Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966)

Primary Genre: Crime

Secondary Genres:: Exploitation, Action, Melodrama

Plot: Three stacked and remarkably fit women (two domineering thugs who appear to be in a relationship with each other (played by Tura Satana and Haji) plus one (Lori Williams) hanging with them for kicks) go on a desert crime spree and plan to rob someone they mistakenly think will be an easy victim (Stuart Lancaster).

The Good Stuff

• 
  Tura Satana often played bad girls, but her tough talking, chain-smoking, leather clad character in this movie is one of the meanest badass sadists in movies. (Example: Not only does she beat a healthy young man into submission -- she follows it up by gleefully taking the time to break his back.)
• Cinematography
• Black & White: This movie was shot in black & white.  You might think that was an artistic decision, and sometimes a movie is better in black & white than color.  For example, Them! was probably better in black & white than it would have been in color, but the decision to shoot it in black & white was a last minute cost cutting decision by the studio, not a consciously artistic decision  Likewise, Faster Pussycat was a shot in black & white to keep the production costs low, and we can't visualized how this would have been better in color.  (See also the movie if....(1968) which frequently switches between black & white and color.  It intrigued film critics who wondered what the director was trying to say about the scenes in color vs the ones in B&W, but what happened was the producers ran out of money for shooting in color....)
  
• 70mm Cinemascope: Personal note: the first time I saw this movie was from a pristine 70mm Cinemascope print on a big theater screen. It was absolutely gorgeous: Sharp, highly defined with high contrast black & white. (And given the huge size of the movie on a huge screen, Tura Satana’s ponderous cleavage was downright cavernous.)  Moral of the story: If you get a chance to see old movies like this in their natural habitat (on a real theater screen), DO IT.
• Tough Dialogue: Tura Satana’s character has dialogue that sounds like Mike Hammer (tough talking with frequent sexual double entendres).  Fun stuff.

The Bad Stuff

• The main characters are well developed  (I mean, well written.)  However, the secondary characters aren't. That might not be so bad in most movies, but there are scenes where the secondary characters have to carry the movie.  Near the end, their earlier motivations are explained, but it’s too little too late.

The Who Cares Stuff

• Gender Reversal: Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Three tough guys ride into a very small community and  go on a brutal crime spree while harassing the local women.  Now reverse the genders, and you have this movie’s basic premise. When this movie came out, you were likely to have seen this story dozens of times, but not told this way.
• Empowering?: I watched this movie with a woman who believed strongly in female empowerment and asked her for her opinion of the movie.  She didn’t like it.  She didn’t see the movie as empowering because of the sexploitation.  To her, this was more like sexploitation with a phony female empowerment theme and a pretense of strong female characters for cover.
• Noir or Not?: Unlike some other armchair movie critics, I don’t see this movie as a film noir.  Although there are no official checklist for classifying films noir, one of the common ingredients for film noir is moral ambiguity.  (That might have more to do with postwar attitudes during the classic film noir era.  We digress.)  The only character that is particularly morally ambiguous is Lori Williams’ character, the third member of the trio, who’s in it just for the kicks.  But she’s not the primary protagonist in this story -- sometimes it’s like she’s written in as a voice for the trio’s often ignored conscience.  So, no.  It has similarities to films noir, but it’s not a genuine article like, say, Brute Force (1947) or Raw Deal (1948).  (You could also argue that film noir is not even a real genre, or that too many movies from other genres like crime stories, police procedurals, and melodramas have been reclassified as films noir, but that 's a discussion for another day.)
• About Russ Meyer: Meyer is synonymous with sexploitation and crazy plots.  He produced, directed, and wrote the script story for this movie, and he quickly shot it for under fifty thousand dollars.  (There were truly giants in those days.)  Although he is also associated with pornography, I’ve heard that Meyer hated pornography because it was so joyless. (But having seen his generally joyless Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, I wonder when he might have formed that opinion about hating pornography.)
• Cult Status vs Initial Release: This movie had a limited release and lost money at the box office.  But it now has a venerable cult status and is frequently referenced in other works.

See Also (other old movies with groups of bad girls):

• Caged (1950): Naïve young woman (Eleanor Parker) goes to prison and, over the course of a couple of years, becomes corrupted and cynical after dealing with tough, hardened inmates and a sadistic matron (Hope Emerson),.
• Swamp Women (1956): Roger Corman movie about a man (Mike Conners) abducted by three hardened female criminals (plus an undercover policewoman) searching for missing loot. 
• Girls Town (1959): Ubiquitous 50s juvenile delinquent B movie about an over-age teenager (Mamie Van Doren at 27) sent to a reform school snake pit.  With the legendary Mel Torme as a tough leather jacket type who gets beaten into submission by two girls..(Yes, you read that right.)  
• She-Devils on Wheels (1968): Ubiquitous outlaw biker flick of the late 60s/early 70s, but this one was directed by Hershel Gordon Lewis and is about a female biker gang called “The Man-Eaters”.  Surprisingly bland and forgettable.
• The Miniskirt Mob (1968): OK, it’s a movie with female outlaw bikers, but it was made by AIP while they were best known for Party Beach movies. This movie also had a peppy 1920s style theme song and may, therefore, seem amusingly tame compared to what the B/independent/sexploitation filmmakers had been doing at the time.  On the other hand, this one has a coherent plot and was competently made.
• The Female Bunch (1971): Dubious exploitation filmmaker Al Adamson takes a stab at tough, violent women in the desert. Compare with his vengeance western Five Bloody Graves (1969).

• And see also Duel in the Sun (1946), which used to be the trashiest western ever made..

The Bottom Line: Guilt free sexploitation (a LOT of voluptuous sexuality but no nudity). Basic brutal, tough outlaw story, but with character genders reversed: it was a fresh approach to what would have otherwise been just another well made B movie about outlaws terrorizing the opposite sex in the desert. Often imitated, frequently referenced, but never (?) equaled.