john waters

Cuddles Kovinsky as the Ultimate Edith Massey Performance

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The almighty Divine is John Waters’s most infamous collaborator (even if that means her name is unfortunately synonymous with eating dog shit in a broad cultural context). Mary Vivian Pierce is the only Dreamlander (as Waters’s recurring cast is often known) to appear in every one of the director’s features. Mink Stole is, perhaps, the coolest kid in the room, the one with the most adaptable talent & willingness to commit. There’s an argument to be made, however, that Baltimore personality Edith Massey was Waters’s most readily fascinating featured player, his most consistently striking & bizarre screen presence. There’s no one else in all of cinema quite like Massey. The only actor who even comes close is Waters’s idol Russ Meyer’s frequent collaborator Princess Livingston (not surprisingly, the two women were discovered while working as a bartender & a motel manager, not as actors), but even Livingston’s bizarre charisma couldn’t quite match the weird energy & depth of content Massey brought to the screen in her decade-long stint as a Dreamlander. Massey’s odd, snaggle-toothed visage helped define who John Waters is as a filmmaker with a striking, idiosyncratic specificity that makes him my favorite living artist, if not person.

A lot of the shock value humor of Waters’s early, transgressive films often outshines the more even-tempered work he delivered later on in his “mainstream” titles like Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and (the utterly perfect) Serial Mom. Waters is often misunderstood in the context of shock cinema due to his earliest provocations, most notably Pink Flamingos, and the weirder trash-art surreality of his work is sometimes overlooked because of his youthful pranksterism. Massey was with Waters from day one during these formative provocations, putting in the bulk of her work as an actor in the director’s so-called “Trash Trilogy.” Easily, Massey’s most iconic role is her turn as Divine’s mother, The Egg Lady, in the aforementioned Pink Flamingos. The Egg Lady was an underwear-clad humanoid who demanded a constant supply of eggs at all times of the day: a strange, unsettling image that afforded Massey a lifetime of celebrity & provided the name of her short-lived punk band Edie & the Eggs. Massey’s screentime & command of Waters’s strange brand of humor grew in her two subsequent roles as villains in Desperate Living & Female Trouble (two films that are far more attention-worthy than Pink Flamingos, as much as I adore that scrappy filth fest). Massey devours scenery in these two wicked roles, whether she’s coaching her beloved nephew on the lifestyle benefits of “turning queer” or sentencing an entire village to death before her royal firing squad. Much like Waters’s overall aesthetic, however, I’m not convinced that Massey’s work reached its pinnacle in the wild, punk days of the “Trash Trilogy”. Her work wouldn’t meet its peak absurdity until it was juxtaposed against the much more mundane avenues of suburban America (and because we’re talking Waters here, I guess that specifically means suburban Baltimore).

The film that bridged these two halves of John Waters’s career, the trashy & the suburban-surreal, was his 1981 feature Polyester. Presenting Douglas Sirk by way of Russ Meyer, Polyester is a wonderfully strange slice of American pie, one molded & poisoned by melodramatic fits of adultery, alcoholism, teenage delinquency, and sexual perversion. Both halves of Waters’s career have endless merit in my eternally gushing eyes & it’s wonderful to watch the way Polyester can teeter totter on both sides of that divide without ever losing track of what makes either half special. Additionally, this is where I find Edith Massey’s most outrageous, knee-slappingly funny performance to be. Massey’s performance as Cuddles Kovinsky is her finest work as a Dreamlander, a true tour de force of delightfully terrible acting that somehow steals a film from a top-of-her-game Divine, which is no small feat. Watching Massey do her weird, off-putting thing in films like Pink Flamingos & Desperate Living is one thing, but her transgressive screen presence made total sense in the context of those films’ early punk depravity. In Polyester, she’s presented as a normal human being, an upstanding member of regular society, and it’s an outrageously ill-fitting role for a foul-mouthed, snaggle-toothed bartender with her braying style of line delivery to fill. Waters & Massey both knew exactly what they were doing when they airdropped Cuddles Kovinsky into an unsuspecting suburbia and it ended up being both a pivotal turning point in Waters’s trajectory as a filmmaker as well as the pinnacle of Massey’s work as a Dreamlander. Unfortunately, it would also prove to be their final collaboration due to Massey’s escalating health problems and inevitable death.

