“Let’s examine closely this dangerously evil creation, this new breed, encased and contained in the supple skin of woman.” Ostensibly members of this “new breed,” Varla (Tura Satana), Rosie (Haji), and Billie (Lori Williams) are introduced dancing in fringed bikinis for a crowd of braying perverts, the only moment across 80-odd minutes that the trio at the center of Russ Meyer’s cultishly revered drive-in classic are at all pliant to the whims of men. Before the opening credits even begin to roll, the three of them are careening wildly through the desert in a pack of sports cars, a prelude to the terror they’ll sow across the Mojave. Things first begin to go awry when a naive, car-crazy young couple are goaded into racing Varla and unwittingly find themselves on the receiving end of her fatal wrath. They really spin out of control once the girls decide to pay a visit to a deranged, woman-hating old man sitting on a fortune just down the road. Few purveyors of smut across film history have proved themselves as dedicated to the craft of cinema as Meyer, whose paeans to mazophilia could always be relied on for crackling wit, airtight editing, and a fetishist’s sense for perversely striking visual compositions. Hailed by John Waters as “beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made,” Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! may just be the apotheosis of Meyer’s art, a relentlessly quotable entertainment machine that stands with the very best in American popular cinema. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence.”

35mm from CFS collections, permission R.M. Films

Preceded by: 

SCORPIO RISING (1963, 28 min, Dir. Kenneth Anger, 16mm) - An alternately sumptuous and seamy portrait of ’60s motorcycle culture coursing with libidinal energy, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising became an underground cause célèbre for its frenetic editing, provocative juxtapositions of Christian and Nazi iconography with long-forgotten bits of American cultural detritus, and revolutionary use of pop music. Shortly after its release, Scorpio Rising became the subject of a landmark obscenity trial based around the film’s purported homosexual content. (As undeniably homoerotic as the film is, Anger maintains that all of the men featured are straight.) Now firmly ensconced in the queer cinema canon, Scorpio Rising was added to the National Film Registry in 2022, an institutional corrective that’s done little to blunt its subversive power.

16mm from Canyon Cinema