The new restoration of 'Multiple Maniacs' offers yet another insane vision from the mind of John Waters.

This week, Jacksonville’s Sun-Ray Cinema is screening a restored print of John Waters’ 1970 anti-establishment film Multiple Maniacs. Waters, who’s somehow become a household name, of sorts, despite—or perhaps because of—his eccentricities, is best known to mainstream audiences as the director of Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby (1990) and Serial Mom (1994) (all of which I’ve reviewed on this blog). Multiple Maniacs is his ode to the Manson family, so-to-speak, a movie that’s tickled with its own transgressiveness. Waters was so fascinated and disturbed by the murders of Sharon Tate and six others (in August 1969) at the hands of the infamous Manson cult, that he attended the trials of guru Charlie (aka Jesus Christ) and his followers, including the three girls who are forever burned in our memories with their shaved heads and the crude crosses engraved on their foreheads: Susan Atkins, Lesley Van Houten, and Patricia Krenwinkel. The film suggests that they've got the wrong people, as Divine later hints that her boyfriend is responsible for the crimes, and even holds up an actual newspaper that reads “Arrest Weirdo in Tate Murders,” just to scare him. (In reality, Waters has become a friend of Lesley Van Houten, who was recently recommended for release by the California Parole Board, only to be turned down by Governor Jerry Brown. You can read about their long correspondence and friendship, and Waters’ convincing argument for why Lesley should be released from prison, in his book Role Models.)

Multiple Maniacs follows The Lady Divine (played by Divine), a woman who dreams of having real success in the performing arts even as she “headlines” off-the-wall free shows featuring “homosexuals, druggies, and freaks.” The M.C. (David Lochary), who's also her (frustrated) boyfriend and manager-of-sorts, stands outside a white tent, shaming passers-by until they break down and enter this traveling carnival of sickos, where they can see horrible things. (You can see the mixture of disgust, fascination, and curiosity in every last one of these ordinary onlookers, even as they snicker and make fun of the freaks on display to them.) Once this troupe of exhibitionist weirdos has accumulated enough audience members, they tie up the terrified crowd with rope and steal their money and jewelry. (Not before concession girls pass out hamburgers for a buck each.)

But there's also a pretty alarming erotic scene in a Catholic Church, where Divine is propositioned by a woman (Mink Stole) who fines confession good for the soul, but not just the soul. If you never got why The Passion of the Christ was ultimately about sado-masochism, Waters will happily offer Multiple Maniacs as another visual aid. 

But even as John Waters venerates bad taste, and exhibits mockery of traditions, he cannot resist reminding us of his considerably wide appreciation of the arts. The makeshift sets (houses of family and friends in Waters' Baltimore hometown) display various movie posters (many of them art house fare from the likes of Ingmar Bergman). John Waters is a man who appreciates the ways that bad taste subverts good taste, even though he's secretly a snob himself. (Well, he's more upfront about it these days, if you pay any attention to his books and interviews.) Waters reads literary fiction voraciously, doesn’t own a television set (or at least, doesn’t watch any TV), and boasts an extensive art collection. You see, John Waters has always maintained a healthy love for the whole spectrum of art and trash, which is why he was born in exactly the right time and place. Multiple Maniacs, a movie that jokingly glamorizes the dregs of society, drags the respectable and the conventional people of the world, kicking and screaming, into its lair and confronts them with what they cannot accept on their own: their own banality, perhaps, or maybe the fact that their form of culture isn’t any more valid than what they consider garbage. 

Multiple Maniacs isn’t likely to be everyone’s cup of tea. At 82 minutes, the movie somehow feels too long, because Waters, when he was making his early films, didn’t always know when to cut a scene. The movie has static moments, but it’s a sight to behold all the same. Divine was always a devoted star, even when his performances registered as mostly amateur work. (He got better and better though, and in Multiple Maniacs his Elizabeth Taylor-vamping occasionally turns surreal.) 

