Bisexual Go-Go dancing vixens with extremely large (and real) breasts who drive really, really fast cars, beat men up, and at times thrill kill. That's pretty much all I can say about Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Wait!
It's got a catchy theme song.
From Louis Black:
"I'm scoring Titty Boom Films," volunteers ribald, soft-core filmmaking legend Russ Meyer, after answering the phone. When I ask what Titty Boom films are, he answers, "Titty Boom is Titty Boom. Tits." If one word could sum up Meyer's career, that word would be tits. At least three or four times this most independent of independent filmmakers has completely revolutionized the entire genre of soft-core filmmaking. After years of nudist-colony films in which the highlight was the volleyball game, in 1959 he brought the genre into the modern age with The Immoral Mr. Teas by introducing the idea of narrative to soft core. There wasn't much plot, but there was some: A bicycle salesman of false teeth has random X-ray vision that occasionally allows him to see women undressed. The film was funny and was fueled by a rave review by respected critic Leslie Fielder, and it offered tits. It was an underground hit, running for a full year in some college towns.
Meyer changed the nature of soft core. In addition to pioneering narrative, he fleshed out format and he introduced violence. But even when he wasn't taking the entire field in new directions, as he did frequently during the Sixties and Seventies, it was always his films that set the tone, including Lorna (1965), Mudhoney (1965), Vixen (1969), Cherry Harry and Raquel (1970), The Supervixens (1975), and Up! (1976). In the early Seventies, Meyer went to work for the majors, turning out Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and The Seven Minutes (1971) for 20th Century-Fox.
Last time I saw Russ, Annie and I visited his house and ate at a restaurant in a town full of slaughterhouses where the waitresses wore black leather aprons. I'm now calling him because Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is being re-released. One of the most enduring of his films, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966) has seen everything from being the name of a band to extensive T-shirt sales. A successful re-release in Germany (where, he is careful to note, it was titled Die Satan's Wives von Titfield) inspired a stateside re-release which, according to Meyer, has been successful everywhere.
"The first time around it wasn't successful," he says. "Why wasn't it successful? First of all, I made a film called Motor Psycho (1965), which had three bad boys, and that worked very well. It was a time when we were getting pressure, particularly at drive-ins, when there was nudity. A lot of them were being busted throughout the country, particularly in the South, certainly in your area. The Baptists were hard at it. So, I decided that we better come up with something action-oriented and that was Motor Psycho. We never had any busts with that. Motor Psycho did very well. Then Faster, Pussycat! didn't do well," Meyer remembers.
In fact, it was the first of his films to not do well. A rough-and-tumble film about three tough women and the trail they blaze, Faster, Pussycat! is Meyer at his hardest, offering a macabre humor at a melodramatic pace in a Gothic setting. It was not the tits-and-ass Meyer; though these women are ample, there is little skin. Oddly, though Faster, Pussycat! offers Meyer as the technician, working at his most imaginative, I wouldn't argue that it is one of his best films. It is one of the most unrelenting from the most unrelenting of filmmakers.
Meyer wasn't just a better filmmaker than most in the soft-core porn industry. Technically and cinematically, he was easily one of the most exciting and inspiring independent filmmakers working in America. His films are about big tits and more big tits. They are about women who want and men who want, and wanting as a way of life. They are about sex and how it is such a joke and such a part of life and all the ways we try to ignore our instincts just make it a bigger part of life. But, mostly, they are about big tits. There is a great joke driving these films. There is both a bawdy humor and a basic silliness to Meyer; to identify it, think Playboy back when Playboy was the most daring publication in America, but a Playboy out of control, driven by a great comedian's sense of humor.
Meyer is one of the most extraordinary film-cutters of all time. I don't want to seem too foolish about this. Film editing as a language system was negotiated over time. The dominant visual style around the world now is Hollywood's invisible editing style, where the cuts are supposed to be fluid and unnoticeable, lulling the audience into a seamless cinematic world. Although experimental, avant-garde filmmakers have ignored or distorted it, and filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and Jean-Luc Godard directly challenged it, the classic editing style of TV and movies has won out, often by adapting and conforming visual and stylistic innovations. Eisenstein postulated a more complicated structure: that one shot should be the thesis and the next shot the antithesis and between the conflict and tension of these two shots rather than an invisible edit, a different meaning would emerge - an implied meaning, a resonant meaning. This is how Meyer edits. His films often race like conventional Hollywood narrative, they veer into Monty Pythonish side streets, they throw a profusion of dissimilar images, the camera moves, the cuts race, the film unfolds. This may sound like saying, "I read Playboy for the articles," but Meyer's films are only occasionally erotic (though they can be surprisingly so). They are more cartoonish than erotic, Tex Avery multiplied and with no restrictions. Yes, this is soft core with silly plots, ridiculous jokes with huge breasts, dazzling camera work, and astonishing editing.
