Welcome back to this special series where I’ll be covering the movies sampled and referenced by the greatest band in the world. White Zombie. In the last installment of the series I promised that we would talk about Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and I most definitely will in this entry covering the two most well known songs from White Zombie’s first album Thunderkiss ‘65 and Black Sunshine.

The first song on the album, Welcome to Planet Motherfucker/Psychoholic Slag starts with a chugging guitar riff followed by a sample, Thunderkiss 65 starts in the opposite way, with a sample THEN a chugging guitar riff…

“Oh my god!”

Okay, I told you perverts last time and I will tell you again this time, pay attention this time. This sample is from a PORNO named True Confessions of Tori Welles and since I am already covering one porn and one hentai later in the series I will not be covering this film.

This song and its bizarre video are most definitely an homage to Russ Meyer’s 1965 cult classic Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The video has a bunch of old cars driving around in the California deserts with go-go dancers, which is basically the plot of this bizarre film. Now I promised I would discuss this film, but first, we need to talk about the star of the film Tura Santana.

Born in Japan she is the daughter of a Filipino silent movie actor and a native American circus performer. During the fallout of World War 2, her family moved to the United States when she was 4 and like many at the time, they found themselves living in one of the many Japanese internment camps in California for over two years. Now you may be thinking “Holy Shit! That’s a crazy back story!” Well buckle up, it gets wild.

“Everyone blames you for being raped, not the rapist”

Once her family was released from the internment camp, they moved to Chicago where Tura dealt with harassment for being a Japanese American in a post WW2 era. Much like her tough character in Faster Pussycat, she had to constantly fight. On her way to school, on her way home and everywhere in between. One day, shortly after her 10th birthday she was kidnapped by five men who beat her, raped her and left her for dead in a Chicago alleyway. A crime that went unprosecuted, which she found out later, due to the judge being paid off. Tura was also punished for “tempting” the men into raping her. Now again you may be thinking “Holy shit! That’s a crazy back story!” Keep your seatbelt on, we’re not to the wild part yet.

After this traumatic event, she started training in martial arts like karate, aikido and judo, earning high rank in a few. She even went so far as to start a local neighborhood girl gang called “The Angeles” that patrolled the mean streets of Chicago making sure that what happened to Tura didn’t happen to any other girl. Her parents eventually sent her to reform school for being a bad kid, but not before they set her up on an arranged marriage at age 13 with a 17 year old man from Mississippi. The marriage didn’t last long and by age 15 she had moved to Los Angeles and used a fake ID to be a burlesque dancer. Now you may be thinking…

Over the course of the next 15 years she tracked down the five men who raped her and armed with her kung-fu skills exacted her revenge on them. "I made a vow to myself that I would someday, somehow get even with all of them," she said in her autobiography and although she never said exactly what happened to those men, she did say "They never knew who I was until I told them."

Holy fucking shit! We talk about actresses that are strong female role models but I swear I never heard any stories about Alyssa Milano starting girl gangs and tracking down dudes and presumably kung-fu-ing the fuck out of them. Tura Satana is THE most badass woman in film history, perhaps all of history.

Tura Satana is sampled with the most memorable line from Thunder Kiss 65 when she says.

“I never try anything, I just do it. Wanna try me?”

Which would make this the perfect time to discuss Faster Pussycat, but before we get there we need to talk about another Russ Meyer film mentioned in the lyrics of Thunder Kiss, Motorpsycho.

Filmed at the same time as Faster Pussycat with some of the same cast, most notably Haji, Motorpsycho is basically a gender swapped version of Faster Pussycat but with a storyline even more bizarre. Now I’m only going to give this film about as much attention as Rob Zombie does when he sings this line in the second verse.

“My motor-psycho nightmare freak out inside of me”

The film follows a veterinarian, Corey, whose girlfriend is beaten and raped by three lunatics on motorcycles. Vowing revenge, he heads to the desert to find them where he is soon joined by a Cajun woman named Ruby (Haji) who is looking for the titular Motor Psychos who killed her husband and left her for dead. Now I am fairly certain that Corey is a veterinarian so they can make sexual innuendo and get away with it. For instance there’s a scene in the desert where he gets bit by a snake and Ruby has to suck the venom out of his leg under his vet guidance. The only problem is he’s grabbing the back of her head and yelling. “Yeah suck it out! Suck it out good baby! Yeah ok, now spit it out baby, spit it out” It’s very sexual.

Overall the movie is pretty dumb. The vet is cheating on his wife with everyone but is hunting down the Motor-Psychos like they hurt the love of his life. The Cajun woman Ruby hates her husband and she insinuates that he’s actually her pimp. When the pair get to the desert they are sidetracked by the snake bite and the motorpsychos end up killing each other. The final surviving Motor-psycho tries to kill Corey in his sleep while he’s hallucinating from the snake bite, he steps on a landmine and explodes. The movie is only 74 for minutes so it’s a good little time waster and when Haji finally appears on screen the movie gets about 10 times better because she’s so damn beautiful.

