emote onscreen. A predilection for health foods gave Trinka halitosis, which complicated love scenes with Tura Satana. The sound effect of Varla breaking Tommy's back was achieved by cracking a walnut. Although Meyer had commanded his actors to abstain from sex during filming, star Tura Satana refused and began an on-set affair with assistant cameraman Gil Haimson. Stuart Lancaster, who plays the old man in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, recalled the making of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!: "We all got to be friends and the atmosphere was very relaxed. I mean, we worked hard. Especially with Russ; he could be demanding. But I could always talk to the cameraman and I learned a lot about the technical aspects of acting in front of a camera. The actors would help the crew out a lot of times, which I enjoyed. Once, I had to slate myself. I'd hold up the slate and go "Scene 74, take 5...clap," throw the slate away and start acting." On Tura Sutana, Lancaster remembered that she "was very nice. She took us all out to a Japanese restaurant and she did all the ordering." Lancaster also commented on working with Dennis Busch who played "Vegetable": "He was a good commercial artist and a real body builder. He took his weights out on the set and would work out after shooting. One day we were sitting around and he was curling some weights and he looked at his muscles and said 'I'm getting too big.' And I thought, 'Well, why don't you stop lifting weights then?' I also directed him in a one act play later called 'Hope is a Thing With Feathers,' about a group of bums trying to catch ducks." In a past Psychotronic Magazine interview, Tara Satana revealed that "I still have my basic outfit. I have the blouse and the jeans, but I don't have the boots anymore, they went the way of the world. Russ still has Stuart Lancaster's wheelchair. He went back and got it. He found it on a junkpile." Satana also admitted that the only cast member she had a problem with was Sue Bernard. "Susan didn't get along with us. She had her mother with her, who was one of those types of women, 'Don't come near my daughter, you're liable to give her something.' The only way I could get anything out of her acting-wise was to literally make her hate me. I had to get very physical and brutal, pulling teeth to get a reaction. But it seems like any of the good stuff she did in that film was when I was getting nasty with her. The rest of the time, all she did was cry." Sources: www.brightlightsfilm.com/16/ AFI Cult Movies 3 by Danny Peary picpal.com/tarart.html Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Films by Jimmy McDonough Russ Meyer-The Life and Films by David K. Frasier The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film www.5minutesonline.com rogerebert.suntimes.com www.austinchronicle.com www.popcultmag.com www.time.com Stuart Lancaster interview by John Donnelly in Psychotronic Magazine Psychotronic Magazine interview with Tura Satana by Marc Isted Compiled by Richard Harland Smith & Jeff Stafford

"Ladies and Gentleman, welcome to violence... the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled, yet violence doesn't only destroy. It creates and molds as well. Let's examine closely then this dangerously evil creation, this new breed, encased and contained within the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakable smell of woman, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don't drop your guard. This flirtatious new breed travels alone and in packs Operating at any level, at any time, anywhere and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor's receptionist, or a dancer in a go-go club!" Narrator "Go ahead, sponge, soak it up. I'm'a gonna love squeezin' you out." Rosie "She wears the pants all right... but somehow she always strips her gears." Billie "All right, you washed... now I'm'a gonna spin-a-dry you!" Rosie "I'm sorry, I seem to be using up all the oxygen." Linda "You're the All-American Boy, a safety-first Clyde." Varla "I'm of legal age for whiskey, voting and loving. 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!" Billie "Right fender, Einstein." Varla "What's your point?" Tommy "It's of no return, and you've reached it!" Varla "You don't have to believe it, honey...just act it." Varla "Oh, you're cute...like a velvet glove cast in iron." Billie "Just passing through, huh? Boy, that motor's sure hot! You gals really must have been moving on these little machines. Yessir, the thrill of the open road. New places, new people, new sights of interest. Now that's what I believe in, seeing America first!" Gas Station Attendant "You won't see much of it lookin' there, Columbus!" Varla "You girls a bunch of nudists or are you just, uh, short of clothes?" The Old Man "It's a ba-ba-bad thing." Vegetable "You gotta straighten your tie, Sampson, or Papa will spank you." Billie "One more slider, flake, and it's wipe-out." Varla "Sound your warning, send