Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 28, 1995 TAG: 9504280009
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVE MURRAY COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Oh yeah, it's still a tawdry B-flick. But 30 years has turned ``Pussycat'' into a work of accidental art. It's a pop artifact admired diversely by feminists, for its unapologetic pleasure-seeking heroines; chauvinists, for the female characters' architectural wonders; gay viewers, for its high-camp quotient; everybody else for its Midnight Movie nuttiness.
Meyer's black-and-white paean to pulchritude starts with a man's voice warning of a ``rapacious new breed'' of women: ``Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor's receptionist - or a dancer in a go-go club.'' And bam, the screen ignites with funhouse-angle shots of three dancers, gyrating for leering men who scream, ``Go, baby, go!''
These are our anti-heroines. There's black-clad Varla (Tura Satana), the leader with a lethal karate chop; Rosie (Haji), an exotic pouter with a yen for Varla; and bubblehead Billie (Lori Williams). They're a time-capsule vision of mile-long lashes, penciled-on brows and (Meyer's obsession) upper-body proportions rivaling a water tower's.
Fueled by a hepcat jazz score and tough-gal dialogue, these fun lovers hit the desert in their sports cars, kill a boy-next-door (he makes the mistake of driving faster than Varla) and kidnap his girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard). That's the prologue.
The movie focuses on Varla's itch to nab the rumored riches of the Old Man (Stuart Lancaster), a wheelchair-using misogynist who lives on a desert ranch with his two sons: the Vegetable (Dennis Busch), a bodybuilder with a negative IQ, and Kirk (Paul Trinka), the responsible one.
The film's over-the-top melodrama and smirky symbolism (speeding trains, loaded shotguns) are like a fabulous Freudian nightmare. Add continuity gaffes - wet hair that instantly dries, a character who goes from drunk to sober in a minute - and the film is a guilty pleasure, as giddy as the sight of Linda trying to escape through the desert, barefoot, in striped bikini and hairbow.
The antithesis of subtlety, Satana barks her lines with the same force she brings to her karate chops (and yes, she does her own stunts). She's a Camille Paglia dreamgirl. The other actors range from competent to deliciously bad. (But hey, most of them weren't hired for their thespian skills.)
There's no pretending that ``Pussycat'' is a neglected classic. Fundamentally this is a male fantasy, redeemed by its pungent '60s trappings and the threat of censors. By keeping the women's breasts inside their blouses, the film creates an interesting tension; it's a porn film without the porn.
``Pussycat'' winds down in moral cliche: The guilty get punished, the innocent are saved. But its currency of lust, money, violence and death creates a streamlined event that's pure cinema.
Or, as Billie would put it: It's a gas.
by CNB