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The Age of Aquarius at the tail end of the decade is part of Lady Divine's Cavalcade of Perversion, la pyramide humaine collapses before the gasping audience. The reflexive guerrilla spectacle, set up with tents in the park, unveils armpit-lickers, bicycle seat-sniffers and puke-eaters, "we've got it all and we show it all," a couple of beardos tongue-wrestling elicit the loudest jeers. The master of ceremonies (David Lochary) gets the bourgeoisie under the big top, Divine (first seen à la Ingres' Grande Odalisque) rounds them up afterward for a bit of robbery and murder. Increasingly unhinged in Flaming Creatures makeup, she terrorizes the ringmaster into the arms of the peroxide nymphomaniac (Mary Vivian Pearce), her revenge is interrupted by the Infant of Prague and a raging Catholic reverie. The miracle of Wonder Bread and canned tuna, Edith Massey as the Virgin Mary, the Religious Whore (Mink Stole) with the rosary where the sun don't shine. "Think about the Stations of the Cross!" (The capper comes by way of a junkie in church, whose spurting bloody arm at once evokes ejaculation and stigmata.) John Waters keeps accelerating the blasphemous fervor until the heroine slays the perfidious beau, pulls out his innards and engulfs them: "I've experienced raw happiness," she exults like Pasolini's trembling cannibal in Pigsty. Warhol zooms, Eustache grain, Manson slaughter. The pure Dalinian inspiration culminates with the gargantuan crustacean having its way with the ogress in the corpse-strewn living room—the foamy mess left behind meets the camera's eye and cackles, the rest proceeds like Romero's Night of the Living Dead, that other great incineration of what's known as the Sixties. "Till all success be nobleness and ev'ry gain Divine," as the ditty goes. With Cookie Mueller, Susan Lowe, Rick Morrow, Howard Gruber, and Paul Swift. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |