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Say what you will, Tura Satana's filmography is hardly breathtaking – indeed, it is short enough for a non-smoker to recite in one breath. But, for that, she made one film that put her in a special league shared by few. That film was, of course, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, the last and perhaps major masterpiece of Russ Meyer's early B&W films (the other two arguably lesser masterpieces being the sadly undervalued films Mudhoney [1966 / trailer] and Lorna [1963 / Italian trailer]).
In Pussycat, although co-starring with Haji and Lori Williams, two equally impressive beauties of pulchritude,
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At the time of its release, despite all popularity and acclaim it has since gained, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was hardly a hit (neither as a "real" film or an exploitation film) and neither her career nor that of her co-stars really went anywhere. Haji made a few more films with Russ Meyer (including one of his major disappointments, Motor Psycho [1965]), Lori Williams more-or-less disappeared, and Satana went on to do two other film jobs of note, both for the cult director of psychotronic weirdness, Ted V. Mikels (official website), before being shot by a former lover in 1973.
After recovering, she worked as a nurse for four years and then briefly as a dispatcher for the LAPD. She married the retired police officer Endel Jurman in 1981, the same year she broke her back in a car accident. (They remained married until his death in 2000).
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Mark of the Astro-Zombies (2002)
In Cody Jarrett’s homage to women in prison films, Tura has a brief appearance as a Judge.
In this wonderful animation trash film, her Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Character Varla makes an all of ten-seconds-long animated guest appearance alongside the film's director Rob Zombie before both get squashed flat. One can't help be left with the feeling that her character should have been accorded more and a better fate, but then, many a "guest appearance" in this film give the same impression. Click on the title above to go to the review of the film on A Wasted Life.
Mikels' latest (2nd) sequel to The Astro-Zombies (1968). Supposedly she appears in it somewhere.
An exotic beauty, a survivor, and a true Pop Icon: Tura Satana.
The world would have been a poorer place without her.
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Lastly, to return to Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Tura Satana's claim to Pop Icon immortality, but to look at another popular aspect of the film: the title track. Over the years, the film's lead song Faster Pussycat! has gained great popularity and been included on many a sampler. Here is the opening credit sequence of the film with the full version of the song by The Bostweeds.
Were it not for the song Faster Pussycat!, it could probably be safely said that The Bostweeds would be completely unknown and forgotten; as it is, virtually nothing is known nowadays about the garage band. Rick Jarrard, a producer at RCA (of Harry Nilsson, Jefferson Airplane, etc) is commonly given as the lead singer, primarily because he is credited as the writer of the song. (Though he is still alive, he himself has never commented about his involvement in the song or The Bostweeds.)
An unnamed source at this dead blog here, who claims to have played with the band, flatly states that Rick Jarrard was not the vocalist of the group and that "Rick, along with Jim Hilton, were our producers at the time and it was through them that we got to do the sound track for the film. We recorded the tracks in a home studio up above Sherman Oaks, Ca. all in one night. We did a bunch of singles under various names at that time."
The vocalist of the Bostweeds is supposedly no one other than a former Mouseketeer named Lynn Ready. Lynn Ready, however, who has dropped out of public sight, has never gone on record about this.
Nonetheless, what is a fact is that in addition to their one-sided release of Faster Pussycat!, The Bostweeds also released another 45 with the A-side Little Bad News and the B-side Simple Man. And while the sound of classic garage grunge bands is often interchangeable, the sound of Little Bad News is extremely similar to Faster Pussycat!
Listed as one of the song's composers is no one less than Lynn Ready. But other than that, the rest is shrouded in mystery – once again proving that we are all just dust in the wind...
1 comment:
Hi All,
The referenced "long dead blog" about the Bostweeds lives on at http://bostweeds.blogspot.nl/2013/06/rick-bert-and-paul-were-not-bostweeds.html
regards,
Jan
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