Superwoman, Tura Santana

Tura Satana as the leather-clad Varla in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! She adlibbed and performed her own stunts. 
The actor Tura Satana, who has died aged 72, lived a life as eventful as the plots of the lurid B-movies that made her a star. Almost 6ft tall and trained in martial arts, she specialised in a kind of tough charisma that has rarely been matched on screen. She was best known for her role in the Russ Meyer sexploitation movie Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965, tagline: "Superwomen! Belted, buckled and booted!"). As Varla, the leather-clad leader of a gang of thrill-seeking go-go dancers, Satana was given an opportunity by Meyer to perform her own stunts and choreograph fight scenes, as well as to adlib dialogue. She responded by channelling a kind of controlled rage, stating in an interview: "I took a lot of my anger that had been stored inside for many years and let it loose." Made for $45,000, the film became a cult classic, inspiring directors including John Waters and Quentin Tarantino. Satana was born Tura Yamaguchi in Hokkaido, Japan, where her part-Filipino father acted in silent films and her mother was a circus performer of mixed Native American and Scottish heritage. The family moved to the US in 1942, but Tura and her father were interned for two and half years in the Manzanar relocation centre for Japanese-Americans in California. The family were eventually reunited and settled in Chicago. At a time when anti-Japanese feeling was still prevalent, the young Tura suffered constant bullying at school. One evening, just before her 10th birthday, she was sent out by her mother to buy some bread. On the way home she was raped by a gang of teenagers. The five youths were never prosecuted, although in interviews she claimed that over the course of the next 15 years, she tracked down each of her assailants and exacted an unspecified revenge. Her father responded to the attack by teaching her the martial arts akido and karate. Tura was soon afterwards sent to reform school as a result of her frequent delinquency. When she was 13, her parents arranged for her to marry a 17-year-old family friend, John Satana. The marriage lasted nine months, by which time Tura was appearing in Illinois nightclubs as a burlesque dancer and a nude model – her act combined martial-arts displays with the usual tassle-twirling. Moving to Los Angeles, Satana dated Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra before being spotted performing at the Follies theatre and offered a role in the television series Hawaiian Eye. Her martial arts skills led to bit parts in shows such as The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and she appeared in Billy Wilder's Irma La Douce (1963) and alongside Dean Martin in Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? (1963). In the former she played a prostitute and the latter, a stripper. It took the softcore king Meyer to fully recognise Satana's potential, even if he did not exactly cast her against type. After Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, she appeared in two more films, The Astro-Zombies (1968) and The Doll Squad (1973), before she was hospitalised after being shot in the stomach by an ex-boyfriend. She had abandoned her burlesque career when changes in California licensing laws led many club owners to require dancers to perform topless. Satana gave up acting to become a nurse and, later, a police radio operator. In 1981 she married a former policeman, Endel Jurman. Soon afterwards, she was injured in a serious car accident. For much of her later life, she worked in hotel security in Reno, Nevada. She was a canny businesswoman, trademarking her image, which appeared as an action figure, a Halloween mask and on T-shirts. She was also a good-natured regular at cult film conventions and, despite having a pacemaker fitted in 2003, seemed as tough as ever. Indeed, in one interview she recounted what had happened when an over-enthusiastic fan hid in her hotel room after a signing: "He went flying across the room and wound up with a broken arm, busted nose and badly twisted leg. The house detective carried him out." Jurman died in 2000. Satana is survived by her daughters, Kalani and Jade, and her sisters, Pamela and Kim. •Tura Satana, dancer and actor, born 10 July 1938; died 4 February 2011 Pat Long guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 March 2011

Midnight Movies Presents: Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill!

Russ Meyer, Mammaries are made of this

Whenever the perennial debate on Can Pornography Be Art? takes place, the films of Russ Meyer, who has died aged 82, are raised as positive exemplars. Considered part cinema visionary and part dirty old man, Meyer proudly proclaimed himself a pornographer, but a first-class one. John Waters, a gay disciple, didn't consider him a pornographer at all. "He has way too much style to be just that," declared Waters. 

Whatever one calls the films - sexploitation (the female nude is shown purely for sexual or commercial reasons), softcore (no erections or ejaculations), kitsch (bad taste), camp ("its essence being its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration", in Susan Sontag's definition) - there is one word that could sum them up: breasts.

Most of Meyer's films revolve around the large cleavages of his leading ladies, such as Tura Satana, Lori Williams, Kitten Natividad, Uschi Digard and Haji. "I love big-breasted women with wasp waists," he told interviewers on every occasion, as if it were a revelation. His self-published, three-volume autobiography was called A Clean Breast: The Life And Loves Of Russ Meyer.
Meyer's "nudie-cutie" films gained him a cult following in the 1960s, widened when he made a rare excursion into big-budget cinema with Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970), which was described by Alexander Walker as "a film whose total idiotic, monstrous badness raises it to the pitch of near-irresistible entertainment".