your message, huff and puff and belch your smoke and kill and maim and run off unpunished." The Old Man "Ghosts...fifty ton o' high-ballin' ghosts...and running late as usual." The Old Man "He's my seedlin', I can't deny that. But he ain't no son to me. He's a, a piece of mutton, a blob of flesh. He's no use to no one." The Old Man "I'm not for talkin' anymore, I'm for eatin.'" The Old Man "I like men with big appetites... only I could never find one to match mine." Varla "She lies... she killed... she killed with her bare hands, she did... she did... she did..." Linda "I can turn myself on a dozen different ways. But you, you've only got one channel and your channel's busy tuning in outside. You really should be AM and FM. You one band broads are a drag." Billie "You know, Tiny Tim, when I've had enough of this stuff, it's been known to be passing out time. And it's just about passing out time." Billie "You're a beautiful animal. And I'm weak. And I want you." Kirk "Don't talk it, do it... just do it." Varla "Go on boy, get 'er... get 'er good!" The Old Man "I've made some funny scenes before, but this cops it." Varla "Wait a minute, hero. I don't care if you want to walk yourself into a sweat in the desert but what about the frail? C'mon, use your noodle." Varla "In hell you'll see me...and we're both better than even money to make it." The Old Man "Drive... and don't miss." Varla "She weren't a bad little blossom, and full of life." The Old Man "Don't sweat it. Just get the knife and follow my dust." Varla "Your old man's been blasted out of his wheels. And your king-sized brother's been twisted like a pretzel. You're all that's left lover, and you ain't gonna be around for long." Varla Compiled by Richard Harland Smith & Jeff Stafford

"The Rolls Royce of trash epics... addictive and possibly mentally warping." Brandon Judell, Planet Out "If this is female empowerment, watch out!" B. Ruby Rich, The Village Voice "Dizzy pulp fiction to be sure, but filmed with a zest, a dynamism, a panache that Meyer has never quite fully recaptured. Tura Satana almost earns the right to be considered an equal auteur of this film, which is dominated by her sheer force of personality." Tim Lucas, Video Watchdog "A cornerstone of both camp and punk cultures... Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! shows the thrillingly lethal consequences when aggravated go-go dancers get bored... Meyer's subtle detailing of these relationships makes Faster, Pussycat look like a William Inge play, with a warped quasi-family slowly destroying each other. Of course, the director doesn't neglect the cheesecake; he includes consciously gratuitous shots of the girls showering, strapping on their bras, and so on. Yet there is surprisingly little real (well, simulated real) sex... Meyer exploits the goings-on more for their dramatic and violent possibilities... a masterpiece." Gary Morris, Bright Lights Film Journal "Russ Meyer is the Eistenstein of sex films. He is single-handedly responsible for more hard-ons in movie audiences than any other director... Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ's tenth film) is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future." John Waters, Shock Value "Say what you will about the film's bad acting, bad dialogue, and bad theme song, but the scenes of violence are quite startling... like violent scenes in Sam Fuller and early Don Siegel films. All the action sequences have pizzazz and it's noteworthy that women are involved." Danny Peary, Cult Movies 3 "Take away all the jokes, the elaborate camera angles, the violence, the action and the sex, and what remains is the quintessential Russ Meyer image: a towering woman with enormous breasts, who dominates all the men around her, demands sexual satisfaction and casts off men in the same way that, in mainstream sexual fantasies, men cast aside women... What attracts audiences is not sex and not really violence, either, but a Pop Art fantasy image of powerful women, filmed with high energy and exaggerated in a way that seems bizarre and unnatural, until you realize Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal play more or less the same characters. Without the bras, of course." Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times "This 1966 movie is like some Sixties Strom Thurmond nightmare about emancipated women run amok." Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle "A Warhollian daydream." Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly "A blast from start to finish." Rob Hughes, Uncut "Has a cult following that I'm hard-pressed to grasp." Ken Hanke, Mountain Xpress "... everyone interested in exploitation films should not only see this film, but commit it to memory." Ian Jane, DVD Maniacs "No movie could live up to the hilarious title of Russ Meyer's legendary 1965 sexploitation romp, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, not even the film itself. The movie, which John Waters has proclaimed his all-time favorite, is a rambunctiously amusing period piece, which flaunts a fetish for large-breasted women and, indeed, for any image that could be deemed cheap and vulgar by genteel mid-60's standards. Although crudely acted, with laughably inept action sequences and a story that makes little sense, it has the feverish pulse of a classic B movie, boldly angular cinematography and a blaringly cheesy jazz soundtrack. In its humorous celebration of a buxom dominatrix as the ultimate icon of female desirability, it is also a movie with an erotic vision in tune with contemporary interest in so-called mean sex." Stephen Holden, The New York Times "In truth, Pussycat is so ridiculously bad, one can only wonder what his other, lesser pictures are like. We're talking Ed Wood territory here... the shoestring production values are so weak, the story is so lame and the acting is so bad that there's no mistaking this "Pussycat" for anything but what it is - a turkey." Chris Hicks, Deseret News "It's a thinking man's raunch from the good ol' days. Though barely PG, it still packs a wallop with its totally amoral thrills, pneumatic cuties in search of kicks and hilariously scurvy portrait of the underbelly of American outback society... A true masterpiece!" Steven Puchalski, Slimetime "... outrageous, ahead-of-its-time... a funny, non-stop barrage of sex and violence... and the best dialogue you've heard in years." Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film "Every inch of the film entertains, from the wild desert drag racing sequences to the sexually charged fried chicken lunch that the characters stop fighting each other long enough to share. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has a deliciously ruthless rhythm that few films of such modest aspirations ever achieve-- it could very well be the most finely crafted exploitation film ever made." Fred Beldin, All Movie Guide "So, besides the obvious big breasted Amazonian women, what can you actually expect from Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill!? Quite a lot, actually; inventive camera angles, sharp editing, crisp black and white cinematography, a cool soundtrack (The Cramps have covered The Bostwood's title theme, for instance) and a knowing sense of its own inherent absurdities and contradictions, not least as far as the co-mingling of male fantasies and fears around the female are concerned. So, in the end, it's not just all about big tits..." Michel Gentil, Edinburgh University Film Society "This is the quintessential psychotronic film and Russ Meyer's best. It should have been locked into the Voyager space probe and launched into space to give extraterrestrial life an example of what 'kickin' ass' is all about." Kurt Ramschissel, Film Threat Compiled by Richard Harland Smith

It's the all-time favorite movie of cult director and trash aficionado John Waters, which speaks volumes already. And among devotees of the genre - a rather singular hybrid of action movie, black comedy and soft-core titillation - Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) is often considered the masterwork of exploitation maestro Russ Meyer, whose other films include the unforgettable Supervixens (1975) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). "Welcome to violence," begins the sinister narration that warns of a new breed of killer female: on the outside soft, seductive and amply endowed (the Meyer hallmark) but vicious, amoral and merciless at heart. The film follows the adventures of three such women, go-go girls gone wild led by the fierce Varla. Accompanying this black-clad pan-racial beauty with lethal karate skills are her occasional lover Rosie and the action craving Billie, rampaging across a desert terrain in pursuit of thrills. Along the way they indulge in drag racing, men-stomping, kidnapping, sexual escapades (in a number of permutations) and initiate a scheme to wrest a fortune from a reclusive old man and his two sons. Meyer said that he preferred aggressive females - superwomen - and he certainly gives full reign to his preference here. There may have been deadly femmes fatales in the film noir genre, but audiences hadn't seen such brutally violent women on screen before Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. While the previous decade reflected the American male's breast fixation in the form of Monroe, Mansfield and similarly stacked blondes, Meyer took that part of the anatomy to new heights. Eventually, his film compositions would be literally filled with the "talents" of such stars as Kitten Natividad (who also appeared in a 2005 hardcore knockoff of Faster, Pussycat directed by adult-movie actress Elizabeth Starr). A former World War II newsreel cameraman and one of the first and most prolific photographers for Playboy magazine, Meyer broke through censorship barriers with his debut film The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), about a man who could see