Directors Index: Waters, John

John Waters' "Female Trouble" is as unique a cinematic viewing experience as anyone is likely to have. It is horridly constructed, crudely edited, poorly shot, horrendously over-acted and badly written, and yet it's the most entertaining bad film since Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space"!

The film stars Divine as Dawn Davenport, a rough young upstart of a Baltimore juvenile delinquent who kicks the plot into motion when she wakes up Christmas morning, and to her horror, doesn't receive Cha-Cha heels from her parents under the tree! "Nice girls don't wear Cha-Cha heels," spout her parents. After an abusive bit of reaction toward her mother, Dawn is off.

Soon, she meets up with a dirty, disgusting old trucker (also Divine!), and they go into a vacant lot and have sex on a dirty old mattress. (Notice the neat detail that the trucker doesn't actually have his pants unbuckled when they're supposedly cumming, as well as the disgusting and unfortunate physical evidence of something on the back of the trucker's underwear - when he does finally undo his pants!).

Dawn grows up and has a daughter, Taffy (the delightful Mink Stole) and raises her on her own. She soon marries a hairdresser whose Aunt Ida (Edith Massey, a longtime friend of Waters) is convinced is a homosexual and who is always being set up on blind dates with flaming young men.

Dawn's delinquency continues into her 20s and possibly early 30s (it's an EPIC!) as she and her high school dropout friends decide to rob people and start a crimewave. Soon, Dawn meets up with the owner of the hair salon, an obviously gay man who is married to a rather hoity-toity woman. They are obsessed with capturing "the beauty of crime" on film and enlist Dawn as their photographic ingenue (Late in the film, Divine looks somewhat akin to a fat version of Amy Winehouse! Uncanny!)...

Meanwhile, Taffy and Aunt Ida both cultivate their individual hatreds of Dawn in their own ways, and I will leave it to you to discover exactly what that entails.

Writer-director Waters ("Pink Flamingos," "Pecker") has never been a particularly adept student of cinema or even an apt director when it comes to simple things like framing, editing, performances, etc. But he can write a script that tells a story with a structure (if a simple one): beginning, middle and end.

This film has some huge (tasteless) laughs as well, including Ida trying to convince a somewhat wayward Taffy: "You don't have to be a Hairy Crishner -- If you change your mind, you can come live with me and be a lesbian!"

My favorite line of this or (possibly) any Waters film has to be, however, when Taffy is exposed to the hairdresser stepfather's penis (which Waters shows as one of two head-on examples of male genitalia in this now NC-17 rated classic). She looks appalled (rightfully so) and a young Mink Stole utters: "I wouldn't suck that thing if I was suffocating and it was full of oxygen!"

Waters' film is ultimately the most entertainingly awful film you're ever likely to see, and that's saying something!

There is quite a difference between a director who seeks bad laughs and one who attains them unintentionally. John Waters stands, alongside his 2004 film, scraping the bottom of the barrel while seeking bad laughs - and failing miserably. This completely unfunny, offensively stupid and ultimately pointless garbage scow of a film is Waters' attempt to regain his title of King of Shock (or is it Shlock?). First, a little history: Waters shot to infamy in the 1970s with films like MONDO TRASHO, FEMALE TROUBLE (which is actually good!) and DESPERATE LIVING. He hit paydirt (cult classic, that is) with PINK FLAMINGOS, his notorious, surrealist excursion into the depths of human depravity. Then came the 80s, where he hit moderate success and mainstream acceptability with films like POLYESTER, HAIRSPRAY and CRY-BABY. In the 90s, he continued in this vein with SERIAL MOM and PECKER before beginning the current decade with CECIL B. DEMENTED. These were watered down Waters, but still better than they needed to be. Unfortunately, along came this execrable (something it would probably enjoy having done to it) wad of cinematic trash. The film is essentially a clothesline from which to hang every goofy, moronic, mildly depraved and ultimately made-up (I think) form of kinky sex and sex play that Waters and his characters can drum up. The plot, such as it is, is about an everyday housewife (the previously inoffensive Tracy Ullman) who gets hit in the head and is revived (and reinvigorated?) by Ray-Ray, the tow-truck guy (Johnny Knoxville from JACKASS), thus sending her headlong into a sea of free sex and hedonism the likes of which her hometown of Baltimore has never seen (even though Waters has made a career the past 30 some years of exposing and exploiting it). This film didn't even make me scoff, I just sat there in dumb silence with a deadpan look on my face: THIS is a FILM?!? By the time David Hasselhoff shows up going to the bathroom on an airplane, resulting in maybe the STUPIDEST deux ex machina ever devised (!), I wanted to go and collect every single DVD and warn people not to watch it or else - what? I'd burn it! But I think that's Waters' point, and it's a vaild one: stupidity, crassness, obscenity, etc. have a place in our culture and our national consciousness and he has as much a right to make such garbage as this as I do to vent my annoyance and, yes, anger at wasting the time I spent (maybe 90 minutes) watching it. That being said, I want to make one thing clear: I like John Waters. Do I admire his craft as a filmmaker? No. Do I think he's a talented writer? Not especially. But I LIKE him. His strongsuit lies in shock value for shock's sake (read: sophomoric, immature jokes and sudden, awkward cuts made to thrust the audience headfirst into something "obscene"). He has the look of the nicest pedophile you'd ever wanna meet. That being said, he should NOT have made this film. Not this way. Not at all. Let's hope he doesn't do it again.