Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!: Russ Meyer's Desert Blast of Attitude

Three sports cars tear across a dry lake bed while a narrator warns us, in the voice of a carnival barker gone to seed, about the violence lurking in the modern American woman. That prologue promises exploitation. What follows is stranger and better: a lean, monochrome roughie shot in the Mojave in 1965 by Russ Meyer, a man famous for putting flesh on screen, in which almost nobody takes their clothes off. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! trades Meyer’s usual currency for something rarer in the genre — pure attitude, cut into the shape of an action picture.

The film flopped. It played the drive-in circuit, made little money, and slid out of view for years before John Waters began evangelising for it as, in his words, the best film ever made. He was exaggerating for effect, the way he does, and the exaggeration stuck because the film earns the argument. It has since been absorbed by everyone from Quentin Tarantino to the design departments of a dozen rock bands, and its central figure has become one of the enduring icons of cult cinema.

Three go-go dancers and a dry lake

The plot is a pulp engine with the panels removed. Varla, Rosie and Billie are go-go dancers who spend their off-hours racing cars in the desert. After a confrontation turns fatal, they kidnap a young woman and end up circling a decrepit ranch run by a wheelchair-bound patriarch rumoured to be sitting on a hidden fortune. Greed, muscle and knives do the rest. Jack Moran’s screenplay keeps the geography tight and the motives simple, which frees Meyer to concentrate on faces, angles and momentum.

Meyer shot it fast and cheap — the budget sat somewhere around forty-five thousand dollars — on real desert locations, using the harsh flat light of the Mojave as a design element. He came up through wartime combat photography and industrial films, and it shows in every frame: the compositions are graphic, the camera sits low so the women loom against the sky, and the editing hits like a jab. He cut his own pictures, and the rhythm here is percussive, built on hard match-cuts and reaction shots that land a half-beat early.

This period of Meyer’s career is usually filed under the “roughie” — a mid-sixties strain of exploitation that swapped the sunny leering of the earlier nudie pictures for violence, sadism and a nastier moral weather. Meyer had already made Lorna and Mudhoney in that vein, melodramas thick with guilt and brutality. Faster, Pussycat! is the roughie perfected and, oddly, purified: the melodrama burns off, leaving only the engine of aggression. It is the moment his instincts as a graphic artist won out over his instincts as a smut merchant, and the result is the leanest thing he ever made.

The absence that made it

The lack of nudity is the film’s great sleight of hand. Meyer built his reputation on the “nudie-cutie” pictures of the early 1960s and would return to flesh for the rest of his career, so a Meyer film that withholds it feels almost perverse. The eroticism migrates instead into costume, posture and speed — tight black outfits, planted stances, the throttle of an engine. It is a film about power expressed through the body rather than the exposure of it, and the restraint gives it a hard, clean line that his later, busier pictures lack.

That discipline is also why the film travels so well outside its original grindhouse context. Strip a Meyer picture of its skin and you can see the bones of his craft — the boxer’s sense of timing, the poster-artist’s love of a strong silhouette, the industrial-film habit of making every shot legible at a glance. Those virtues survive translation into any decade, which is how a drive-in obscurity ended up as a design bible for people who would never sit through the softcore comedies that made Meyer rich.

Varla, and the woman who played her

The reason the film survives is Tura Satana. As Varla, she gives a performance of such contemptuous command that she overwhelms the material around her. Satana had a genuinely hard biography and a background in martial arts, and she performed her own fights and drove her own car; the physical authority on screen is real. She designed much of Varla’s look herself and delivered every line as though daring the camera to blink first.

Varla belongs in the small pantheon of screen villains who are more compelling than any hero the film could have offered instead. She is cruel, funny, tireless and completely unrepentant, and Meyer’s camera treats her as a force of nature rather than a cautionary tale. The film gestures, in its opening narration, toward moralising about dangerous women, then spends its running time plainly thrilled by one. That gap between the disapproving frame and the delighted execution is where the camp lives, and it is why later audiences read the film as a feminist artefact its makers never consciously intended.

The supporting players orbit her. Haji brings a wounded loyalty to Rosie; Lori Williams plays Billie as pure appetite; the men at the ranch are grotesques and weaklings, useful mostly as obstacles for Varla to shove aside. Meyer had a lifelong habit of making his men ridiculous and his women monumental, and here the imbalance becomes the whole architecture. The film’s universe runs on female will, and every man in it is either an obstacle, a fool or a corpse-in-waiting.

Why the craft outlasted the box office

Watch it now and the thing that startles is how modern it moves. The dialogue is heightened to the point of abstraction — everyone speaks in taunts and threats, nobody in ordinary sentences — and the effect anticipates the stylised patter that Tarantino would later make a career from. He has named the film among his favourites, and the debt is audible in any scene where his characters trade menace as a form of foreplay.

There is also the matter of the title itself, a piece of pulp poetry so perfect it has floated free of the film entirely, appropriated by bands and boutiques and slogans until the exclamation marks became a genre unto themselves. Few films of any budget have contributed a phrase that outran the picture so completely, and the fact that it belongs to a black-and-white desert cheapie only sharpens the joke. Meyer understood packaging as well as he understood framing, and the title is a thesis: everything here will be faster, louder and more shameless than good taste allows.

The visual grammar has been strip-mined too. That low-angle framing of a standing woman against a white sky, the fetish attention to cars and boots and sneers, the black-and-white contrast pushed until the desert looks lunar — all of it became shorthand for a certain kind of retro cool, borrowed by album sleeves, music videos and fashion shoots that mostly have no idea they are quoting a drive-in flop from 1965. The film has been cited as an influence far out of proportion to its original reach, which is the usual fate of work that gets the surface exactly right.

If you want the ancestor of this energy inside Meyer’s own filmography, the line runs forward to the studio delirium of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and back to the box-office breakthrough of Vixen!, the picture that actually paid Meyer’s bills. And for the strain of deranged erotic satire that shares this film’s glee at a woman running riot through a moral panic, Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion is the natural double bill.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is the rare exploitation film that transcended its market by having a real idea under the tyres — that attitude, photographed cleanly and cut hard, is more durable than any amount of skin. It cost almost nothing, earned almost nothing, and outlived nearly everything released alongside it.

Spoilers below

The desert stand-off resolves through attrition. Varla kills the old man’s simple-minded son, then turns on Rosie when loyalty stops being useful, and the film’s body count climbs with a cheerful indifference to any of the characters’ survival. Billie is dispatched. By the final reel the group that began as a unit has cannibalised itself, which is the film’s one genuine moral note — Varla’s cruelty is so total that it eventually has nowhere left to point except at her own.

The ending stages her death almost as an afterthought, crushed by the very vehicle-and-brawn logic she lived by, and the abruptness is the point. Meyer refuses to give her a tragic arc or a redemptive beat; she simply runs out of people to destroy and is destroyed in turn, by a man no more sympathetic than she is. The film declines to punish her in any morally satisfying way, and that refusal is what keeps Varla from curdling into a lesson. She stays exactly what she was in her first shot — magnificent, appalling, and entirely herself — right up to the moment the frame lets her go.