Cuddles Kovinsky is a wealthy heiress & former housekeeper of Divine’s much put-upon housewife archetype Francine Fishpaw. As Francine’s life spins out of control due to her teenage children’s hedonism & her husband’s flagrant adultery, Cuddles’s own path hits a rags to riches upswing. Cuddles lives the lavish fantasy of the nouveau riche, traveling around Baltimore in a limousine with a boy toy European driver behind the wheel, shopping for fashion’s high end designer finery (none of which looks at all natural or comfortable on her weird, little egg-shaped body), rubbing elbows with Baltimore’s country club elite, and just straight up murdering the French language with a never-ending recital of high society clichés & platitudes. Cuddles is the ever-optimistic ying to Francine’s depressive, alcoholic yang and Massey plays her with the exact right tone of complete obliviousness. When Francine passes out on the floor blind drunk her best friend Cuddles mews, “You’re so cute when you’re tipsy!” When Francine attempts to hang herself to end the pain, Cuddles exclaims, “We’re going on a picnic!” Polyester is mostly centered on Francine’s struggle to find happiness in a world where its existence seems unlikely at best, but Cuddles is perfectly happy throughout, concerned only with what she’s going to wear to her debutante ball at the country club. Divine & Massey’s performances compliment each other nicely, but it’s near impossible to take your eyes off Cuddles anytime she graces the screen. Even her over-the-top pantomime reactions to every syllable of someone else’s lines are attention-grabbing in a completely absurd, living cartoon kind of way. Of all of Massey’s wonderfully weird onscreen creations, Cuddles stands out as her most arrestingly unique & distinctly out of place.

I don’t mean to downplay the early works of either Waters or Massey here. The “Trash Trilogy” is pure cinematic chaos, a hedonistic whirlwind of freaks & weirdos I don’t know where I’d be without. I love each of those films & Massey’s performances in them dearly. With Polyester, however, the degenerate duo (with the help of Divine & other Dreamlanders, of course) struck upon something much more subversive. Watching Massey don leather dominatrix gear or wax poetic about the virtues of cocksuckers fit in very closely with what you’d expect from her image & her gaudy barroom personality. There’s something much stranger & more unexpected going on with Cuddles Kovinsky, a character that allows Massey to wear French schoolgirl & horse riding outfits and bray lines like, “There must be a God. Everything is so beautiful!” It’s all too easy to picture Massey fronting a punk band or tending bar, but gleefully praising God & enjoying a picnic in the woods? That’s some weirdly subversive shit. Waters capitalized on that taking-the-circus-to-suburbia aesthetic more or less for the remainder of his career, but unfortunately Massey wasn’t able to come along for the ride. Polyester ended up being Waters’s final collaboration with the actor and after a role in the forgotten schlock title Mutants in Paradise, she died. At least we can say her career as a Dreamlander ended on top, though, as Cuddles Kovinsky brought some of her weirdest, most unexpected energy to the silver screen, helping reshape the trajectory The Pope of Trash’s career would take in the decades to follow. At least we’ll always have Cuddles

-Brandon Ledet

Love (2015)

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three star

Browsing through John Waters’s Top Films of 2015 list (which included personal favorites Tangerine & The Diary of a Teenage Girl! whoo!), I was reminded of a film I was once mildly interested in, but had since completely forgotten: Gaspar Noé‘s Love. I’m not typically a fan of Noé‘s work. His provocateur tendency for shock value & Max Landis-levels of insufferable public persona usually keep me away from rushing to check out his work. Waters has a way of getting me to scope properties far outside my comfort zone, though (Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip comes to mind). His blurb for Love made the film feel near impossible to resist: “The first Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival to show hard-core heterosexual rimming—in 3-D, no less. Thank God for Gaspar Noé.” With a byline like that from The Pope of Trash himself, I figured Love was worth a gander no matter how little patience I have for Noé’s personality.