What’s most exciting about Multiple Maniacs, besides the fact that it was the penultimate step toward Waters’ crowning filth-de-resistance, 1972’s Pink Flamingos, is that this movie provides a window into the insanity of the 1960s. All that sizzling, lunatic rage against society has been captured for those of us who can only experience the 1960s by proxy. If the Manson murders drove a dagger into the heart of the Peace and Love movement, Multiple Maniacs was there to record the fall: John Waters has always been able to tap directly into the bloodstream of the here and now: He knows what’s going on in the world, and he filters it through his own deliriously happy vision. The anger and the humor and the irreverence have lost none of their power. Multiple Maniacs is stabby and proud of it. 

With Mary Vivian Pearce.

I Am Divine

I Am Divine explores the life of director John Waters' most conspicuous product, the 300-pound drag queen Divine. Fans of John Waters will surely enjoy this, and people who are interested in underground movies of the 1970s will likely find it very interesting too. I discovered John Waters in a book on midnight movies when I was around 14 years old. At the time I was obsessed with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. This book, which I stumbled across at a wonderful used bookstore in Jacksonville, had a chapter on Night, so naturally I bought it. Once I had gobbled up the chapter on Romero's film, I slowly became interested in the other chapters, each of them dedicated to a different cult classic: The Rocky Horror Picture Show, El Topo, Eraserhead, and Pink Flamingos. I was too young to seek any of these movies out at the time, but I filed them away in my head and planned to eventually see them. (Well, I still haven't seen El Topo or Eraserhead, but I'll get around to it some day.)

It's kind of amazing how something can open up a door to a whole world. Being a fan of Night of the Living Dead is what got me interested in how movies are made. It also inadvertently turned me into a John Waters fan. I don't really like Pink Flamingos. Aside from the unsavory content (including Divine's famous scene where he eats actual dog shit), the movie is actually kind of boring. It's cheaply made (although this is one of its charms, in a way) and stagey. But it's also angry in a very exciting, entertaining way, and Divine, all done up in that red fish-tail dress and that big Elizabeth Taylor wig and that excessive, scary eye makeup, is quite a sight, the biggest and best production value of that film.

What's heartbreaking to discover is the fact that Divine (also known as Glen Milstead) was tormented as a child and a teenager, constantly being harassed and even beaten up at school. He was lonely until he discovered a group that accepted him. The film explores all the ways Divine tried very hard to be loved, to be the center of attention. He wasn't just a drag queen. He made fun of drag queens by becoming the exaggeration of a drag queen. And he also didn't wear his costumes outside of work. When he was off camera, he was wearing regular men's clothing. 

I Am Divine is a difficult movie for me to evaluate critically because I'm so interested in the people involved, and because I am such a fan of John Waters. I'm not sure how someone who isn't into Waters' movies, or someone who is maybe put off by Divine's brash, gaudy mock-offensiveness, would take this loving documentary. And it's extremely hard to objectively say whether I Am Divine is successful as a doc. Seeing all the people who contributed to this, including Divine (via archive footage) and Waters, Tab Hunter, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, and Pat Moran, feels like some kind of cult movie family reunion. 

Now available for streaming on Netflix. 

Cry-Baby

300th review

Cry-Baby (1990) is writer-director John Waters' second mainstream movie, and it's a charming, surprisingly good-natured parody of Baltimore in the 1950s. It's about two rival gangs: the Squares and the Drapes. The Squares follow the rules, the Drapes break them, and goody-goody Allison Vernon-Williams (played by Amy Locane), feels caught in the middle. "I'm tired of being good!" she moans. She's pressured by her grandmother (Polly Bergen) to follow a conventional path. (Her grandma runs a sort of adolescent finishing school where she teaches teenagers the tenets of suburban social etiquette and good taste.)

But Allison is in love with Cry-Baby (Johnny Depp), who represents freedom from conventions. (He's eventually arrested and convicted of "juvenile delinquency!", which I didn't realize was an actual charge.) Basically, Cry-Baby is the James Dean of Baltimore. He's loved by the Drapes and despised by the Squares.

Cry-Baby is a musical, but not the kind where a song interrupts the story every five minutes as padding. Its musical numbers are mostly amusing riffs on 1950s culture, mimicking the songs that were popular then (or in some cases reproducing actual 1950s songs; these are generally the ones performed by the Squares' hilariously unhip all-male quartet, which performs at various Baltimore social functions throughout the movie.) I've never responded to 50s nostalgia. Hoop skirts and Elvis aren't my idea of a good time. But in the world of John Waters, even the 1950s can be entertaining. 

