Review: 'Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever'

Watching Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert's TV reviews in the eighties and nineties was only partially about finding out which new movies were worth watching, especially if, like myself, you often disagreed with them (those guys had little affection for horror movies or David Lynch). Watching two guys who look like fairly benign uncles get genuinely exasperated with each other was a big part of it too. As anyone who reads Matt Singer's new book Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever (or watches that infamous behind-the-scenes video of them shooting a TV promo and calling each other assholes) will learn, Siskel and Ebert really didn't like each other. At least at first. After nearly two decades sharing the camera, a sincere love developed between the critics, and viewed from one of several angles, Opposable Thumbs is a sort of Sam-and-Diane love story. 

Since wringing a whole book out of the relationship between two movie critics, even ones as famous as Siskel and Ebert, is probably no simple feat, Singer had to rely on several angles. Some of these are a bit ho-hum, such as his efforts to get to the bottom of how they ended up on TV in the first place or why Siskel's name came first or how the whole "thumbs up/thumbs down" thing developed. These guys didn't exactly live juicy lives, but it is interesting reading about their early careers, especially when getting more details about Ebert's fleeting yet still-surprising partnerships with The Sex Pistols and fellow breast-enthusiast Russ Meyer. The passages about Siskel's pranks on Ebert and an ill-fated co-star spot for a skunk on their show are amusing enough. The conclusions of both mens' lives are sincerely sad. But the real core of this story is how two rival Chicago film critics came together to insult each other on the air and learned to develop a friendship that transcended the drastic differences in their personalities. That facet of Opposable Thumbs gets a sincere thumbs up from me.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 284

The Date: July 10

The Movie: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

What Is It?: A depraved free-for-all of sex and violence that finds Tura Satana as a go-go dancing maniac who tours around the country in her hot rod with her pals Haji and Lori Williams raising hell and looking for kicks. While Tura is clearly the star of the picture, Lori Williams steals the show whenever she’s on screen, and she gets most of the best lines. Russ Meyer proves that he was a lot more skilled behind the camera than most give him credit for; the black and white photography is just as striking as the cleavage he so loved to exploit. Just don’t go looking for America down the front of Tura’s cat suit, because “You won’t see much of it lookin’ down there, Columbus!”

Why Today?: On this day in 1938, Tura Satana is born.

Cult Club: ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’ (1965)

In this new feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

Cult cinema became a self-conscious movement in the ‘70s when audiences hopped up on goofballs and near-lethal doses of irony started convening at urban cinemas to hoot along with midnight showings of Pink Flamingoes and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s amazing to consider that Russ Meyer made Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! a decade earlier when every aspect of it seems consciously contrived for the midnighters. Perhaps that’s because it was so influential among the makers of those ‘70s cult items. Pink Flamingoes-director John Waters has called Pussycat “the best movie ever made… possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.” Waters, a master ironist himself, may have been joshing a bit when he wrote this in his autobiography Shock Value, but was he at least a little right?

Legions of critics would catcall, “Not even close!” Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has been derided for its obvious offenses for decades (certainly one reason Waters holds it so close to his mustachioed heart). Even its entry in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die tisks at its "troublesome sexual politics." Russ Meyer is perhaps history’s most famous breast-fetishist, and there is certainly no shortage of female objectification in his best-known picture. The man was no less enamored with violence, which is well present, too. So sex and violence, eh? That’s why Meyer is so much more horrible than every other filmmaker, none of whom would ever indulge in such things? Well, the naysayers say “nay” because Meyer so lingers on his actresses’ cleavage, he so revels in his character’s violence. His plot hangs on sex and violence as wispily as Tura Satana’s catsuit hangs on her bodacious frame.

In Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Varla (Satana), Billie (Lori Williams), and Rosie (Haji) are a trio of go-go dancers who dig nothing more than swinging with each other and tooling around the California desert in their hot rods. When they run into a square (Ray Barlow) and his bikini-clad girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard), Varla challenges the dude to a drag race. As he starts gaining on her, she forces him off the track. When he gripes about her poor sportswomanship, Varla karate chops him to death (with a twist of back breaking). Linda gets all bent out of shape after watching her boyfriend bite the dust, so Varla commands her go-go underlings to drug and kidnap the girl until they can think of what to do with the potential squealer. While refueling at a gas station, Varla learns about a local wheelchair-bound man (Stuart Lancaster) who lives on a farm with his sons: sensible Kirk (Paul Trinka) and a muscleman known as The Vegetable (Dennis Busch). The Old Man also happens to be sitting on a big pile of cash. At the farm, he tries to get his paws on Linda, Billie tries to get hers on The Vegetable, and Varla tries to get hers on the scratch. Mayhem ensues, leaving all but our two dullest characters, Linda and Kirk, dead.

Tura Satana
Meyer uses this goofy plot as an excuse to exploit the boobs and bashing for which he is infamous. While Meyer couldn’t have possibly conceived Faster, Pussycat! as a mainstream film, he still seems bound by the restrictions of mid-‘60s American cinema. Nudity and graphic bloodshed are taboo. So is the triumph of his villains, hence the plethora of deaths that end the film. For those criticizers who’ve actually seen the film, the opening monologue about the “rapacious new breed” of violent women and Varla’s death are the strongest arguments for Meyer as misogynist, but the time in which his film was made has to take some of the blame. If we can forgive the rote moral and our antihero getting her rote comeuppance, we have without a doubt the strongest woman to appear in an American film thus far.

Farewell, Tura Satana

Russ Meyer often gets a bad rap for his famously boob-centric body of work, but it's tough to not recognize that his masterpiece Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! featured a trio of female characters completely unlike any the cinema had yet to see. Sure, there's no shortage of cleavage, but the film's three stars were groundbreakingly powerful in a way that no non-50 foot woman had been before. Lori Williams may have gotten all the best lines as the eternally wisecracking Billie, but it was Tura Satana's iconic performance as the psychopathic, mighty Varla that commandeered the film.


Sadly, Satana died yesterday of heart failure (her age has been reported as 72 or 75). Born in Hokkaido, Japan, Satana (born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi) was the daughter of a silent film actor. She fought her way through some extremely difficult early years to achieve cult stardom as Varla in 1965. In 2008, she told Entertainment Weekly of her most famous role:

"A woman, like my character, was able to show the male species that we’re not helpless and not entirely dependent on them. People picked up on the fact that women could be gorgeous and sexy and still kick ass."

Hear, hear!

As well as Pussycat, Satana appeared in a less prominent role in the more prestigious (though, let's face it, not nearly as good) Billy Wilder film Irma La Douce (1963), the horror flick Astro Zombies (1968), and Rob Zombies's cartoon The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (2009) in which she revisited Varla.

And come to think of it, Billie had the bulk of the film's great lines, but Satana did, indeed, have the best one.