Love is an erotic drama featuring not one, but two overriding gimmicks: 3D & unsimulated sex. Whether the film is a heartfelt indie drama that approaches high art in its fearless depiction of human sexuality or a well-manicured HD porno with a nice soundtrack is mostly up to the audience. Director Gaspar Noé certainly didn’t distance himself from the porno accusation. He was quoted before the film’s release as saying, “With my next film I hope guys will have erections and girls will get wet.” Sounds like porn to me. In modern film naked breasts are plentiful, but erect penises are . . . hard to come by. Whether or not Noé is aiming for pure shock value, you have to admit that there’s something unique about an art house drama that not only starts with an unflinching depiction of mutual masturbation in its very first frame, but also features an erect penis twice ejaculating directly onto the camera lens (“in 3-D no less!”). However, it’s difficult to claim that the film purely exists for titillation. Only 15 or so minutes of the film’s 135 minute runtime are hardcore sex (though those 15 minutes obviously make a massive impact) and the drama that surrounds that pornographic material is far too sad to be sexually stimulating. The truth is, of course, that Love exists somewhere between those two extremes, high art & cheap porn, and that push & pull is partly what makes the film an interesting work.

The trouble with Love, unfortunately, is that its central drama isn’t nearly as engaging as its hardcore 3D sex gimmick. Noé positions himself as something of an indie circuit carnie huckster here: he promises the greatest show on Earth with a cavalcade of fleshy delights, but once you’re in the tent he has already separated you from your dollars & has very little pressure to deliver the goods. Our fearless protagonist in this particular 3D sex circus is a selfish asshole of a film student emotionally stuck between two women he doesn’t deserve: the mother of his child & an ex-girlfriend he cheated on to produce that child. When he discovers that his ex (who has a history of self harm & substance abuse) has been missing for months, he takes a drug-addled trip down memory lane, ignoring his current family unit so that he can mentally relive his glory days of vicious break-ups, drug-fueled arguments, and, of course, rampant forays into sexual bliss & discord that he experienced with the one who got away. He imagines that his life would’ve been better if he never split with his now-missing ex, but never takes personal responsibility for how shitty things turned out, when it was most certainly his fault. Worse, his disregard & negativity towards his current relationship shows the pattern repeating itself and when the mother of his child spits “Take care of your past while I take care of your future” it’s all too apparent where their own romantic bond is heading. The sad thing is that he’ll probably regret that break as well & find anyone but he person responsible, himself, to blame for it. His negativity & selfishness are purely toxic. God help anyone who loves him.

It’s just as difficult to pinpoint exactly how you’re supposed to feel about Love‘s protagonist as it is to decide where the film falls on the art/pornography divide. He’s a selfish ass, prone to sexist remarks like “Living with a woman’s like sharing bed with the CIA” or calling the supposed love of his life variations of “whore”, “cunt”, “bitch”, etc. He also uses transphobic language in a scene that felt like it would’ve been uncomfortable as far back as the 90s, but even Noé himself has referred to the actress in that scene as a “tranny” in his interviews. Gaspar Noé aligns himself so closely with the protagonist that it’s impossible to separate them. Murphy is an idealist film student who wants “to make movies out of blood, sperm, and tears” & “make a movie that depicts sentimental sensuality.” I’m not sure Love accomplishes either of those goals (except maybe the part about the semen), but those sentiments really do feel like a mission statement directly from the horse’s mouth. The question is if Noé is living out his own romantic bitterness on screen here or skewering himself for indulging in that bitterness & self-absorption in the first place. I don’t have an answer,but I will say that this aspect of the film isn’t nearly as interesting as its salacious carnie gimmickry. Its story is pitifully thin, drawn out, and overlong. No matter what Noé was trying to say with his romantic navel-gazing, what he ended up proving was that the least interesting thing about Gaspar Noé films is Gaspar Noé himself.

