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Exploitation filmmaker Russ Meyer has, perhaps, the most instantly recognizable directorial style of anyone ever to sit in a director's chair. The man was a consumate stylist, whose films are marvels of editing and mise en scene. His  movies are characterized by bright primary color schemes and crazy dutch tilts, by rapid fire cutting and shrewd visual puns. Oh yes, and breasts. Meyer's movies are obsessed with all things mammalian. His actresses are "cantilevered ladies," whose brasierres are engineering marvels. It is a strange accident of fate that the most gifted low-budget filmmaker of the age should be afflicted by a fetish that has transformed his oevre into an extended meditation on breasts and sex. This REALLY took flight in the 1970s, when changing sexual mores permitted Meyer to indulge in his obsessions more or less uncensored. Prior to that, his movies were a LOT stranger. They were strongly tinged with a decidedly gothic sensibility.

Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! is such a movie. The advertisements bill it as "Russ Meyer's Ode to Violence In Women!" which alone announces the film as some kind of exploitation classic. What we actually get in the movie is the apotheosis of the American fascination with big tits and fast cars. The film has deranged renegade go-go dancer Varla (Tura Satana) and her two cohorts challenging a hot rodder to a race, killing him, then kidnapping his girlfriend. They take this on the lam and wind up encountering an equally deranged family that has a secret fortune somewhere on their property. Then everyone tears everyone else to pieces.

Faster Pussycat is a one of a kind gothic whatzit. At the time it was made, Meyer had yet to descend as deeply into his mammary obsession as he would over the next ten years--the blouses here are amply filled and cut down to there, but they never come off. In its place, Meyer substitutes a vision of the dark underbelly of American culture that is striking, exciting, and repellant all at the same time. Perhaps the most striking thing about Faster Pussycat, apart from its arresting title, is the pitch of the performances. The acting here is so broadly done that it begins to resemble kabuki theater or avant garde performance art. If a line needs emphasis, it is shouted, hissed, or sobbed. Tura Satana as Varla is a memorable monster--a "beautiful animal" one character calls her--whose exotic looks combine with the sneer on her face to create a character who is barely recognizable as human. The vision of the American family on display here bears an eerie similarity to the Sawyer family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Faster Pussycat operates, on some levels, as a horror movie.

I've watched Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! with all kinds of audiences. No two audiences react the same way. Some are horrified by it, some laugh at it, some ridicule it, but I can pretty much guarantee that no one is likely to forget it once they have seen it.