Russell Albion Meyer was born in Oakland, California, the son of a police officer and a nurse. With money borrowed from his mother, he bought an 8mm Univex "picture-taking machine" when he was 12 and began making amateur films. He became a combat photographer and newsreel cameraman for the Army Signal Corps during the second world war, shooting under dangerous conditions in France and Germany.
After the war, Meyer started photographing nude models for magazines, shooting some of the first centrefolds for Hugh Hefner's newly launched Playboy. He married his second wife, Eve Turner, who became one of the first Playmates, and after whom he named his first company, Eve Productions.
Meyer's debut film was The Immoral Mr Teas (1959), which told of a delivery man (played by Bill Teas, an army friend of Meyer's) with the ability to see fully clothed women naked. The film was a breakthrough in the US because previous nudie films were either naturist romps or hypocritical moral tracts preaching the dangers of unbridled sex. It cost Meyer �24,000 to make but earned him �1m.
He now led the skin-flick market with garish, grotesque and gruesome comic strip erotica, lasciviously coupling dumb hunks with busty broads, such as Eve And The Handyman (1961), Wild Gals Of The Naked West (1962) and Fanny Hill: Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure (1964). In a sense, Meyer was a true auteur as he produced, directed, wrote, photographed and edited the films himself - and became very wealthy in the process.

Most of the cast of the cultists' favourite, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), which was succinctly described as "Three dominatrixes with huge tits and tiny sports cars sought in murder", were culled from LA strip clubs and Playboy magazine. The plot - three belted, buckle-booted, buxom go-go dancers on a crime spree - demonstrates, according to the pompous male narrator, the horrors of the "predatory female". Both hetero and homo male audiences, as well as revisionist feminists, revelled in it, from different viewpoints.

There followed the sloppily made and unpleasant Vixen (1968), in which the eponymous heroine (Erica Gavin) lives in a Canadian mountain resort and lusts after her biker brother. She is openly racist, rejecting her brother's black friend by remarking that she would not "make it with monkeys". Meyer even throws in a discussion about Cuban communism. Unaccountably, Vixen earned �6m on a �76,000 investment.

In 1970, 20th Century Fox hired him for two "mainstream" studio projects, the melodrama Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls and The Seven Minutes (i.e. the time it takes for a woman to have an orgasm). The former was written by critic Roger Ebert. It was Meyer's favourite. "Roger and I embraced that one to our bosoms, or co-bosoms," he explained.
The film is a self-styled morality tale, in which each character represents a vice or a virtue. The diaphanous plot concerns an all-girl rock group, the Carry Nations, handled by Z-man Barzell (John Lazar), which reaches the dizzy heights of fame and then falls into decadence, with a lot of perverted sex, drugs and backstabbing.

The Seven Minutes, Meyer's only "straight" movie, was a less happy affair. About a pornography trial, it featured a bunch of has-been Hollywood actors, including Yvonne de Carlo and John Carradine, and Meyer's then wife, Edy Williams.

Meyer then returned to independent shoestring productions with Supervixens (1975) - psycho cop, Nazis and nymphomaniacs - and Beneath The Valley Of The Ultravixens (1979), about a randy housewife who changes from Lovonia to stripper Lola Langusta. As usual, there are tight close-ups of breasts, but there is more full-frontal nudity than before.
Much to Meyer's surprise, after his retirement, his films were given the seal of aesthetic approval with seasons at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood and the NFT in London.

Meyer married and divorced a few times and lived with a series of models, Playmates, strippers and actresses. Russ (Russell Abion) Meyer, film-maker, born March 21 1922; died September 18 2004

Copyright Ronald Bergan, The Guardian

Thursday September 23, 2004

Roger Ebert on 'Faster, PUSSYCAT! Kill! Kil!'

It's been 26 years since I last reviewed a Russ Meyer movie ("Vixen"). In 1969, I wrote the screenplay for Meyer's "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" ("simultaneously the best and worst movie ever made" - Michael Dare, Film Threat magazine). In the years since, I have passed on reviewing other Meyer films; there was an obvious conflict of interest.

But now, with the re-release of Meyer's "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" (1965), perhaps the statute of limitations has expired.

Besides, why not a review from someone who has a conflict of interest? Meyer's fans are vociferously partisan, and here is the movie that director John Waters ("Hairspray") called "beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future." Completing the circle, Stephen Holden, in his recent review in the New York Times, credited Meyer with having invented John Waters, not to mention Madonna.

What is it about Meyer that spurs critics to this hyperbole? I think it is an intensely personal reaction to the visceral power of Meyer's unusual images. Take away all the jokes, the elaborate camera angles, the violence, the action and the sex, and what remains is the quintessential Russ Meyer image: a towering woman with enormous breasts, who dominates all the men around her, demands sexual satisfaction and casts off men in the same way that, in mainstream sexual fantasies, men cast aside women.

Meyer's extraordinary women are of course fascinating to those with breast fetishes, but look a little longer and you will notice that the breasts are not always presented as centers of desire.