By all means, Love shouldn’t be a likeable film. Its director is something of a self-indulgent ass. Its acting isn’t anything special, which is a major problem for a romantic drama built on emotional performance. Its dialogue can be laughably awful, especially in Murphy’s internal monologues that include statements like “I’m a loser. Yeah, just a dick. A Dick only has one purpose: to fuck. And I fucked it all up.” Ugh. Its electric guitar solo soundtrack often spoils the mood of its erotic moments with unbearable cheese. Themes are drilled home in obvious, self-congratulatory ways, such as when a title card explains the definition of Murphy’s Law (because the protagonist’s name is Murphy! get it?!). Still, Noé sets this paper thin, self-indulgent narrative to an interesting enough visual language that it’s impossible to brush it off entirely as an empty exercise. Beds are colorful voids playfully shot form above as the hardcore sex sessions they host play out in a frank, striking manner. The film’s drug use isn’t particularly interesting by its mere existence, but they do lead to interesting psychedelic images made of flashing lights & 3D ejaculate that afford the film a unique look. The same dream logic of haunting memories that elevated the relatively week narrative of the VHS slasher Sorority House Massacre work their wonders here in an interesting way as well. A tour through a European swinger’s club is treated with the same sex  church reverence as the gorgeous Atlanta strip club sequence of Magic Mike XXL. The stark, alternating lights of dance clubs & bedrooms can be downright hypnotic. Love might be riding on the novelty of its hedonistic 3D sex gimmick, but it does it well enough not to lose your attention before the credits roll.

If Gaspar Noé was trying to break any special sort of ground here, I don’t believe he accomplished his goal. Much like history’s first 3D feature film, Bwana Devil, Love talks a big game about delivering a one of a kind spectacle, but ultimately ends up feeling like so, so many works that came before it . . . just in 3D. I’m not sure, for instance, that the world needed another indie drama about how monogamous jealousy & fear of polygamy can ruin long-term relationships. That story’s been told before with much more interesting nuance in its character & narrative beats. As far as the hardcore, unsimulated sex goes, 2014’s French sex thriller Stranger by the Lake indulged in the same pornographic impulses, but had a lot more to say about the push & pull between lust & companionship. I honestly believe that John Waters has made the best case for Love’s position as a groundbreaking work of cinema. It truly is “The first Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival to show hard-core heterosexual rimming—in 3-D.” That much is true (although it’s possible Mr. Waters mistook some of the film’s cunnilingus for rimming). Even if that’s all the film accomplished I still enjoyed moments where it desperately reached for more, Gaspar Noé‘s obnoxious personality notwithstanding.

-Brandon Ledet

40 Indignities I Suffered to Watch John Waters’ Cameo in Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip (2015)

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John Waters is my favorite director of all time. He may even be my favorite human being of all time. His own personal sense of irony & self-amusement knows no bounds, though, which is how I ended up in a movie theater in the middle of the afternoon watching the fourth live-action Alvin & The Chipmunks feature, Road Chip, despite having never seen a Chipmunks movie prior. Much of the Internet was freaking out over the weekend about Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which is an undeniable phenomenon, but there was also a lot of confused excitement about John Waters, who is his own kind of phenomenon, appearing in the latest Chipmunks feature.

At first the John Waters/Chipmunks connection may seem a bit arbitrary & absurd, but the two entities aren’t entirely unrelated. For instance, I’ve never seen a Chipmunks movie before, but I do remember a trailer for one of the earlier entries (possibly the first?) involving a gag in which one of the Chipmunks eats a turd (because who wouldn’t love to see one of their favorite childhood cartoon characters do that?). Of course, this gag parallels one of Waters’ more infamous stunts: the time he filmed Divine eating dog shit at the end of his gross-out trashterpiece Pink Flamingos. I could’ve saved you the gruesome details of that connection just by informing you that Waters is an outspoken fan of the Chipmunks & probably simply requested to appear in a cameo for the franchise, but where would be the fun in that?

I am going to save you the emotional turmoil of actually watching Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip by describing here the entirety of John Waters’ brief scene in the film. He appears as himself, flying first class alone on a flight to Miami. Alvin, the star chipmunk, sloppily eats a plate of spaghetti or some such next to Waters, who feigns being disgusted. Alvin asks something to the effect of, “What’s the matter, you’ve never been on a flight with a chipmunk before?” Waters scoffs, “Actually, I was on on a flight with the Chipettes [more on them later] and they were ladies.” Alvin then closes the exchange with the punchline, “Don’t you judge me. I’ve seen Pink Flamingos.”

