A readymade midnight movie from 1965, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill's geekshow of large-print perversity and ripe dialogue rebop has long distracted fans from its corrosive social commentary, which cracks the shallow chest of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" to expose the bradycardic beat of its dissatisfied heart. Galloping resentment fuels this dark tale of a trio of amoral go-go dancers slipping the male gaze and heading into the desert to blow off steam (resulting in the murder of a hot-rodder and the abduction of his twerpy "Gidget" girlfriend) only to run afoul of a crippled hermit and his brood over an alleged fortune in insurance money.

The patriarchal nuclear unit depicted here, which resorts to kidnapping and murder to make desert living more enjoyable, sets the stage for the monstrous families of both Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977), while Tura Satana and her amoral gal pals, grabbing the anarchic torch from the distaff juvies of the Ed Wood-scripted The Violent Years (1956), pave the way for the girls-gone-wild of Herschell Gordon Lewis' She-Devils on Wheels (1968) and the hardcore Baise-Moi (2000), which married simulated ultraviolence to actual onscreen sex in a heady gumbo that would have made Pussycat director-producer Russ Meyer blush.

It's hard to root for anyone in this cynical free-for-all, but the characters' collective evil only partially obscures their thwarted humanity. Tura Satana's jaded Varla wears a valentine heart pendant even as she squeezes friends and foes alike for "Everything...or as much as I can get." Her back-story unstated but eminently guessable, Varla goes for broke and winds up broken, like Theodore Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, another flawed hero destroyed while grabbing for her share of the American dream.

Director: Russ Meyer
Producers: Eve Meyer, Russ Meyer
Screenplay: Russ Meyer, Jack Moran
Cinematography: Walter Schenk
Editing: Russ Meyer
Original Music: Paul Sawtell, Bert Shefter
Cast: Tura Satana (Varla), Lori Williams (Billie), Haji (Rosie), Susan Bernard (Linda), Stuart Lancaster (The Old Man), Paul Trinka (Kirk).
BW-83m.

by Richard Harland Smith