Johnny Depp's performance is wonderfully sincere yet ironic. He's reminiscent of teen idols Sal Mineo and the afore-mentioned James Dean, but he's also subtly funny. Depp had of course become something of a teen idol himself, thanks to the success of his show 21 Jump Street. So playing the lead in a John Waters movie--even a relatively clean-cut one like this--represents an attempt to move away from that image. I'm not sure it worked, because he's so likable in this film, and he certainly hasn't dimmed as a star in the last 20 years. 

The Johnny Depp we get in Cry-Baby is the Johnny Depp I miss. He's not hiding under piles of make-up and a zany wig, or an affected voice, or a character who's completely alien to society. He's a social misfit, to be sure, but he's not pandering to the audience for laughs by being needlessly eccentric. Perhaps he's so appealing to audience members because they find those ostentatious roles (e.g. Willy Wonka, Jack Sparrow) more colorful and therefore more entertaining. But it's become the norm for him to do something commercially weird. (Because, let's not forget, commercially weird is nothing compared to genuine weird, which is why John Waters going semi-commercial was actually a good thing. More on that later.) What has happened in the process of all those oddball commercial roles is the unavoidable plateau: one performance hardly distinguishes itself from another.

Frequently, Waters' movies peter out about sixty minutes in, so I was pleasantly surprised by Cry-Baby, which is perhaps his most sustained movie. Waters was working at his peak, in a sense. He had achieved a little bit of mainstream popularity with Hairspray in 1988 (even though that film wasn't a runaway success), and was given a bigger budget with which to explore his usual theme of social anarchy in the suburbs. But even when his movies run out of steam, they're still a lot more interesting than big, lumbering commercial comedies and musicals. He finds colorful people who aren't all beautiful. He pokes fun at our very conventional discomfort (or is it horror) when we're confronted with the abnormal. 

Cry-Baby has a lot of bizarre characters, most of whom are drawn with love, not scorn. Even the stodgy grandmother is redeeming, allowing her granddaughter to choose the man who loves her the most rather than the one who wants to confine her to a life of suburban drabness. The 1980s represented a sort of neo-50s return to the pernicious rot of banality. Those who find that depressing will likely respond to Cry-Baby, a movie which gleefully disrupts suburban mores. 

With Ricki Lake, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop, Traci Lords, Kim McGuire (who plays a character called "Hatchet Face"), Mink Stole, Patricia Hearst, Troy Donahue, and Joe Dallesandro. 92 min. ★★½

Pecker

Edward Furlong as a budding young Baltimore photographer named Pecker who becomes the latest sensation among the arty metropolitan types after he's discovered by a New York art dealer (Lili Taylor). But fame and fortune completely disrupt his life--and in the process, his work--much to Pecker's chagrin.

In some ways, one might read into Pecker (1998) an autobiographical thread: writer-director John Waters started out making ultra-shocking low-budget films like Pink Flamingos (1972), which celebrated social anarchy and didn't have to adhere to any kind of censorship regulations. They were sensationalistic and edgy and even disturbing. After Waters found a bit of mainstream success with Hairspray (1988), it became harder and harder to make those kinds of movies. (Also, the midnight movie phenomenon of the 60s and 70s was dead, thanks in large part to the emergence of home video. The rules of the game, if not the game itself, had dramatically changed.) So Pecker has a bit of reflective resonance for fans of Waters, in the sense that notoriety and success had some kind of impact on Waters' career. Still, he's managed to make some pretty shocking stuff, and his most recent film (A Dirty Shame) earned an NC-17 rating.

Pecker (the name, by the way, isn't really used as a euphemism for 'penis', although you might have expected this from John Waters), also proclaims Waters' love/obsession for Baltimore, his hometown, which he portrays as eccentric, weird, unironic, and yet somehow beautiful and familiar and accepting. It's the anti-New York. (Pecker takes a picture of his dad, who runs a bar, in front of the cash register, with the 'no sale' sign in view as a joke, and the New Yorkers proclaim it as some kind of haunting celebration of poverty and economic hardship; the dad is dumbfounded at their pretentious ability to over-analyze things. In Baltimore, we take it to understand, things are what they are: weird and even disturbing, yes, but at least they're upfront about it.

