Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Starring: Tura Satana

Lori Williams

Haji

Susan Bernard

Stuart Lancaster

Paul Trinka

Dennis Busch 

Directed by Russ Meyers

Released: 1965 

Length: 83 minutes

I suppose it would be an injustice for a column dedicated to female domination movies not to review Russ Meyer’s 1965 film “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” Decades before Hollywood and television began celebrating the powerful woman through characters such as "Xena: Warrior Princess" and “Lara Croft, Tomb Raider”, Russ Meyer brought forth his quintessential female image of a strong, towering woman with large breasts, who dominates all the men around her, demands sexual satisfaction and casts them off once she is done using them. 

After inventing the skin flick with "The Immoral Mr. Teas" (1959), by the mid-1960s, Meyer had moved beyond the nudie market. In films such as "Lorna," "Mud Honey," and "Faster, Pussycat" Russ Meyer branched out into the wider exploitation market dominated by American-International Pictures. Of all his early films, "Faster, Pussycat" has found the widest audience. And while it made money in 1965, it now enjoys a cult following and has had huge grosses in Germany and France, has had a punk rock band named after it and can be seen on American television on Turner Classic Movies. That’s where I saw it.  

While the film is known for combining sex and violence, the reason this movie is worthy of a Femdom movie review is because of the film’s image of powerful, dominant women.

 

 

Meyer's women are no doubt captivating to those with a fetish for strong women with large breasts. But are the women’s breasts presented as objects of desire or are they weapons used to intimidate men? Tura Satana, who plays the lead in "Faster, Pussycat," is extraordinary in appearance. Her makeup, with its slashes of Kabuki-style eyebrows, looks intimidating. She never smiles but she does show off her abundant cleavage as if it is a symbol of female power.

The feminist and lesbian film critic B. Ruby Rich, writing at length on "Pussycat" in the Village Voice, said she dismissed "Pussycat" in 1965 as just a skin flick. Seeing it again during its revival at New York's Film Forum, she had a different reaction, viewing it now as female fantasy, its images of "female empowerment".  

That is not surprising since Meyer, from the beginning of his career and almost without exception, filmed only situations in which women wreak their will upon men. 

“Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” shows the thrillingly lethal consequences when aggravated go-go dancers get bored. Russ Meyer's black-and-white desert melodrama opens with crazed half-naked women dancing in shadow and thrusting their breasts into the camera, while a pompous male voice in overdub details the horrors of the "predatory female" for its nervous target audience, the sexually paranoid heterosexual male sitting alone in Pussycat theatres across the country.

 

Meyer unabashedly exploited his own fantasies of a world of dominant, sexually supercharged women who ruthlessly take out their anxieties on any man who crosses their path, or is lured into their "web." 
 

After the opening scene, we see Tura Satana as the black-clad Dominatrix, racing her Porsche in the desert against cars driven by her female lover (Haji) and another go-go dancer (Lori Williams). They kidnap a young girl (Susan Bernard), after Satana breaks the back of her boyfriend with one swift karate move. The three macho babes are thrill-seekers. There is the hot blonde (Lori Williams), tough and always horny, the gorgeous Lesbian (Haji) with both sadist and masochistic impulses; and of course there is the leader, the head Dominatrix (Tura Satana), scary-yet-desirable with her black stretch jumpsuit, leather boots and accessories.  
 

After Satana kills the All-American boy with her bare hands and the women kidnap his “girlie” girlfriend, they stop for gas and the talkative attendant (Mickey Foxx) chatters away about "seeing America first," his eyes glued to Satana's cleavage. 
 

"You won't find it down there, Columbus!" she sneers.
 

This movie is full of that kind of campy dialogue. We are treated to other such Satana one-liners as: "Honey, we don't like nothing soft." and "I don't beat clocks, just people." and my favorite "I don't ever try anything, I just do it." 

Back to the story, the gas attendant tells the aggressive females that an old man, who lives in the desert with his two sons, has a hoard of money hidden on his property. One of the sons, who is named Vegetable (Dennis Busch), is muscle-bound but dim-witted, and they see him carrying his father to their pickup truck. Billie (Lori Williams) flips out over the muscular lad and you can see the lust in her eyes.

 

Following the truck to an isolated desert shack, they concoct a story to explain their prisoner and ask the perverted old man (Stuart Lancaster) if they can use his water. He agrees but only because he wants to get his hands on the young, innocent girl. 

We get to watch the women bathe in the water from the water tank, they act tough and macho and there is plenty to stir the submissive desires within the targeted male audience.

This leads up to the scene when the old coot invites the women for dinner. The father and his sons sit down at dinner with the women (all dressed in bulging bikinis, halter tops, etc.), and when Billie says something Satana doesn't like, she simply stands up and belts her. 

How does the father respond? With the chauvinistic comment, "Women! They let 'em vote, smoke and drive, even put 'em in pants! And what happens? A Democrat for president!" 

Later, the father orders his muscular son to assault Satana, who discourages him with her karate skills, and then tries to crush him against a wall with her Porsche. The victim uses his strength to hold off the car. Meyer uses quick cuts between the victim, the spinning wheels and a stiletto heel jamming down on the gas pedal.  

The muscular son is a typical Meyer male buffoon — the hunk who can't fuck — and the director gets plenty of comic mileage counter-pointing the oversexed women with the impotent men in the film. The father wants to molest the young girl but he is a cripple and the other son is the nice guy who doesn’t know how to react when Satana tries to seduce him.  
 

The film ends in tragedy for all three women, but not before they wreak plenty of havoc and Meyer indulges the audience with plenty of Femdom imagery. "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is not a very good film when it comes to plot, acting or dialogue. However, the film was daring for its time and it broke new ground when it came to the portrayal of women. I’m sure to the submissive male living in 1965, watching these three dominant, well-endowed females on the screen for 83 minutes was pure Nirvana. 

 

 

 

None of the lead females went on to do other films of consequence. In fact, Satana became a dental hygienist.  
 

And Russ Meyer passed away in 2004. On his tombstone it reads;  
 

Russ Meyer

King of the Nudies

‘I Was Glad to Do It’

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars