Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965, Russ Meyer) (Patreon)

83/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. Hard to think of another film in which content and form seem diametrically opposed yet equally magnificent; you'd think that'd provoke severe cognitive dissonance, but instead each somehow reinforces the other, creating a pinnacle of trash, art and the movies. (Wish Kael had actually written about it.) Even the campiness itself walks a tightrope between knowing and sincere, with everything heightened to a degree just shy of clear comedic intent. People could try (and have tried) for decades to recapture this tone without ever coming close. Miraculous, really. I will confess that Satana shouting most of her lines eventually grows a little wearisome for me, and acknowledge that the film peaks very early, on the salt flats...but both of those minor criticisms can be chalked up to the near-impossibility of sustaining pure cinematic id for longer than about 30 minutes. More than once, I found myself thinking of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which similarly dispenses with any pretense of civilizing restraint, plunging the viewer straight into dopamine city. This is a more benign vision (even if most of the characters still wind up dead), giddy rather than terrifying, but there's still an electrifying rawness at play that even the funniest dialogue ("Look, I don't know what your point is, but—" "The point is of no return, and you've reached it!") doesn't diminish. More remarkable still, every character is distinct: Varla, Rosie and Billie occupy very different locations on the proto-riot-grrrl spectrum, and are offset by the ingenuous (Linda), the venal (Old Man), the simpleminded (Vegetable) and even the ostensibly normal (Kirk). A true dramatis personae, assembled from anti-SAG detritus.

To some extent, all of the above could be considered a happy accident. Certainly neither of the other two Meyer films I've seen to date—Vixen! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls—remotely compares. But I should really explore further, because a second viewing of Pussycat confirmed what I'd remembered: It's one of the best-directed and -edited microbudget movies ever made. Compositions are insanely dynamic, employing low angles and foreground/background disjunction to striking effect; there's hardly an ordinary shot in the entire 83 minutes. (Big exception: Meyer had to fudge close-ups of actors behind the wheel during the drag race. It's the one thing that looks amateurish.) And while I feel fairly confident that multiple cameras weren't running at any point, the match cutting throughout seems almost too precise to have been achieved via any other means. Might be my own weird aesthetic predilection, but there's something intensely satisfying about a sudden shift in perspective that preserves continuity of motion—it's the illusion upon which the medium is constructed, to my mind (which may partially explain my distaste for long, show-offy camera movements). Doing that with a single camera requires precise duplication of the actors' movements, which seems highly improbable here. Yet every cut sings and singes. Again, miraculous. And the film's formal excellence confers additional power to its "primitive" narrative and performances. All of which is a longwinded way of saying Holy fuck what a gas. There's nothing ironic about my love for this movie, which I'd never tar with the label so-bad-it's-good. More like so-brazen-it's-great.