For the perfect precursor to Max’s madcap feminism, look to Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!—another desert-set action-classic about violent women, and the men who’re unlucky enough to meet them.
Tura Satana stars as the leader of a gang of go-go girls. They dance away during the film’s opening credits, as an audience of men bark orders—and then they never acquiesce to another male again. The trio rolls into the wasteland for drag races, and ends up killing the first guy they see. (Satana snaps his spine like a chicken bone, just for fun.)
The crew then kidnaps the girlfriend left behind, and sets off in search of a satchel of cash to steal. There’s an unabashedly pulpy vibe at work here, and it’s accentuated by the actress’ ice-cold delivery of the script’s quips—each of them as sharp as razor-wire. The young naif offers one of the dancers a soft drink. “We don’t like nothin’ soft,” she snorts back. “Everything we touch is hard.”
The director is Russ Meyer, who earned his reputation directing high-energy “sexploitation”—movies that existed to flaunt the large chests of his leading ladies. Pussycat ostensibly belongs to that genre, as the camera is often angled to stare down their shirts. But the leering evolves into something else. Meyer uses the legs of his actresses to fill up the whole frame, like Greek gods looming over the lost souls of the background. His camera stares up at Satana as though she were Wonder Woman. It’s not fetishization—it’s awe.
FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! BRATTLE THEATRE. 40 BRATTLE ST., CAMBRIDGE. FRI. 5.22, 9:30PM. $9-11.