Instead, they're weapons used to intimidate men. Tura Satana, who plays the lead in "Faster, Pussycat," is extraordinary in appearance: Her makeup, with its slashes of Kabuki-style eyebrows, looks terrifying. Her black costume seems suited to a motorcycle gang. She never smiles. And her abundant cleavage seems as firmly locked in place as a Ninja Turtle's breastplate. One cannot think of her as fondleable.

What deep recesses of the psyche do these images address? The feminist and lesbian film critic B. Ruby Rich, writing at length on "Pussycat" in a recent Village Voice, said she dismissed "Pussycat" 20 years ago as just a skin flick. Seeing it again during its revival at New York's Film Forum, she had a different reaction, viewing it now as female fantasy, its images of "empowerment" fascinating to her. Meyer, from the beginning of his career and almost without exception, has filmed only situations in which women wreak their will upon men.

He does so within a frenetic style of quick-cutting, exuberant action, pop and comic-book imagery, and dialogue that seems phoned in from another universe. Consider, for example, the dinner table scene in "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" - the most bizarre meal I have ever seen on film, with the single exception of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." The events leading up to the meal: Tura Satana, as the black-clad dominatrix, is racing her Porsche in the desert against cars driven by her female lover (Haji) and another go-go dancer (Lori Williams). They kidnap a young girl (Susan Bernard), after Satana breaks the back of her boyfriend with one swift karate move.

They stop for gas. The talkative attendant (Mickey Foxx) chatters away about "seeing America first," his eyes glued to Satana's cleavage. "You won't find it down there, Columbus!" she sneers. He tells them that an old man, who lives in the desert with his two sons, has a hoard of money hidden on his property. One of the sons, who is named Vegetable (Dennis Busch), is muscle-bound but dim-witted, and they see him carrying his father to their pickup truck.

Following the truck to an isolated desert shack, they concoct a story to explain their prisoner, and the lustful old coot (Stuart Lancaster) orders lots of fried chicken prepared. The coot and his sons sit down at dinner with the women (all dressed in bulging bikinis, halter tops, etc.), and when the go-go dancer says something Satana doesn't like, the dominatrix simply stands up and belts her.

How does the father respond? With a tolerant chuckle: "Women! They let 'em vote, smoke and drive - even put 'em in pants! And what happens? A Democrat for president!" Later, the coot orders his muscular son to assault Satana, who discourages him with her karate skills, and then tries to crush him against a wall with her Porsche. The victim uses his strength to hold off the car. Meyer uses quick cuts between the victim, the spinning wheels and a stiletto heel jamming down on the gas pedal. For him, Satana digging her car's rear wheels into the sand is the female equivalent of impotence.

I remember seeing "Pussycat" in 1967. I was amazed. I had simply never seen characters like this before, in the movies or (needless to say) anywhere else. After inventing the skin flick with "The Immoral Mr. Teas" (1959), Meyer had, by the mid-1960s, moved beyond the nudie market. In films such as "Lorna," "Mud Honey," "Faster, Pussycat," "Common Law Cabin" and "Good Morning . . . and Goodbye" branched out into the wider exploitation market dominated by American-International Pictures.

Of all his early films, "Faster, Pussycat" has found the widest audience. It has had huge grosses recently in Germany and France, has had a punk rock band named after it and is now in general re-release around America. What attracts audiences is not sex and not really violence, either, but a Pop Art fantasy image of powerful women, filmed with high energy and exaggerated in a way that seems bizarre and unnatural, until you realize Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal play more or less the same characters. Without the bras, of course.

BY ROGER EBERT / March 24, 1995

Welcome to Midnight Movies

It's at the witching hour that family-friendly cinemas lay dormant and a new cinema emerges for those who prefer to walk on the darker side of life. Welcome then to Midnight Movies.

Midnight Movies will be playing the best of grindhouse, blaxploitation, exploitation, horror, underground, and cult classics — films that will shock you to your core.

On Midnight, Friday the 13^th, Midnight Movies will open with Russ Meyers’ 1965 boldly titled Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Get ready to go-go for a wild ride with the action girls! Have you ever seen an Amazonian-like go-go dancer in a catsuit strangle a man to death with her bare hands to the soundtrack of the 60s? These girls are superwomen! Belted, buckled and booted! 

Meyers’ 1965 Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is unflinchingly exploitative, and features gratuitous violence, sexuality, provocative gender roles, campy dialogues and three extremely outrageous, thrill seeking go-go dancers. Tura Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams star as Varla, Rosie and Billy who, while racing cars in the desert, meet a young couple. After taking care of the boyfriend, they kidnap the girlfriend and head on a spree of mayhem.

Friday the 13th of May

The Sugar Club Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2

Tickets priced €9 or €7 students (strictly over 18)

Doors open at 11pm

Film starts: Midnight followed by DJ till late.

To book a table mail midnightmovienight@gmail.com or put a post on our Facebook page (minimum 5 per table)