When
our film begins and the screen goes all Outer
Limits
on us to a spaz-jazz beat, the narrator
chimes in and says, "Ladies and
gentlemen, welcome to violence...", we, as a viewer, already know we're in
for something truly special.
As
the
narrator continues to talk about violence,
focusing on its newest manifestation
hidden under the soft curves and contours
of the female body, we're introduced
to three of those heavenly boobies --
BODIES!: Varla (Turu
Santana), Rosie (Hadji) and
Billie (Lori Williams),
go-go dancing for several lecherous
customers at some dive along the strip.
When
this trio isn't performing on stage,
however, they're out on the back highways of the
desert, hot-rodding around in their little
sport coupes. Varla is clearly the leader
of this bunch -- and clearly off her nut,
but the others aren't really all that
stable either; evidenced when Billie veers
off course and jumps into a convenient
body of water. Varla sends Rosie in after
her, and, in quick short order, we have
our first no-holds barred cat-fight -- first in the
water, and then on the beach -- in less than
five minutes.
Moving
on to the flats, Varla challenges a
displaced beachnik (Ray
Barlow) to a drag-race. And while
Rosie, Billie, and Tommy's bikinied and
bubble-headed girlfriend, Linda (Susan
Bernard), watch, the race
commences. But the only way Varla can win
is to cheat, and cheat she does, nearly
getting Tommy killed. Things turn ugly, Varla and Tommy fight, but Varla proves
more than a match for him with her karate
skills. (HI-keeba!) As the
fight escalates, Varla loses her temper
and winds up breaking Tommy's back,
killing him.
Obviously,
the beach-bunny kinda freaks out about
this development, but she's quickly
subdued. Truth told, Billie and Rosie aren't too
thrilled with this either, especially when
Varla reminds
them they're both stuck as accessories to
murder.
Keeping Linda doped up, they head further
into the desert, unsure of what to do.
After stopping for gas, the treacherous
trio spot a huge piece of
"butt-steak" carrying an old
invalid around. And thanks to a
plot-specific gas station attendant, they
find out the old man is a crazed hermit
who's hoarding a small fortune with his
two sons, keeping it hidden away on a
secluded ranch nearby...
At
long last 3B
Theater
turns its beer-goggles on the wild and
wacky world of sexploitation pioneer Russ
Meyer. Of course,
when any cinephile talks about Meyer, the
conversation almost always veers toward
the director’s obsession with a certain
female character trait -- both of them,
and to Meyer, the bigger those [*ahem*]
character traits [plural] were, the
better. Anyhoo...
Meyer
honed his craft on two fronts, first as a
combat cameraman who waded on shore with
the 29th Infantry on D-Day, and second, as
a centerfold photographer for Playboy
magazine. And when you distill his films
down to there very essence, that’s what
you wind up with: full frontal nudity and
protracted violence -- usually intertwined
in a bizarre but always equally
entertaining fashion. A quadruple threat, Meyer served as writer,
director, producer and distributor for his
naughty opuses to well-rounded hips, ample
cleavage, and big breasted women who could
kick the living crap out of you, with the
titles usually summing them up rather
succinctly: Vixen,
Super-Vixens
and Beneath
the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens
--
I’m sensing a pattern here.
A
genius to some, a dirty old man to others,
Meyer’s work has to be seen to be truly
believed and appreciated -- or disavowed.
And that used to be the problem: actually
seeing the man’s films was next to
impossible until his recent death in 2004.
The one notable exception was one of the
few movies he made for a big studio, Beyond
the Valley of the Dolls,
scripted by none other than uber-critic
Roger Ebert, who
also penned Up!
and Beneath
the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens
for Meyer under the pseudonym, R. Hyde.
Beyond that, Meyer controlled his
catalogue, so if you wanted a copy of Mud-Honey
or Mondo-Topless,
you had to get it through him -- and shell
out a lot of scratch if you wanted to see
them. Now, most of his oeuvre is finally
out on DVD via the -- what else -- Bosomania
Collection, but still carry a hefty
price tag of around $35 a pop.
Groundbreaking and risqué when they were
first released in the 1960s, they all have
been tempered a lot by what has followed
in their wake and could almost be
considered camp.
So
are
they worth it? Well, I can definitely say
that Faster,
Pussycat! Kill!
Kill!
is. Probably Meyer’s best known
film -- if by title only -- and oddly
enough, his cleanest, the film can be
interpreted in a lot of ways: a caper
movie with a feminine twist, or perhaps an
ode to the violence that’s inherent in
all of us; but I personally like to think
of it as a Beach
Party
movie gone horribly, horribly wrong as our
fugitive trio tail the old man's pick-up
back to that secluded homestead.
Once
there, they plot to get the
money so they can skip off to Mexico and
escape the murder rap -- leaving Linda to
die somewhere in the desert along the way.
