Rating: n/r (Note: I'm refusing to rate this movie, just like I refuse to rate Pink Flamingos, because I know it bugs my brother.)
Plot: A woman and her obese maid kill the former's husband and have to flee to Mortville, a town made from garbage and ruled by an evil queen.
I don't suppose this trashy fairy tale is going to appeal to that many people. Movies with lines like these generally don't:
"I'd like to stick my whole head in your mouth and let you suck out my eyeballs." (This one provided by an actor named Turkey Joe who plays a cop about as well as you'd expect somebody named Turkey Joe to play a cop. Sadly, this is his only role. He gets to wear women's undergarments and say, "I like the feel of nylon on my big butt.")
"You can like my royal hemorrhoids, you fat pig!"
"I'm so hungry I could eat cancer."
"I'm working hard all day and you're in there fucking midgets."
"Get off me with those semen-stained hands, you big ape."
"It'll be like having a Barbie doll crotch!"
Actually, Barbie Doll Crotch would be a helluva band name.
The movie also has Liz Renay as Muffy St. Jacques. Renay was in The Nasty Rabbit, but she's a lot more naked in this one. And it's a lesson in how you have to be careful what you wish for, I guess. And yes, friends, I did wish for it. I was in a mood. There's a scene where she displays her orgasmic acting chops which has to be one of the worst in movie history. Well, Queen Carlotta, played agonizingly by Edith Massey, also has a magically glorious sex scene. She's hot anyway, a woman who's got almost all of her teeth, but when she exclaims "Oh, look at those balls! Oh, look at that pelt!" before engaging in coitus and screeching "Get it! Get it! Get it!"? It's enough to ruin a person's sex life, I think. Quite a bit of sex in this movie, but it's all the kind of sex Christians warn kids about in their attempts to make it seem like the greatest of sins. There's some lesbian action with Jean Hill--Grizelda--nude except for a pair of Converse All-Stars that will have you thanking God even if you are an atheist. More titillating lesbo action occurs after a character's sex change, and that combines the act with puking and a woman begging to cut the thing off followed by scissors and a dog licking the member. And something called "pecker tracks." Oh, crap. I probably should have preceded all that with a spoiler alert. And how about Wrastlin' Rita's costume, complete with what I believed to be a comical vagina? To me, this seems like Waters was making too much of an effort to shock everybody, and it comes less naturally than Pink Flamingos. It's fairly entertaining, however. What other director is going to start with opening credits over the consumption of what I think was a fried squirrel, throw in another brilliant one-off performance by a guy named Willie Brooks who is selling buys (brilliantly), have Mink Stole screaming every single one of her lines at the top of her lungs and still managing to be a few notches below the intensity of Faye Dunaway's Joan Crawford, include a character named Big Jimmy Dong, and have somebody credited as "Baby in the Refrigerator"? That's Damien Overholser, and the early role was not the start of an acting career at all. There's also some really weird sets, random color and crap that's kind of like a psychedelic Sanford and Son or something. It's much more elaborate than anything in Flamingos with some almost-cool imagery in the shanty town sanitarium of Mortville, a place with no toilets and a place that looks like the type of place with no toilets. Some weird music perfectly accompanies the weirdness of it all. It all does get a little boring, so I had to invent a new game to keep myself entertained, a little game called What Would Be the Worst Way to Die? Here, you can play a round, all with choices I grabbed from Desperate Living:
What would be the worst way to die?
A. Smothered by a large African American woman
B. Fork in the hand
C. Drowning in dog food
D. Having a car window rolled on your neck
E. Bludgeoned and eye-gouged with a heel before being stepped on
You know what to expect going in to an early John Waters' movie. Dog roadkill shots, Nazi references, a Charles Manning painting, some kind of cooked dog, forced roach eating, puking, nude volleyball, implied necrophilia, foaming at the mouth, and a little cannibalistic cherry on the top. For Waters' fans, I'm not sure what else you could ask for. For anybody else? Well, I'd recommend you stay away.
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