through women's clothing. By keeping nudity at arm's length with this plot device, Meyer was able to circumvent objections and get his film booked into theaters, earning back its miniscule cost 40 times over. When others started imitating his winning formula, he began to up the ante with soft-core sex scenes and violence. After the success of Motor Psycho (1965), Meyer's tale of three bikers on a rampage across the southwest, his wife Eve convinced him to make a female version. The script was entrusted to Jack Moran, a former child actor who had reportedly appeared in Gone with the Wind (1939) and some "Buck Rogers" serials. A diehard alcoholic fallen on rough times, he met Meyer through one of the director's World War II buddies Moran encountered during an overnight jail stay. Meyer hired him first to work on the threadbare script of Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962), but it was with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! that Moran got to sharpen his style of hard-edged, sardonic one-liners. Meyer claimed that to keep the ever-present booze from sidetracking his writer, he would lock him in a room with a typewriter and bolt the door, promising to let him have his liquor back after a good night's work. With no other alternative, Moran quickly delivered the screenplay for what was first known as "The Leather Girls." At first Meyer's wife didn't like the script and had to be coaxed into financing it before Meyer could pull together a cast from Playboy centerfolds (including the magazine's first Jewish model, Susan Bernard, in the role of the annoyingly naive heroine, Linda) and Los Angeles-based exotic dancers. Foremost among these was Tura Satana, a real-life martial arts expert who intimidated several of her co-stars. She encountered no difficulty working on her own terms, even blatantly violating Meyer's rule against cast and crew members having sexual relations during production. Satana has the distinction of being the only cast member who got some residual rights beyond a salary for her work on Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (she receives a percentage of the foreign distribution profits). She also owns the rights to her own likeness and Meyer always had to deal with her directly for any re-release of the picture or new version of posters and other visual materials. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was shot on a miniscule budget in the grueling heat on the edge of the Mojave desert. It was not a hit on its initial release. But it was given new life by John Waters' rave in his 1981 book Shock Value, in which he called Russ Meyer "the Eisenstein of sex films" and noted the film's "top-notch production values, split-second editing, low-angle shots leering up at almost deformed, big-busted, domineering sex-starved heroines, and plot lines so ludicrous that all you can do is laugh along with the director." Waters also revived interest in Satana, tracking her down at work in a medical office and interviewing her about her role in the film. Meyer subsequently re-released the film to great success, and it still plays regularly on the campus and repertory circuits. Even mainstream critics and film writers such as Danny Peary who generally dismissed the director's work had to admit that Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was unique and surprisingly inventive, particularly in the startling, female-centered action sequences. The movie has also made an impact on pop culture. The driving theme song written and performed by The Bostweeds (actually two B-movie and stock music composers in their 60s named Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter) was later recorded by the "psychobilly" band The Cramps. Faster Pussycat is also the name of a late 80s Los Angeles metal band, and visual references to the movie turned up in a version of a music video of The Killers 2005 hit "All These Things That I've Done." An episode of "The Itchy and Scratchy Show," the cartoon series within The Simpsons animated TV series, was entitled "Foster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!", and in the Canadian pseudo-rockumentary Hard Core Logo (1996), a punk musician suggests the band name "Faster, Leonard Cohen, Die! Die!" But perhaps the greatest tribute to the film comes from its biggest fan, John Waters, and his star Divine, whose characters often display traits associated with the wild girls of the Meyer film, especially Dawn Davenport, the character driven by her urge for sex, fame, fortune and violence in Waters' Female Trouble (1974). Director: Russ Meyer Producers: Eve Meyer, Russ Meyer Screenplay: Russ Meyer, Jack Moran Cinematography: Walter Schenk Editing: Russ Meyer Original Music: Paul Sawtell, Bert Shefter Cast: Tura Satana (Varla), Lori Williams (Billie), Haji (Rosie), Susan Bernard (Linda), Stuart Lancaster (The Old Man), Paul Trinka (Kirk). BW-83m. by Rob Nixon

