“Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” (IMDB, Amazon) is about three strippers Varla (Tura Satana), Rosie (Haji) and Billie (Lori Williams) out in the desert looking for thrills. They come across Linda (Sue Bernard) and her boyfriend Tommy (Ray Barlow). After killing Tommy, they take Linda hostage. At a nearby petrol station they are tipped off about an old, crippled man (Stuart Lancaster) living in the desert with a fortune. They decide to liberate him of his money. All they need to do is get past his two sons (Dennis Busch and Paul Trinka). However, it turns out the old man has an agenda of his own and most of the cast end up knife stabbed or hit by cars before we reach the end of the movie…
I have to admit, this movie is from 1965, and apparently, the way they acted in the 60ies are just not in my taste.
This film has huge problems with the script. Let us start with the name. When someone calls something “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” at least I get an image of some kind of incitement/hunt/stress scene. My imagination was that the three “evil” strippers would incite the poor innocent girl to kill some other poor innocent victim. As it turns out, the script contains very little incitement, actually very little action at all.
The lack of action is, obviously, the main problem of this script. The characters (part from Paul Trinka’s Kirk) are all trying to ”be” instead of ”doing”. The three girls go around and snarl and talk “tough” but sadly enough the script fails them; there are virtually no cruelty or toughness for them to act on, leaving the poor actors to try and ”be” as good as they can, which of course just looks silly. This failure also rubs off on the victim of the story, Linda, making her fear and anxiety seem plastic and phony as well.
The script had me cringing more than once from the outright ridiculous plot turns. Especially the scene at the gas station where the station attendant tip the girls off about the old man, had me thinking of those good old days when I participated in high-school plays.
The script doesn’t give much credit to the human psyche either, and it utilizes the “linear cause-effect” type of psychology. For instance, the old man lost his ability to walk when he saved a girl from being hit by a train, so obviously, now he hates trains and girls…
If you want to see how to write a script that will kill all the characters mercilessly, then watch this flick (and by “kill” I don’t mean “blood-bath”-kill, unfortunately, even splatter would have made this less painful… most of the characters die, that’s true but they’re dead long before that happens). Or if you just feel that the good old classics has to be good, old and classic, then watch it and suit yourself! ;o)
I give “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” 1 point of 5. (I’m not gonna f-up my own system by starting to deal out zeroes and minuses but I am pretty tempted…)
Children of Glory (2006) (IMDB, Amazon), or Szabadság, szerelem, as the original is named, is about Karcsi Szabó (Iván Fenyö), a member of the Hungarian Olympic water polo team. How he meets Viki Falk (Kata Dobó), falls in love with her, gets involved in the 1956 Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union and finally goes to the Olympics to play the Soviet Union water polo team in what will become known as one of the bloodiest matches in the history of water polo.
