Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Dir. Russ Meyer, 1965

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Sat 25 July 2009 // 19:30 / Cinema

Period juvenile delinquency films ... go-go dancers ... psych sounds from Leeds freakbeat heroes THE BACCHAE and Sunderland's own surf-guitar legends SENOR BEATNIK ...

PLUS Sounds of Seduction DJs Michael Clunkie and Lord Leigh Park ...

And framing it all .... Russ Meyer's masterpiece, starring his scariest starlet, Tura Satana.

FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! is the tale of three thrill-seeking gogo dancers in sports cars who terrorise a backwoods family with a hidden stash of loot.

'The sweetest kittens have the a sharpest claws!" claimed the ads, and these cats certainly do. A truly wild mad-movie, well within many conventions of the sixties groovy exploitation flick but nevertheless boasting a bizarre set of anti-heroines, and Meyer's typically warped yet expertly realised view of the world.

The magnificent Tura Satana, Haji and Lori Williams are a trio of homicidal go-go dancers. One's a bisexual sadist (Satana), another a nyphomaniac (Williams) and their leader's a lesbian (Haji), They karate-chop a man to death after a desert car race; kidnap his girifriend and head off. Hunting some stashed cash, they hide out on a remote desert farm run by a family of weirdos, with a lecherous paraysed grandad and musclebound son named Vegetable.

Faster Pussycat; one of the top cult films of all time, displays not only the hip sixties mentality (such as Lori Williams forever breaking into hot go-go steps whenever trouble looms), but is also testimony to Meyer's celebration of the amoral, the violent and the perverse.

Fair enough the two "goodies" have to survive, but Meyer makes them boring and colourless, and they have a tough time against the grotesquerie of the three girls and weirdo family, who predate The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by almost a decade.

Faster Pussycat... is an amazing variation on the road-movie genre, showing Russ Meyer to be a fine action director without a bare breast in sight. The road-movie's never been so far out...

£5 members / £6 non-members

THE BACCHAE: http://www.myspace.com/thebacchaemusic
SENOR BEATNIK: http://www.myspace.com/senorbeatnik