There is one more movie mentioned in the lyrics of Thunder Kiss ‘65 and it is as dissimilar to MotorPyscho and Faster Pussycat (which I will talk about) as humanly possible and that is the 1988 low budget, horny alien sasquatch film known as Demonwarp.

Oof…

Yeah, uhm, so Demonwarp. Yikes! The movie opens up with some bizarre dialogue about an old man’s mix matched socks, the Bigfoot appears and snatches the old mans daughter. Then a bunch of teenagers show up and start getting naked but one of them came to the woods to kill Bigfoot. The Sasquatch starts murdering everyone and then the old man reappears to set TNT booby traps that Bigfoot disables with a whole lot more nudity. The films heroes eventually track down Bigfoot to the cave he lives in and also find a bunch of zombies.

Wait, what? Zombies? I thought this was a big foot movie not a zombie movie, what gives? Turns out Demonwarp is neither a Bigfoot movie or a zombie movies.

The group of teens track Bigfoot to his cave and kill him, he transforms into one of the teens Dad…or something. He knows him and he cries, that’s all we can confirm. The teens then go to war with the zombies but they are actually aliens coming out of a ship buried in Bigfoot’s cave. I get it now, this is an alien invasion movie?

Wrong! Turns out the alien zombies are actually demons under the control of a satanic priest who feeds people to his demon masters. The teens show up, one transforms into a Bigfoot and another into a zombie just to tie all the story lines together before we finally find out it was all a dream…

…but there is a demon in the dream, but then we find out that is also a dream…

…but just like inception we find out that the dream within the dream was actually just a dream and that the dreamer of this multilayered dream is the dude’s dad or whatever that turned into Bigfoot.

This movie is all kinds of what the fuck, there is a copy of it on YouTube, I highly suggest you check it out, maybe you can figure out what’s going on.

Thunderkiss ‘65 is not the only song on La Sexorcisto that is about hot rods, in fact the very next song on the album is about a hot rod, specifically a Mustang known as Black Sunshine.

The intro of this song sounds like it’s a sample but in reality it’s just Iggy Pop being badass. He delivers the intro and the outro to the song, let’s check out what he has to say in the intro:

Gripping the wheel his knuckles went white with desire

The wheels of his Mustang exploding on the highway like a slug from a .45

True Death: 400 Horsepower of maximum performance piercing the night

This is Black Sunshine

How badass is that? Imagine, it’s 1992, you in an obscure heavy metal band and you get Iggy Fucking Pop to read the most badass poem about a car ever written as the intro to your song. Rob Zombie of course follows up this epic opening with just bizarre absurd lyrics that don’t make too much sense. He does mention the final Hammer horror film, and one of my all time favorites To The Devil, A Daughter which we will get into later in the series, for now let’s talk about the film sampled in the song, yes, it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for, let’s talk about Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

The film follows three go-go dancers Varla (Tura Satana), her girlfriend Rosie (Haji) and their friend Billie (Lori Williams) who are dancing and racing cars in the desert when a young couple arrives in the desert to run time trials in their car. After a brief scuffle, Varla ends up breaking the man’s neck and taking the young girl hostage. They eventually run into an old man in a wheelchair who they decide to rob. They follow him back to his ranch where he lives with his giant dumb son where the two hangout, watch the trains go by and murder women. The old man’s other son Kirk appears and all hell breaks loose as the Go-Go dancers fight each other, the old man and his giant son and finally Kirk and the girl they kidnap. The whole movie is just one big collection of villains doing villainous things to each other with a giant desert fist fight to top it off.

There is a scene in the film where Linda (Susan Bernard), the girl kidnapped by the go-go dancers, escapes and runs for her life. She makes her way out onto the freeway and is picked up by a good Samaritan driving by but she is shocked and horrified to find out that he is actually related to the people she tried to escape from. This is all very similar to when Sally escapes in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre only to find that the local gas station owner is one of the cannibals or the end of House of 1000 Corpses when Denise escapes Dr. Satan but is picked up by Captain Spaulding.

This is an absolutely amazing film unlike anything you've ever seen before. With its cast of bad people doing bad things and no true “hero” for most of the film, it’s easy to see how this was a big influence on Rob Zombie’s films.

As the song Black Sunshine ends we get some more epic spoken word from Iggy Pop as the song fades out:

Finally nothing moves. High noon

Black top rolling below the asphalt drive

A concrete fascination scraping the edge of nothing

This is Black Sunshine

As this article fades out I will remind you to keep a look out for the next installment of this series From the Bowels of Hell! Where we will cover two more White Zombie songs from La Sexorcisto which includes a futuristic dystopian film, a post-apocalyptic dystopian film, a brief appearance from Adam West in a cape and an ever briefer appearance from Bela Lugosi in a cape.

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Written by Bud

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