And that about wraps it up. In order to witness this brief exchange, which is admittedly pretty cute, I suffered through a 90 minute Alvin & The Chipmunks feature I could’ve happily died without ever seeing. There were too many indignities to count haunting this embarrassment of an experience, but I’ll do my best to list as many that come to mind below. Please do not repeat my mistake. Love yourself.

1. Purchasing a ticket for Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip. I currently work at a movie theater, so my ticket was comped, but still. It was mildly embarrassing to have to ask for one adult ticket for Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip in the middle of a rainy afternoon. Funnily enough, in Waters’ interviews about his cameo in the film, he expresses his delight about when he’ll be able to see the film in the theater, since he’ll have the perverse delight of requesting one senior ticket for Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip. I guess it’s a pleasure that improves with age.

2. Watching Road Chip alone among parents & young children. This sometimes feels awkward for me in children’s movie screenings, especially as an adult male. I feel like I’m always giving off at least low-level creep vibes when I watch kids’ movies alone in the theater. It was especially undignified this time, though, because the movie was for a very young audiece. Like, babies.

3. Watching two advertisements for Road Chip prior to the film beginning. In ads for the Road Chip soundtrack & a Road Chip-themed gift card, scenes from the film I resigned myself to sitting down & watching were sadistically warning me of what was soon to come. It was redundant at best, hopelessly cruel at worst.

4. A young child’s forced laughter. Okay, this one kinda makes me out to be a monster, but hear me out. Since the pint-sized audience at my screening was so young, just barely outside of baby range, I ended up seated near a super young child who had no business being in a movie theater. Instead of really watching or interacting with the movie, the kid was faking loud laughter at very odd, arbitrary moments in order to get a reaction out of their very patient, willing-to-please father. I’m not faulting the kid at all for trying to have a good time, but there was something about their loud, forced, fake laughter that rang a little too true to my own experience of desperately trying to find some amusement in a film I also had no business watching.

5. The Chimpunks’ awful voices. I mean, there was a reason I avoided the first three Alvin & The Chipmunks features. Their auto-tuned helium voices are annoying enough in the short-form ads. Experiencing them for an entire full-length feature was near torturous.

6. Feminized versions of Alvin & The Chipmunks. For some reason, this franchise (and possibly its animated source material?) decided it needed female versions of each of the Chipmunks just to wear cute clothes, suggestively gyrate their hips to dance music, and flirtatiously remind you of the meaningless of existence & the random cruelty of life & the universe.

7. A “music by” credit for Mark Mothersbaugh. It’s not enough that my favorite director of all time has a cameo in this film, I also have to deal with the fact that the front-man for my favorite band of all time was even more heavily involved? I know Mothersbaugh has been doing this kind of thing for decades,  but that’s still rough.

8. A cameo from LMFAO’s Redfoo. I can’t tell if this cameo makes Waters’ contribution more or less subversive, but it hurt too watch either way.

9. Urban line dancing.

10. Country line dancing.

11. A fart joke about “pizza toots”.

12. The Chipmunks butchering Gloria Estefan’s “Conga”

13. The following line [delivered by a Chipmunk to their “dad” Dave]: “Any girlfriend of yours is a girlfriend of ours.”

14. The multiple weird insinuations about whether Dave is The Chipmunk’s “real” father or adoptive father.

15. A Chipmunk butchering Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”

16. Being tricked into watching American Idol.

17. Having suffered through the film’s ad campaign frequently enough to recognize that there were gags from the trailer missing in the film.

18. “Dave liked it & he’s gonna put a ring on it.”

19. Watching comedy greats Retta, Jennifer Coolidge, and Tony “Buster Bluth” Hale slum it in larger-than-cameo roles. Hale easily got the worst of it on that front, as he thanklessly plays the film’s antagonist & The Chipmunks’ ever-thwarted foil.

20. The implication that Alvin has watched Pink Flamingos.

21. “I have a very particular set of skills.” Can we retire this reference now?

22. The Chipmunks butchering The Dixie Cups’ [and many others’] “Iko Iko.” This one actually hurt the most out of all the auto-tuned karaoke in the film. It’s a New Orleans classic, a song I grew up loving. And now it’s been soiled.

