Russ Meyer's first classic. It has many of the elements he'd delivered before - energetic handling, skilled photography, melodramatic plot - but this one is elevated. It takes the structure of Motor Psycho but crucially makes these characters the protagonist and also turns them into women. He brought back Haji from Motor Pyscho and discovered Tura Satana to play the lead ones.
Having women as the bad girls completely turns the piece on its head - because strong vicious women even now are a relative rarity on screen, it remains so fresh to see these amazons go from go go dancing, to driving around in the desert, killing a random guy, then trying to rob a man in a wheelchair.
Paul Trinka is super wet as Kirk, the nice normal son, and Susan Bernard very annoying as the whiny girl... but that adds to the film's charm. I didn't like Stuart Lancaster that much in Mudhoney but didn't mind him here as the wheelchair bound old man (the structure of this is a bit weird - there's half an hour of a plot involving a drag race in the desert and accidentally killing a guy, then the rest two thirds is about conning an old man out of money).
I think it helped Meyer himself didn't do the script, though he wrote the story. There's some very quotable lines in the dialogue.
The real ace in the hole here is the cast. Tura Santana is of course an incredible icon - exotic, mysterious, vicious. Haji is extremely good as her lesbian off sider (this is spelt out with surprising explicitness - though I guess it was a little in vogue in the 60s with The Children's Hour and The Foxes). Lori Williams isn't as well known - I guess she's blonde and isn't as buxom - but fits in very well with the others, as a kind of I'm-only-in-it-for-laughs type who can resist trying to seduce the big muscle head.
Big, outrageous melodramatic fun that has aged well.
No comments:
Post a Comment