{"id":46191,"date":"2025-07-29T23:30:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T23:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/46191\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T23:30:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T23:30:07","slug":"moving-doc-shows-the-human-side-of-a-badass-b-movie-queen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/46191\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving Doc Shows The Human Side Of A Badass B-Movie Queen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cBeautiful! Voluptuous! Deadly! Vicious!\u201d As a movie star, Tura Satana was hardly prolific, but as a cult cinema icon the former go-go girl was already a legend long before her death in 2011 at the age of 72. Directed by Cody Jarrett, narrated by Margaret Cho<\/a>, and perfectly timed for the 60th anniversary of her standout movie Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! \u2014 in which she plays stunning black-leather-clad bad-ass Varla\u00a0\u2014 this playful but reverent and often quite unexpectedly moving documentary offers a fascinating portrait that reveals some of the late star\u2019s secrets while generating a few new mysteries of its own. The prime audience is grindhouse movie buffs, for sure, but Jarrett\u2019s film has more to talk about than such kitsch as the making of 1968\u2019s The Astro Zombies, raising serious questions about the alarming state of race and gender in postwar America.<\/p>\n

\n\tBoldly, the film gets off to a heavy start, revealing that the Satana \u2014 born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi to a Japanese father and American mother \u2014 was raped by five local men in her Chicago stomping ground, just a few days away from her 10th birthday in 1948. The crime is recounted, in her own words, in chilling detail, but, as Jarrett goes on to show, Satana did not let the event define her. Rather, she saw it as a warning to toughen up and get ready to fight back; after all, internment was very much a recent memory, animosity for Pearl Harbor still hung in the air, and the young Satana knew that signs saying \u201cThis is a white man\u2019s neighborhood\u201d were not intended solely for African Americans.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe assault was so serious, Satana was lucky to survive (enough to get her own back later, in ways the film alludes to only in the most oblique terms), but, in accordance with the times, the men were absolved, and the girl got the blame \u2014 surprisingly, even at home. Though she had a good relationship with her father, Satana\u2019s mother was distant, doing everything she could to erase her daughter\u2019s racial identity, from joining the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses to \u2014 most shocking of all \u2014 taping her eyes open to give her a more western look. Inevitably, Satana was not a grade-A student, and after a stint in reform school Satana became a fairly well-paid burlesque dancer in her mid-teens. Amazingly, her parents approved. \u201cThey wanted that money, but they still didn\u2019t want me,\u201d she notes, adding that they\u2019d married her off at 13, to a 17-year-old boy named John Satana.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs it did in her life, cinema mostly occupies the middle third of the movie, starting with her introduction to Billy Wilder before making her (uncredited) debut in his 1963 film Irma La Douce almost by accident. \u201cI just wanted to screw him,\u201d she claims, adding Wilder to a long list of rumored suitors that include Tony Curtis, Tony Bennett and a young Elvis Presley, who she claimed proposed marriage. Bizarrely, Satana would end up settling for much, much less in her actual love life, belying her ass-kicking image by shacking up with controlling and coercive men who tried, unsuccessfully, to make her turn her back on showbusiness.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe most moving scenes in the movie come courtesy of Satana\u2019s daughters Jade and Lani, who don\u2019t even try to sugarcoat their mother\u2019s shortcomings (\u201cShe wasn\u2019t a \u2018Hey, let\u2019s bake cookies\u2019 kind of mom,\u201d they say, to no one\u2019s surprise). Though by no means a bad mother, they suggest that her mind was elsewhere, and after a series of twists that would have finished off any lesser mortal \u2014 a brutal car crash and a bizarre shooting incident \u2014 Satana finally got her groove back with the arrival of VHS and the re-release of her modest back catalogue. More importantly, Faster Pussycat! \u2014 a flop on its original release \u2014 found a whole new audience in the wake of punk rock and the early days of the gay rights movement, who embraced Varla as a countercultural heroine.<\/p>\n

\n\tGiven that Satana passed nearly 15 years ago, Jarrett was clearly aboard the Satana train well before that, which translates into fine original interview material and impressive archival footage, including Super-8 home movies. Interviewees are good too, from Faster Pussycat! superfan John Waters<\/a> to Dita Von Teese, Peaches Christ<\/a> and former stripper Angel Walker, whose signature act was to light her tassels aflame \u201cthen extinguish the flames by means of strenuous mammary rotation\u201d. Star of the show, though, is Satana herself, living up to Russ Meyer\u2019s famous saying: the sweetest kittens do have the sharpest claws.<\/p>\n

\n\tTitle: Tura!
Director\/screenwriter: Cody Jarrett
Distributor: Quiver Distribution
Running time: 1 hr 46 mins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cBeautiful! Voluptuous! Deadly! Vicious!\u201d As a movie star, Tura Satana was hardly prolific, but as a cult cinema…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46192,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,36383,36384,206,36385,899],"class_list":{"0":"post-46191","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-john-waters","10":"tag-margaret-cho","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-peaches-christ","13":"tag-review"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}