Russ Meyer, the filmmaker whom many historians credit for creating the soft-porn industry with such self-descriptive titles as The Immoral Mr. Teas, Vixen, and of course, the cult classic of the genre, Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill, died on September 18 in his Hollywood Hills of complications from pneumonia. He was 82. Born Russell Albion Meyer on March 21, 2004 in Oakland, California, his father was a policeman and mother a nurse. It was the latter that lent young Rusty the money to purchase an 8-millimeter Univex picture-taking machine when he was 12. Quickly he was making films around the neighborhood and won his first prize by the time he was 15. When World War II came around, he was sent to Europe as a newsreel cameraman. After the war, he became a professional photographer, working on studio sets, producing stills on such films as Guys and Dolls and Giant. He eventually found himself doing glamour shots of beautiful models, and would then find fame as one of Hugh Hefner's chief photographers for Playboy magazine. Sensing that the same audience who was receptive to Playboy would also be receptive to a "nudie" flick, Meyer made his film debut with The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959). Shot as a silent on a miniscule budget of only $24,000, the financial windfall of this soft-core sex film astounded the movie industry, garnering over $1 million. The key to Meyer's success was to walk the fine line between sexual baiting and obscenity. The plot - a man subjected to a powerful anesthetic discovers that he can see through the clothes of every woman who walks by him - was titillating without being too graphic (there is never any physical contact between the players), and Meyer cleverly worked himself around the local film censors while still appealing to his mostly male audience. Meyer kept the streak coming with such films as Erotica (1961), Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962), and Europe in the Raw (1963), but these were still soft core teasers that concentrated more on voyeurism, than anything more intimate. That changed with the release of the notorious Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill (1965), where there was a healthy dose of foreplay, leather, blood, carnage, and big-breasted gals for the filmgoers. He kept the fever pitch up with the equally raunchy Motor Psycho (1965), and Mondo Topless (1966). Although his films were relegated to drive-ins, arthouses and adult theaters, many of these viewers came back for more screenings, and Meyer was seeing a healthy profit being turned on his productions. The film that would eventually break him out of the underground was Vixen (1968). The title character was essentially a nymphomaniac who would sleep with anybody - including her own brother! The film had purists in a lather, which is just what Meyer - ever the self-promotor - wanted. The film was an astounding hit. The entire production cost merely $76,000 dollars, yet earned over $6 million. 20th Century Fox, in deep financial trouble, wanted to cash in on the sudden rash of X-rated films and signed Meyer to direct his first big-studio picture. The film, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), an in-name only sequel to Valley of the Dolls (1967), was a smash. The screenplay, written by film critic Roger Ebert, dealt with the lives of three young ladies who were determined to make it as a rock band at any cost! It was well-received as a fairly sharp parody of its predecessor and holding more than its share of campy laughs. His next film, the "serious", The Seven Minutes (1971), based on the best-selling novel by Irving Wallace about a pornography trial, was a critical and commercial flop, and it quickly ended his career in big-budget pictures. By the mid-'70s, Meyer returned to the skin game with such titles as Supervixens (1975), Up! (1976), and his final film Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). With the advent of hard-core pornography (Meyer's films were teasing but never explicit) and the demise of drive-ins, Meyer found himself out of fashion in the adult film industry. By the '80s, he was something of a recluse, although he continued to make money with the success of his films on VHS, and eventually DVD. Toward the end of his life, Meyer saw much appreciation for his work on numerous levels: he was offered a cameo role as a video camera salesman in John Landis' (a longtime fan of Meyer) Amazon Women on the Moon (1987); respect from mainstream film critics, various film festivals honoring his work; teachings on his films offered in modern culture courses at such respectable modern institutions as Yale and Harvard; and the open sincerity of noted directors like Landis and John Waters, who claim that Meyer is a great influence on their own work. In 1992, Meyer published his three-volume autobiography, A Clean Breast: The Life and Loves of Russ Meyer. Meyer was single at the time of his death and he left no survivors. by Michael T. Toole