And after Varla quickly concocts a story to explain
away why Linda is tied up, saying the girl
is a runaway that they're being paid to
bring back quietly, she sets to work
to find that money anyway she can.
The
women try to seduce it out of them first,
but the old man (Stuart
Lancaster) is wheel-chair bound and
seems pretty bitter about it -- and he's
about as far off his nut as Varla. The
butt-steak is named Vegetable (Dennis
Busch) and is about as bright as
that name would imply. The second son, Kirk
(Paul Trinka), is
-- well, he's the sensitive one, I guess.
And while the girls try to divide and
conquer, the viewer is then subjugated to
more go-go dancing, viscous vamping, less
than subtle seductions, and treachery on
all fronts with in-fighting, out-fighting,
and dialogue that was written by -- I
swear to freakin' god -- a Martian or an
escaped mental patient ... Between
the old man's political rants, his views
on women's lib, and his lecherous attitude
toward Linda -- who manages to escape
several times only to be recaptured --
Varla quickly concludes that the vamping
isn't going to work. And as both sides conspire
to kill each other, both sides also
suffer defections. Seems Kirk believes that the
terrified Linda is telling the real truth
and promises to help her get away for
good, while
Billie tries to wash her hands of the
whole thing, which gets her knifed in the
back by Varla. This sets off the climax as
the brutish Vegetable, who had a thing for
Billie, kills Rosie, who secretly had a
thing for Varla, and then goes after Varla
in retaliation for Billie.
One
step ahead of him, Varla makes it to her
car, runs the old man over first --
revealing the money had been hidden in his
wheelchair, and then pins Vegetable
against a building. Amazingly, Vegetable
holds the car at bay for awhile, but Varla
keeps on gunning the engine until the
vehicle crushes him. Gathering up the money, Varla
heads off into the desert to
track Kirk and Linda down, who are fleeing
on foot, to finish eliminating all the
witnesses. Will the ineffectual Kirk be
able to stop Varla? I doubt it. Or will
Linda finally grow a pair and defend
herself? Now that'd be interesting.
All
those answers can be found in the
slam-bang conclusion of this truly
gonzorific movie.
The
End
(Sort of).
Merry
@#*%ing Christmas. Hope yours was good.
Mine sucked. Had to work the whole damn
weekend, so I spent it alone with just me,
Ebenezer Screwed, a large bottle of
schnapps, and a beat up copy of It's
A Wonderful Life.
Well, got about a half hour into that, and
about a third of the way through the
bottle, when I said "Screw this" and watched Strip
Nude for Your Killer
and Faster,
Pussycat!
instead, finishing off the bottle during
the process. So
all apologies to George Bailey -- I just
wasn't in the mood, but I digress...
Wow!
What a fantastic, weird, sexy and oddball
movie.
And
you wanna know the strangest thing I got
from this movie? The vibes were there when
the women first track down the old hermit
to his ranch, which is nothing but a bunch
of dilapidated old buildings and littered
with several husks of rusted out cars,
that we were veering into Texas
Chainsaw Massacre
territory, here. This whole thing is
confirmed later during a bizarre dinner
sequence that looks and feels eerily familiar.
The
correlations are there. Linda isn't all
that far off from Sally, and Vegetable to
Leatherface isn't that far of a stretch.
We're definitely talking the same genus
and species here, and were just a couple
of evolutionary steps back (-- or
forward?) from the Sawyers. Here,
though, it's completely sexual: the hermit
and his brood are only interested in
raping and killing the women, while the
later film's family is more of a culinary enterprise. Has anyone else noticed this?
Or am I completely off my nut?
The
whole thing could almost be considered
satire, but all of that is secondary to
Meyer’s true purpose -- showing off his
leading ladies attributes, and he shows
them off quite beautifully. Teaming up
with cinematographer Walter Schenk, once you
get past the subject matter, their set-ups
and frame composition is quite striking,
and, dare I say, empowering and
complimentary to Meyer's starlets who
weren’t necessarily hired for their
acting ability. (I mean, What the
hell was the deal with Hadji's accent?)
His
women aren't necessarily traditional
beauties, but are stunning in their
appearance -- strong and tough, with every
feature that makes them a woman --
breasts, hips, waists and legs -- amped
upped to the Nth degree. Lori Williams'
hips are the true inspiration of the
female lead in that piece 'o crap novel
I've been trying to write for almost three
years now, but I still haven't been able to
capture the true essence of them in the
written word, so I won't try here, either.
I’d
personally wanted to see
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
since I read about it in Danny Peary’s Cult
Movies: Volume 3
back when I was about fourteen years old.
Now -- almost twenty years later -- that
dream has finally been fulfilled. I’ve
always said expectations be a harsh
mistress seldom satisfied, but this movie
delivered the goods on so many levels that
it achieves to something far greater than
it’s schlocky trappings. And in the end,
almost everybody dies, concluding what
could quite possibly be the greatest movie
ever made.
I’m
serious.
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