When I look back on it, we should’ve all been locked up. ![]() I do remember some of them running through the apartment screaming. But children always loved Divine, because he was like a clown. I think we covered their eyes for the sex scenes. I once showed it at a children’s birthday party – for the daughter of my casting director, Pat Moran. But I lost every time we were in court for obscenity. The night it opened at the Elgin theatre in New York, my life changed El Topo, the first “ midnight movie”, had just closed there, so it was the perfect place to show it. Even if you hated it, you couldn’t not tell someone about it. People thought he lived in that trailer and ate dog shit.Īs soon as I saw it with an audience, I knew it could be a hit. But after Pink Flamingos, it was hard for him. Eating the dog turd was no big deal there are no camera cuts, you can see it is real. But he used the rage he had from being bullied in high school to make that character. He was a shy man he would never go in drag unless he got paid. It's an acquired taste, but I adore this film.Divine was nothing like that character in real life. It's endlessly quotable, my favourite monologue being towards the end when Divine announces "filth are my politics," and Divine is at her most raucous and risque in this film, which is fascinating for any fans of drag queen legends. The more I think of it, the more I love Pink Flamingos. Multiple Maniacs, Female Trouble, Polyester, etc all have aspects that are grotesque, from people eating their own vomit, rapists with dirty drawers, ugly sex and hardcore drugs - John Waters' taking the taboo, and unexpectedly unpleasant images (before seeing Pink Flamingos, did you ever wonder what a pulsating asshole looked like? No, me neither) and funnelling it into his comedy makes his brand of humour almost like an endurance test for the casual viewer, and makes it the height of excess for his dedicated fans. It does still shock, and I think that the shock factor does contribute to John Waters' trashy sense of style and humour very well. Pink Flamingos is probably the most grotesque John Waters film too, with an infamous scene of Divine eating dog shit, but also the pulsating anus at the birthday party and the death of a real chicken during a sex scene (and the unsimulated oral sex later in the film) all contributes to the film's notorious reputation. It's become a style of comedy performance that we see in pop culture more commonly now, from RuPaul's Drag Race (when the drag queens compete in comedic sketches where over-acting and ridiculous monologues are the basis of humour, upping the camp factor all the way to 11) and even Adult Swim productions like Tim & Eric's Awesome Show Great Job, where humour is found in the excessively absurd and the outright grotesque, similar to Pink Flamingos. It's a little hard to explain, I think, and it's not fair to say it's necessarily just "bad acting" because it's a style present even in John Waters' more mainstream, Hollywood films like Polyester and Hairspray. Most of the time, their performances are over-acted and over-written, creating this strange brand of humour that is as reliant on odd comic-timing and over-the-top dialogue. What I love about early John Waters' films is that they are very poorly made because John didn't know how to make a film but learnt as he went along, making these no-budget outrage-fest comedies that he and his "Dreamlander" friends would love, casting his friends, artists and outcasts as the unlikely stars. I certainly enjoyed it a lot more, and I think Pink Flamingos has more influence to it than simply managing to outrage and offend decades after its midnight movie cult success. Their films are filled with a trashy self-awareness and intense irony, so I thought I would enjoy Pink Flamingos more on a re-watch (it was the first film I heard about of John Waters' because of reading numerous "disturbing movie" lists as a teen). It's outrageous, campy and gloriously tacky. ![]() I haven't laughed so hard for a long time at a comedy film, John Waters' and Divine's voice was just so fascinating to me. Over the years, I've become acquainted with their work as a comedy duo, making great exploitative trashy comedies like Multiple Maniacs, Female Trouble and Polyester. I didn't much care for it, but also at the time I wasn't familiar with John Waters or Divine. When I first saw Pink Flamingos years ago (it's not available physically in the UK after decades of being banned, and now being lost in a limbo without distribution, so I had to watch it online), I found the film shocking and vile.
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