Pink Flamingos/Female Trouble

John Waters is known these days for helming slick satires like SERIAL MOM and CECIL B DEMENTED. Back in the 70s, however, his films were reviled and applauded in equal measures as they gleefully trashed every cinematic taboo known to man.

PINK FLAMINGOS will always be Waters' most famous film. It charts the last days of Raymond & Connie Marble, as they try to rob Babs Johnson (played by 300lb transvestite Divine) of her title, The Filthiest Person Alive.

The Marbles (great name for a band, don't you think?) attempt this by running an underground business that involves abducting young women and having their assistant Channing rape them, thus impregnating them. Nine months later they sell the babies on to lesbian couples.

Meanwhile Babs is hiding from the law in a Baltimore trailer with her son Crackers, friend Cotton and her insane mother, the delightfully strange Edith Massey (the star of the show - would YOU let this woman be in your film?!).

When the Marbles send a female spy to the Johnson camp, Crackers takes her into a nearby barn and rapes her with a live chicken. The girl returns to the Marbles, and reveals that Babs will shortly be holding a secret birthday party for herself. In what is the turning point of the film (ie the moment all of this madness seems to be leading somewhere) the Marbles acknowledge Babs' birthday by sending her a rotten turd in the mail, and the Johnsons swear revenge!

Of course the storyline is ridiculous. But it allows for loads of tastless trashy fun such as: castration;Divine giving his/her 'son' oral sex; dismemberment; cannibalism (albeit brief); the man with the singing arsehole; and, of course, the finale of Divine eating dog poo ... for real.

Fast-paced and filled with a surprising number of superb acidic one-liners, PINK FLAMINGOS is a unique slice of ultra low-budget trash, that pushes the boundaries of bad taste further than almost any film you'd care to mention. It's odd, then, that it never comes across as totally offensive.

Perhaps it's the bubblegum rock'n'roll soundtrack, hysterically bad acting and ridiculous sub-plots (such as egg-crazy Edie's marriage to the Egg Man) that keep the film from buckling under the weight of it's own sleaziness. One things for sure, all of those concerned look they had a heap of fun making this trash.

FEMALE TROUBLE is better made, but less interesting. Darker in tone (it tells the story of a naive girl whose need for attention is exploited by an unscrupulous couple), the film seeks it's shocks from scenes of minor bloodshed - such as the moment of Divine's facial disfiguration.

Basically Divine plays teenaged tearaway Dawn Davenport, who drops out of school and leaves home in search of a new life. On her travels, she is raped while hitching a ride (Divine also plays the rapist). A messy 'birth' scene later, the story then skips a few years to find Divine living in virtual squalor with her daughter Taffy(Mink Stole).

The owners of an exclusive beauty salon convince Dawn she has just the image they need to sell their products, and soon she is obssessed with the idea of becoming a media star - encouraged by her entourage that "crime is beauty" as she makes her way through kidnapping, murder and finally toward the electric chair.

The constant bickering between Divine and Stole becomes unbearable at times, and the film as a whole is too long. It lacks the insane 'fun' element of PINK FLAMINGOS, too, with most of the one-liners carrying a spiteful nastiness within their apparent humour. Having said that, the film does have it's memorable moments - such as the early Christmas morning scene where Dawn flips when she doesn't get the cha-cha heels she was expecting.

Still, if it's low-budget camp sleaziness you're after, this is the ultimate package. The 2 disc set comes complete with remastered anamorphic wdescreen (1.85:1) versions of both films (yes, they're both uncut) and have above-average picture quality considering their origins. Removable English subtitles are available - so you can read the obscenities as well as have them yelled at you.

Each film has over 20 chapters plus the original theatrical trailers, while the FLAMINGOS disc has several deleted scenes including a Manson-esque murder that really should have been left in the film!

Best of all though are the commentary tracks by Waters. I was especially interested in hearing his views on the chicken scene, seeing as though animal violence on screen is rightfully a source of much controversy these days. Waters remains unrepentant, insisting that his chicken got the best of both worlds - it got laid, starred in a film, then was cooked and ate by the crew! Well, he's audacious if nothing else!

The commentaries are informative, witty and surprisingly nostalgic. Waters has a genuine fondness towards these films, and in paticular their stars - his admiration for Edith Massey dressing up in tight spandex in FEMALE TROUBLE is almost moving!

What the average Asian horror fan would make of these films is anyone's guess. They'd probably moan about the non-existent production values, hideous over-acting and lack of FX. What they might fail to see is imagination, wit, energy, and truly transgressive feature-film-making from a time when such things were possible.

The discs come in a fold-out cardboard packaging, and represent 'Volume 3' of an ongoing serious of Waters DVD 2 Disc releases. 'Desperate Living/Polyester' and 'Pecker/Hairspray' are the other two.

Review by Stuart Willis