leads. The track was never released commercially, but it did appear in February 1966 as a promotional-only 45 single without a B-side. Reception and influence Box office Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! premiered in Los Angeles on August 6, 1965. Atypically for a Meyer film, it was a box office failure upon its initial release. "When it first came out, it was not successful", said Meyer. "At the time, people didn't understand that women could have a relationship with other women." Critical It was generally dismissed as an exploitative "skin flick" by the few critics who took any note of it at all. John L. Wasserman of the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reviewed a double bill of Faster, Pussycat! and Mudhoney in April 1966, saying that "Pussycat has the worst script ever written, and Mudhoney is the worst movie ever made." Cult status In the years since, the film has been regarded more favorably, gaining in both commercial and critical stature. As of August 2020 it holds a "fresh" rating on film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, with 73% (22 of 30) critic reviews positive. In his review of the film's 1995 re-release, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars. Noted feminist film critic B. Ruby Rich said that when she first saw Faster, Pussycat! in the 1970s she "was absolutely outraged that [she had] been forced to watch this misogynist film that objectified women and that was really just short of soft-core porn." Upon viewing it again in the early 1990s, however, she "just loved it" and wrote a piece in The Village Voice reappraising the film and discussing her change in opinion. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is currently number 674 on the tenth edition of the often-referenced "1,000 Greatest Films" list and 377th on the Sight & Sound "Greatest Films Poll". It is frequently mentioned on lists of the best B movies and cult movies of all time. The film has also been influential on other filmmakers. Writer-director John Waters stated in his book Shock Value that "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future." He later said on its re-release that "it ages like fine wine." Music video director Keir McFarlane acknowledged that a scene in the video for the Janet Jackson