Pecker is a bit uneven, but it's got the usual amount of Watersian flare and weirdness. The story, which feels lacking in any real conflict for nearly half the movie, doesn't sustain itself over the 86-minute running time, but Pecker is redeemed by a terrific cast who embody their characters with gusto and their own bizarre form of dignity. They include: Mary Kay Place (as Pecker's mom), Mark Joy (as his dad), Christina Ricci (as his girlfriend, the militant manager of a Baltimore laundromat), Martha Plimpton (as Pecker's big sister, a bartender and MC at a local gay bar), Brendan Sexton III (as Pecker's best friend, a devoted shoplifter), Mink Stole, Patricia Hearst, Jean Schertler, Lauren Hulsey, Bess Armstrong, and Mary Vivian Pearce. ★★½

Polyester

John Waters' first sort-of mainstream movie was Polyester (1981), a celebration of everything Waters loves: bad taste, bad melodrama, bad hairdos, and bad people. Divine stars as Francine Fishpaw, a suburban housewife living in Baltimore whose life is falling apart: her sleazy husband, the owner of an adult movie theater, is having an affair with his tacky, obnoxious secretary (Mink Stole), her daughter LuLu (Mary Garlington) is dating a scuzzy punk named BoBo, and her son Dexter (Ken King) is addicted to Angel Dust and has a foot fetish, which has morphed into a penchant for roaming around town stomping on the feet of unsuspecting women.

Polyester is funny up to a point, although it runs out of steam in the last third. It's perhaps a little too easy to turn suburbia inside out, and yet it's still amusing to see it happen, especially by someone like John Waters, who grew up in suburbia and constantly demonstrates his acute familiarity with--and enjoyment of-- the sordid private lives of middle-class Americans. What's most memorable about Polyester is that Waters shot it in "Odorama," a gimmick designed to emulate one of his cinematic icons, director William Castle (who was himself famous for an endless supply of gimmicks geared toward marketing his movies). For audience members to experience "Odorama," they were given a card with 10 "scents" on them, and whenever a number flashed on the screen, they scratched and then sniffed that particular number so they could experience the same smell as the star of the film. You can imagine where that one leads to.

Divine is at her most histrionic, the icing on the cake being her hilarious Liz Taylor wig. Tab Hunter co-stars as Todd Tomorrow, the handsome stranger who happens into Francine's life. With Edith Massey as Cuddles (Francine's only true friend), Joni Ruth White (as Francine's malicious mother), and Stiv Bator. The title song is sung by Hunter, and all the film's music was written by Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of the band Blondie, and Michael Kamen. 86 min. ★★½

Serial Mom

Imagine if suburban moms everywhere just...snapped. All the minutiae of daily life, the endless little grievances of maintaining a home, of being a wife and mother, of putting up with the monotony of the PTA and the neighbors and all the stale, banal conventions of middle American values, building and building until they just couldn't take it anymore. John Waters' Serial Mom (1994), starring Kathleen Turner as a Baltimore housewife, imagines for us. 

Turner plays Beverly Sutphin, whose descent into serial killing starts with a little harmless social anarchy: she's been harassing one of her neighbors (Mink Stole) with obscene phone calls (in a disguised voice). She giggles at the thought of this little secret. The police have been in the neighborhood asking questions, but nobody would ever suspect Beverly. But then, Beverly is angered by her teenage son's math teacher, who thinks he's too obsessed with horror movies and that Beverly is to blame. She backs over him with her car, and soon it seems that anyone who gets under Beverly's skin is a potential victim. Not rewinding your video before returning it to the rental store? Dead. Wearing white shoes after Labor Day? Dead. Beverly can't stop.  There are too many rule-breakers out there who evade any kind of consequences for their utter disregard for the social conventions that matter to Beverly.

Her bewildered family (husband Sam Waterson, adolescent kids Ricki Lake and Matthew Lillard) doesn't know what to do, and meanwhile the police are putting two and two together, waiting until they have enough evidence to nail Beverly for six gruesome murders. (The piece de resistance is when Beverly bludgeons a woman to death with a leg of lamb while "Annie" sings "Tomorrow" on the television set.)