We continue to talk, Russ rambles on about the two Titty Boom films, Pandora Peaks: A Tale of Two Titties and Melissa Mounds. He tells me that he has kept shooting more footage to enhance the documentary feeling of these films. "It puzzles the one-arm reader, but on the other hand I like it," he adds. "These are really industrial movies."
I ask about his autobiography. Although delayed for many years, he assures me it will be published soon. It will be a 1,500 page work (at one time it was to be in two volumes and titled The Breasts of Russ Meyer, but now is scheduled for three) featuring 2,005 pictures. "It's a smoker, it's a fuck-and-tell book; it's not a kiss and tell, accurately describing every union I've had with a woman, including sound effects," Meyer laughs.
When I first fell in love with Meyer's films, stunned by their brilliant and exciting technique, the vigor of his cinema, and its surprising lack of condescension to the audience, I argued that they were biting critiques of American sexuality. He laughs about such comments, lightly mocking them. Over the years, I've come to accept that his films are often funny, always ribald and cinematically stunning, but, basically, they are about breasts. Films like Vixen, Cherry Harry and Raquel and especially the stunning (literally) Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, move beyond this but, ultimately, Meyer would probably be bothered if you claimed they moved too far beyond. Meyer's obsession is extraordinary, both perverted and magnificent, both adolescent and spiritual.
His house, above Los Angeles in the hills, is a giant A-frame. The living room goes straight up to the top of the house, though there is a second floor in the rest of the house. He used to shoot features in this house, the cavernous design being one of the reasons he bought it.
In the current issue of Playboy, film critic Roger Ebert tells a story about working on the script of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the Meyer classic which Ebert co-wrote. Ebert would be typing the screenplay in the living room and Meyer would be upstairs. Whenever Meyer heard the sound of typing stop, he would scream, "Keep working Roger, keep working."
Meyer owns his own films and it's Meyer who sells the videos. A long time back, legendary Naughty Ones drummer Mike Buck called to order some videos and Russ answered the phone. They talked. It was in that room: Russ sitting at a desk, taking orders.
I see Meyer moving around this room, working from this room, writing and planning in this room. The living room walls are covered with pictures and posters for Russ' films or just posters of extremely large-breasted women that he has photographed. From top to bottom. Dozens of posters and photographs. Dozens and dozens of women with very and sometimes very, very large breasts. It is overwhelming. All these women and their breasts run together into flesh, too much flesh. It is nice to go outside and find the California sun.
Independent, revolutionary, ribald, and controversial, feminists should and do hate some of Meyer's films, but he tells me that Faster, Pussycat! was kept alive by women's groups renting it to show on campus.
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a dusty, violent film. Meyer's skills show up but, whereas what I like most about him is his sense of humor, this is a mean Meyer. He shows us how good a filmmaker he is, just how harsh and unrelenting he can be. How completely he can fuck with sexual stereotypes, how the world was really only about wanting and desire.
I should make a point here about Meyer. Maybe that he is sexist. Maybe that film after film, photo after photo, of big-breasted women is exploitative. Meyer's cinema is a wave, it wraps around itself, it is porous. For many it is beneath contempt. Certainly, the one-hand readers must love his cinema. I won't pass judgment. I actually probably wouldn't go to see Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It is a fairly disturbing film in an outlandish way. But I would go to see Cherry Harry and Raquel anytime. There is a joke to Meyer; maybe he is making it (certainly he is making some jokes), maybe it is larger than he. In a way, exaggeration, insane exaggeration done with humor, seems to both support and deny stereotypes. But there is the joke and the films.
"What's next?" I ask. "If Faster, Pussycat! is successful will you release more films?" "What I'm going to do is sort of a Pulp-y thing," he answers. "Take six films and crazily edit them together, separated by shooting films of some remarkable women... and have them be in between, as a bridge." There will also be footage of Meyer on a fashion shoot in Japan, edited together in a Meyeresque assembly of music, narrative, images, editing, and tits. It will include sequences out of order and bodacious models commenting on the life and times of Russ Meyer. He says it will be like Pulp Fiction and suggests maybe he'll call it something like Pulp a Go Go.
Technical Information:
Title: Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Year: 1965
Country: U.S.A.
Director: Russ Myers
Source: Retail DVD9 PAL- arrowfilms.uk.
Video codec: x264, 2pass, L4.0
Container: .mkv
Size: 1.32 GB- movie only
Video Bitrate: 2038 Kbps
Resolution: 720x480, 4:3
Audio: DD mono- English
Subtitles: No
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