Only John Waters could stage a Charles Manson-style slaughter then think: “This could really do with a giant-lobster rape scene to spruce it up.”
This restored 1970 film is rough around the edges even by Waters’ own lo-fi standards, but it’s still gleefully subversive, outrageously trashy and, possibly, shocking. Shock is very much the name of the game when Divine’s modern-day freak show rolls into suburbia, promising fetishists, a “puke-eater” and “two actual queers kissing”. She later receives a “rosary job” in a church, courtesy of lesbian seductress Mink Stole (a scene you can’t imagine any priest gave them permission to shoot), which leads to a tangle of lurid murder plots.
Some of the camerawork is equally shocking, it must be said, and many scenes ramble on too long, but there’s still the feeling that this is the work of a genuine group of outsiders, rebelling against all society had – bourgeois respectability, hippie values, religion, professionalism – and having a great time doing it.