Serial Mom is a bit slapdash, in typical John Waters form, but it's such an audacious little slice of insanity that it's hard to be overly annoyed by its faults. This is, after all, a funny movie about social anarchy. It doesn't hold up very well as a movie (the sense of pacing is minimal, and at times you wish Waters would build things up with more restraint: Beverly is already cuckoo by the time the opening credits finish, so we don't get the pleasure of watching the progression from "normal" to "crazy.") But as a piece of satire on suburban mores, it's pretty watchable stuff, and it certainly taps into the culture's commercialization of crime and criminals. The people's obsession with Beverly and the accusations against her turns--like all American obsessions--into a capitalist endeavor by the end of the picture. She's a celebrity, and Suzanne Somers (who makes a brief appearance) is vying to play her in a TV-movie. And her daughter is even selling shirts and pins with the emblem "Serial Mom" emblazoned on them. Meanwhile, Beverly agrees to act as her own attorney (Charles Manson/Ted Bundy style), and it's fun to watch all the little surprises she has up her sleeve, geared toward winning over the jury.

With Scott Morgan, Walt MacPherson, Justin Whalin, Patricia Dunnock, and Mary Jo Catlett. Written by John Waters. 95 min. ★★½

Hairspray

It was inevitable that filmmaker John Waters, Baltimore's King of Trash, would go mainstream, if only briefly. His Hairspray (1988) is an affectionately kitschy tale of dancing and integration in 1962 Baltimore. Ricki Lake plays the heroine, Tracy Turnblad, who is probably the first fat girl to be the star of any teen comedy. It's a wonderful thing: finally a movie that doesn't glorify skinny little things. It vilifies them instead. Waters revels in the bad taste of middle-class Americans, and even when he's doing it for a mass audience, he manages to be coy and ironic (without seeming mean-spirited, no mean feat.) The mainstreaming of Waters' schtick works for him: it evens out some of the over-indulgent aspects of his brand of filmmaking. Hairspray feels like a movie, where some of his earlier films (such as the notorious 1972 cult film Pink Flamingos) had that insufferable "home movie" feel to them which made watching tedious, even as you waited eagerly for the next shocking moment.

Lake's mother is played by the inimitable Divine, the drag queen who worked on almost every John Waters picture. Divine died unexpectedly, just a week after Hairspray opened. Divine has always imbued Waters' pictures with a sense of legitimate American white trashiness. As Tracy's mom, Divine is quite a showpiece, draped in a moo-moo, sporting a long black wig, and that wonderfully campy, butch persona. Divine's bizarreness keeps Hairspray from ever looking like some benign Hollywoodized teen comedy.

And the supporting cast is equally marvelous and macabre: Sonny Bono (the ultimate used car salesman of cinema) and Debbie Harry (sporting an outlandish blonde wig that transcends the campy fashion that Harry has always brandished as the frontwoman for the punk rock band Blondie) as the villains, Franklin and Velma Von Tussle; Colleen Fitzpatrick as their daughter, Amber (she looks like Kelly Preston), who hates Tracy because she becomes a popular regular on a local TV program called "The Corny Collins Show," whose host (played by Shawn Thompson) is sort of Baltimore's Ed Sullivan (a young Ed Sullivan). Ruth Brown turns in a deliciously fun performance as "Motormouth Maybelle," the black diva who is friends with the "Corny Collins Show" and helps unite the black and white communities with her goofy rhyme-speech. She's a hoot; The always hilarious Jerry Stiller plays Tracy's dad. He has a wonderful kookiness about him that makes him look simultaneously out of it and sharp as a tack; Michael St. Gerard plays Link, the boy who falls in love with Tracy on the dance floor (he looks astonishingly like Elvis Presley, and even played him in the movie Great Balls of Fire!); Leslie Ann Powers plays Tracy's best friend Penny; Clayton Prince as Seaweed; Waters regular Mink Stole plays Corny's assistant, Tammy; and Joanna Havrilla plays Penny's uptight mom, Prudence, who's so terrified of black people that she hands a black man her wallet while walking through the Baltimore ghetto, assuming he's trying to rob her when he isn't.