Yes, the breaking news emerging from our Hollywood insider is that Quentin Tarantino is on the verge of directing the cult, Russ Meyer, B-movie sexploitation film, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The 1965, black and white film is one of cinema’s most infamous schlock, underground movies that many people won’t have seen.
Made by legendary B-movie auteur, Russ Meyer, notorious for his infatuation with voluptuous, powerful women; the film’s plot centres around three sadistic go-go dancers, Varla, Rosie and Billie who break free from their lap dancing nightclub, and race out into the desert in a 1960’s Porsche 356 on a mission to cause as much mayhem as possible.
The film is awash with random violence and sex, first, (spoliler alert!) when Varla accidentally kills a man using her karate skills and the three of them take his girlfriend hostage, they move on to terrorising a reclusive elderly man and his gormless son in a remote desert farm in the hope of getting their hands on his hidden cash. It’s a twisted storyline that revels in it’s bizarre nature and the centralisation of the female form.
The film feels hacked together due to the ‘split-second editing’ and elaborate camera angles and features some groundbreakingly bad acting, however, it is most memorable for it’s big breasted, super powerful, aggressive women who use their sexuality to dominate and intimidate men, and is at the heart of the sexploitation genre.
For stark originality, eye-burning imagery and fat-cat boldness, the three women and their desert adventures meant that Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! soon became an underground classic at 1960’s Drive-ins, garnering a wide release mainly thanks to the relentless self publicising by Meyer himself. At a time before porn had reached an audience, the titillating scantily clad superwomen are a breast fetishists dream, and it has over the last 50 years become a cult classic.
Tarantino has expressed his love for the film over the years, and he’s one of the few Directors around who has not only paid homage to it in films like Deathproof and Kill Bill, he’s possibly the only Director who could make of fist of such an unconventional storyline and perhaps after a reimagining, turn it into a cinema classic.
Quentin’s been floating the idea since 2008 and Harvey Weinstein has already said the purse is there and ready to be opened for the budget. The rumours started to spread again in 2016 off the back of The Hateful Eight, but right now The MALESTROM can tell you that, ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’ is sitting right at the top of Tarantino’s IMDBpro page as the next film on his books.
Take a look at the trailer for the original:
For the uninitiated, Meyer started out his career as a World War 2, military documentary filmmaker and former Playboy centerfold photographer, who turned his love of voluptuous women into a B-movie art form of his very own, more commonly known as the ‘skin flick’. Legendary screenwriter, William Goldman and famous U.S film critic, Roger Ebert called him ‘America’s only true film auteur’, not a compliment to be taken lightly. Iconic director John Waters had this to say,
“Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.”
Meyer unleashed a whole string of sexploitation films in the 1960’s such as Motorpsycho!, Vixen and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, that went on to make him extremely rich. He wrote, produced, and directed having self-funded each project, keeping virtually every penny they ever made – he ended up a happy man and spent the best part of his life with a smile on his face in the Hollywood hills.
It’s worth checking out the clip below from a 1990 documentary by Jonathan Ross as part of his original, ‘Jonathan Ross’s Strange Film Show’, which is a real blast from the past. As to whether Tarantino will turn ‘Faster, Pussycat!’ into a modern classic… only time will tell!
Buy a copy of the film HERE
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