Tocka

Pink Flamingos by John Waters
screening

 

PLOT SINOPSIS

Renegade filmmaker and noted aficionado of expressive bad taste John Waters exploded into international infamy with this darkly comic, no-budget parade of the perverse (his third feature film, and first in color), in which plus-size cross-dresser Divine stars as Babs Johnson, a flashy criminal on the lam from the FBI who is hiding out in a trailer outside of Baltimore, MD. Accompanying Babs are her mother (Edith Massey), an obese and dim-witted woman who is malignly obsessed with eggs; her degenerate son, Crackers (Danny Mills); and Cotton (Mary Vivian Pierce), Babs' duplicitous "traveling companion" and Crackers' co-conspirator in unwholesome erotic play. While Babs would prefer to be left in peace, she takes great pride in her status as "the Filthiest Person Alive" (an honor confirmed by one of America's sleazier tabloid newspapers), and when Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary) announce their plans to take the title away from her, Babs is not about to stand idly by. The Marbles are a hateful couple who kidnap women, force their homosexual manservant, Channing (Channing Wilroy), to impregnate them, and sell the babies to lesbian couples found unfit for legal adoption; the Marbles then turn the profits back into pornography and narcotics trafficking. Impressive stuff, to be sure, but Babs is not about to take a back seat to anyone in a battle of filth, and when the Marbles throw down the gauntlet, Babs and her family retaliate in a no-holds-barred battle to determine who truly are "the Filthiest People Alive." Featuring murder, bestiality, rape, dismemberment, coprophagia, a dizzying variety of sexual perversions, and a performance of "Papa Oom Mow Mow" you will not soon forget, Pink Flamingos is nonetheless a comedy, and a surprisingly successful one; shot on a budget of only 12,000 dollars, the film has grossed close to ten million dollars around the world, and its success launched John Waters into a career as America's leading authority on poor taste.
 

REVIEW

Punk rock was, among many other things, a call for democratization of popular culture, a declaration that music was something nearly anyone could do if they found the calling, and in many respects, John Waters' Pink Flamingos was a bid to do the same thing for cinema. Pink Flamingos looks like a slightly overgrown home movie, the acting runs from pretty good to one step above junior high drama club, the score is not only comprised of a variety of obscure oldies but obviously dubbed from aged 45's (complete with scratches), and the screenplay has more than its share of holes. But despite it all, Pink Flamingos works, generally because Waters' smart and subversive comic ideas refuse to be held down by the primitive technical means at his disposal. Waters subscribed to the notion that if you had ideas and a camera, then you could be a filmmaker, and never let it be said that John Waters was ever short on great ideas. Waters is not afraid to go for the gross-out (indeed, it's his raison d’être), and Pink Flamingos is his most spectacularly rude film, but his bad taste is at once strange and positively ornate compared to the juvenile teen flick ickyness that would come to dominate film comedy in the 1990s; nearly three decades after it was released, Pink Flamingos' most spectacular moments still inspire a puzzled "What was that?" from first-time viewers. And just as Waters believed anyone with the ideas and the wherewithal could be a filmmaker, the best members of his cast -- Divine, David Lochary, Mink Stole, and Edith Massey -- were "movie stars" waiting to happen, and if they're a bit short on technique, they've got enthusiasm and personality to spare. Most reviews of Pink Flamingos focus on the film's ultra-black humor and dizzying bad taste, but what truly makes the film special is John Waters' unexpectedly intelligent and idiosyncratic humor, and his liberating willingness to try anything in the name of filmmaking; he may have made better movies, but he never stated this position on bad taste and stubborn independence with more gleeful vehemence than here.
 

CAST
Divine	Babs Johnson
David Lochary	Raymond Marble
Mink Stole	Connie Marble
Mary Vivian Pearce	Cotton
Edith Massey	Mama Edie

PRODUCTION CREDITS
John Waters	Director / Producer / Screenwriter / Editor / Cinematographer