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Roasted rodent on silver plate announces the kinship with Salò during the opening titles, and then there's A Woman Under the Influence compressed into eight minutes of matchless Mink Stole caterwauling in suburbia. ("How can you ever repay the thirty seconds you have stolen from my life," she screeches at the poor soul who dialed her number by mistake.) Home is a husband crushed by the outsized servant (Jean Hill), law is a patrolman rolling on the ground in confiscated lingerie, sanctuary is Mortville the colony of misfits. "I ain't your maid anymore, bitch. I'm your sister in crime!" The vexed dyke (Susan Lowe) and "the Dog Food Murderess" (Liz Renay) receive the fugitives in squalor, Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey) reigns with a phalanx of leather-boys. (The artifice of cardboard towers and drawbridges curiously anticipates Rohmer's Perceval, paintings of Charles Manson and Idi Amin adorn palatial walls.) The housewife surrenders to Sapphic contortions ("If it's good enough for Gertrude Stein...") but eagerly joins the despot, Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce) triggers the uprising. "I have never found the antics of deviants to be one bit amusing." John Waters at his most vehement and rigorous, just the revolting revolution needed for the pigpen of fairy-tales. Romance with the garbage man is curtailed, Backwards Day is endured, a plague of rabies is unleashed by Your Royal Hogness. The sex-change surgery is conducted at gunpoint, scissors come in handy for the impromptu reversal: "Now I won't have any organs. It'll be like having a Barbie Doll crotch." An eyeball squished in the wrestling arena, a bullet fired into fascism's rectum, a palette of puke sustained throughout. Godard's Weekend at the close and no mistake. "Royal proclamation number one: Kiss my ass!" With Cookie Mueller, George Stover, Turkey Joe, Ed Peranio, George Figgs, Channing Wilroy, Marina Melin, and Sharon Niesp.
--- Fernando F. Croce |