23. An extended tangent filmed in New Orleans. This included a cleaned-up version of Bourbon Street busking, off-season Mardi Gras beads, a “New Orleans jazz parade”, and a thick-accented local yokel in a mumu demanding that the out-of-towners drink her moonshine.

24. A second-line themed cover of “Uptown Funk”.

25. A gag in which Hale takes a nut shot.

26. A gag in which a parrot shits on Hale’s shoulder.

27. Beats by Dre ad placement.

28. Chuck E. Cheese ad placement.

29. An honest-to-God Santigold song on the soundtrack. Her last record, Master of My Make-Believe, was really fantastic stuff, but it was released over 3 years ago and I feel like I’m just starting to hear her songs in various movies & advertisements. I’m glad Santigold’s getting paid for her legitimately awesome music, but I had no interest in hearing songs I actually like in this film.

30. “Teens today” social media shaming.

31. A false death crisis following a car accident. Oh man, that character totally died, which is a bummer. Except that they’re fine, which is awesome! It’s a common trope in a lot of recent media, one I can’t help but dwell on thanks to critic Tasha Robinson’s excellent piece on The Disney Death.

32. A “Turn Down for What” dance break.

33. A mostly-wasted Taylor Swift archetype.

34. An original song sung at the climax that included a rap breakdown.

35. “Does this look like a face that would survive prison?”

37. A who-cares romantic subplot.

38. A legal proceeding conclusion that recalls the gloriously idiotic conclusion to Mac & Me, except way, way less fun.

39. Finding myself oddly compelled to stick around for scenes playing in tandem with the final credits to receive closure on Tony Hale’s storyline.

40. Three separate incidents of Dave screaming, “Alvin!”. One would’ve been a decent callback. Two is an understandable indulgence in excess. Three is cruel. There’s no need for three “Alvins!”, just as there’s no real need for four Alvin & The Chipmunks movies, but here we are.

I love John Waters with all of my heart, but I can’t say that the emotional toll of these 40 indignities were worth the comedic payoff of his brief cameo. I hope he had fun filming the scene & I hope he has even more fun ordering his senior citizen movie ticket as soon as he has the free time. That’s the only good thing that could’ve come from this. I had no business being there.

-Brandon Ledet

Desperate Living (1977)

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fourstar

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Full disclosure: I may have implied I knew more about the John Waters canon than is strictly accurate in my review of Polyester. The truth is that I saw (the intentionally filthy and shocking) Pink Flamingos and Mondo Trasho in high school eleven years ago, and have randomly seen both Cry Baby and Hairspray a few times each, although even I, with my limited knowledge, know that these two are not really indicative of Waters’s body of work (a friend once told me that Cry Baby is a straightforward representation of the genre that Hairspray was meant to satirize, which seems accurate to me). I also once started watching Pecker, but the VHS broke about thirty minutes in, so I can’t speak to that movie, really. That was my entire experience with the Waters oeuvre until a few weeks ago, and I may have made some not-quite-accurate generalizations in my previous review. Feel free to point out my errors in the comments!

In the meantime, it was my pleasure to see Desperate Living, Waters’s 1977 picture starring Mink Stole as decoy protagonist Peggy Gravel. Peggy was recently released from a mental institution, and now her frayed nerves mean that she’s having trouble readjusting to family life as she shrieks and screams her way around her home until she and her housemaid Grizelda (Jean Hill) accidentally kill Peggy’s husband Bosley (George Stover, of Blood Massacre). The two of them then flee town and, after an encounter with a policeman (Turkey Joe) who forces the two women to give him their underpants and kiss him (gross), end up in a shantytown called Mortville, where many vagrants and fugitives make their home under the cruel rule of Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey), a nightmare Disney queen who forces her citizens to obey her every whim, no matter how silly or dangerous. Peggy and Grizelda take shelter in a ramshackle building–like all buildings in Mortville other than Carlotta’s palace–owned by Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe), a genderqueer former wrestler, and her sexy girlfriend Muffy St. Jacques (real life Mafia moll Liz Renay). When Carlotta’s daughter Coo-Coo (Mary Vivan Pearce) tries to run off with her lover, a garbage collector who resides within Mortville’s nudist colony, Carlotta has her guards kill the man. Peggy, who has “never found the antics of deviants to be one bit amusing,” joins Carlotta in her quest to kill all of Mortville with an unholy elixir consisting of rabies and rat urine.

Desperate Living starts off in a more objectively humorous place than the film ends, as we follow Peggy’s histrionic reaction to some normal (and some questionable) child behaviors before Grizelda smothers Bosley with her massive rear end. Once the action leaves the Gravel household, however, all sorts of horrible things happen that require a certain appreciation for filth-as-comedy. Firstly, the encounter with Sheriff Shitface is objectively disturbing, as he sexually assaults two women at gunpoint; once in Mortville, the whims of Queen Carlotta are more subdued if more deadly (forcing everyone to put their clothing on backwards and walk in reverse motion is harmless, even if her orders of execution are creepy). Still, there are a lot of laughs to be had here if you are in the right mood, and there’s also a lot of fetish fuel if you’re into that sort of thing (Ed Peranio’s striptease as Lieutenant Williams manages to be both silly
and sexy), what with all the mesh shirts and leather pants floating around. Still, this is not a movie for the weak of stomach, or anyone who would find the detachment of a vestigial phallus odious. Recommended for lovers of the weird.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Polyester (1981)

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fourhalfstar

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Polyester was not John Waters’ first feature, but it was the first to garner any significant amount of mainstream interest. Following his first forays into feature films with Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs, Waters worked on what he dubbed the Trash Trilogy, consisting of Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living. To say that these films pushed the envelope and seemed design to induce faintness and nausea is an understatement; to say that they were in poor taste, or were made as an exploration of “good bad taste,” does the films’ shameless vulgarity a disservice. The films were confrontational, characterized by notoriety, and generally just gross for the sake of it.

Polyester was an altogether different animal. It still featured many of the actors who made up Waters’ “Dreamland” repertory troupe, but it features a much more linear narrative than his previous works. Taking its inspiration from films of the exploitation genre known as “women’s pictures,” especially those of Douglas Sirk, the film concerns the dissolution of the family unit of overweight matriarch Francine Fishpaw (Divine). Francine discovers that her husband Elmer (David Samson), the proprietor of an adult movie theater, is having an affair with his secretary Sandra (Mink Stole); her mother (Joni Ruth White) is an abusive cokehead obsessed with wealth and class; her daughter Lu-Lu (Mary Garlington) is sneaking out to have sex with her delinquent greaser boyfriend Bo-Bo (Stiv Bators); and her son Dexter (Ken King) is a glue-sniffing weirdo who has been skipping school in order to stomp the feet of unsuspecting women, dubbed the Baltimore Foot Stomper by the press. Her only friend is Cuddles (Edith Massey), the Fishpaw’s (possibly mentally handicapped) former housekeeper who is now quite wealthy after inheriting a tidy sum from another family for whom she once worked as a domestic servant. After her children face their own demons and become (relatively) well adjusted citizens, Francine struggles to overcome the alcoholic despair into which she has fallen, finding a new potential love in Todd Tomorrow (Tab Hunter).

The Baltimore of Polyester is a wondrously delirious place, full of odd characters and strange circumstances. From the nuns at the unwed mothers’ home that Lu-Lu is sent to, who force the pregnant women in their care to participate in a hayride in the middle of a thunderstorm, to the older choir woman who commandeers a bus in order to chase down the delinquents who swatted her as they drove by (ending with her stopping their escape by biting a hole in their vehicle’s tire), every person is an exaggerated caricature of reality. Hyperbole is Waters’ currency, and Polyester is one of the most accessible of his films for a mainstream audience. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the immersive experience he crafted for the movie: the original theatrical release of the film featured interactivity in the form of an “Odorama” card, with numbers appearing on screen to indicate when audience members should scratch the cards and smell the same thing that Francine does. I was lucky enough to attend a screening of the film at the Alamo Drafthouse, complete with a recreation of these cards; more often than not, the scents on the card simply smell like chemicals, but that doesn’t detract from the glory of the attempt. This is a delightfully hilarious movie, and I hesitate to say more in order to ensure that you get the maximum number of laughs from it. Suffice it to say: as long as you don’t take yourself too seriously, you will love this movie.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond