Baltimore native John Waters is filmdom’s pencil-mustached titan of trash who has spent a lifetime of dumpster-diving into a vat of bad taste, sleaze, kinky gross-outs, over-the-top camp, maudlin melodramatics, sick jokes, taboo sexuality, vulgarity and bizarre personalities. At least he has a fabulous sense of humor. The director is a New York University film school dropout who instead became a scholar of transgressive, envelope-shredding cinema, influenced by the directorial likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Federico Fellini, William Castle, Douglas Sirk and Ingmar Bergman. Early on, Waters assembled a stock company of players from suburban Baltimore who he would the Dreamlanders, including Mink Stole and Edith Massey.
But Waters would find his true muse and favorite leading lady in his childhood friend, Glenn Milstead, a drag queen whose alter-ego was known as Divine. When Milstead died at age 42 from an enlarged heart in 1988, Waters’ output went more mainstream, with brand-name actors like Johnny Depp and Kathleen Turner starring in his films. But without the presence of Divine, Waters lost some of his outsider edge. The last film he helmed was 2004’s “A Dirty Shame,” which earned an NC-17 rating. In 2008, he tried to make a Christmas film for children, “Fruitcake,” but the company who backed it went out of business.
He has other creative outlets, such as photo-based art and installations that display a sense of humor. Waters also tours with his annual Christmas show that began in 1996. One of his more quirky outlets was when he went on a cross-country hitchhiking trip in 2012, and wrote about his encounters in his 2014 book, “Carsick.” Waters also acts, most recently playing one of his idols, gimmicky B-movie king William Castle, on TV’s “Feud.”
In honor of this one-of-a-kind auteur, here is a ranking of all of his 12 films ranked from worst to best, including “Pink Flamingos,” “Hairspray,” “Cry-Baby” and “Serial Mom.”
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12. MONDO TRASHO (1969)
Image Credit: Courtesty of Film-Makers' Cooperative Starring: Divine, Mary Vivian Pearce, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Margie Skidmore.
A surreal plunge into urban seaminess that is light on dialogue begins with chickens getting their heads chopped off and a blond bombshell (Pearce) being seduced by a hippie foot fetishist. Meanwhile, Divine drives around Baltimore after running over the bombshell while being repeatedly visited by the Virgin Mary. Waters admits this is his least favorite movie and that it should have been a short. “Mondo Trasho,” which cost slightly over $2,000 to make, is little seen since no licensing fees were paid to use the songs on the soundtrack, which include “Jack the Ripper” by Link Wray and the Ray Man, “Short Shorts” by The Royal Teens and “Strangers in the Night” by Frank Sinatra.
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11. MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970)
Image Credit: Courtesy of New Line Cinema Starring: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Edith Massey.
Lady Divine is the impresario of a traveling freak show called the “Cavalcade of Perversion,” featuring fetish acts and oddities like a puke eater (don’t worry, it’s creamed corn). Instead of charging a fee, performers chase down pedestrians and force them to attend. At the end, Divine robs them at gunpoint. Then she gets bored and decides to murder the audience members instead. Shocking incidents stack up and mayhem ensues, including Lady Divine being raped by glue sniffers, an act of anal penetration with a dildo and a rosary employed in a very unholy way. Oh, and a cheating husband is eviscerated and his organs eaten. Divine is ultimately raped by a 15-foot giant lobster named Lobstora. The film ends with the National Guard firing at Lady Divine as Kate Smith sings, “God Bless America.” A “Baltimore Sun” critic declared the film “thoroughly disgusting” but also “quite funny at times.”
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10. DESPERATE LIVING (1977)
Image Credit: Charm City Prods/Kobal/Shutterstock Starring: Mink Stole, Liz Renay, Edith Massey, Susan Lowe, Mary Vivian Pearce, Jean Hill.
A rare Divine-free early Waters outing (he was committed to a play) and he is sorely missed. Instead, Stole is Peggy, a wacky housewife who kills her husband and goes on the lam with her grossly overweight maid (Jean Hill). The cops give them a choice: Go to jail or be exiled to Mortville, a nasty shantytown filled with deviants, nudists and crooks ruled by mean Queen Carlotta (Massey) and her daughter, Princess Coo-Coo (Pearce). The pair chooses Mortville and encounters of the aberrant kind follow. This might be the only film ever made to involve a transsexual lesbian who uses scissors to cut off her new penis and feed it to a dog. Massey is the MVP as she demands that her leather-clad boy-toys “rob my safety-deposit box.”
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9. FEMALE TROUBLE (1974)
Image Credit: Dreamland/Kobal/Shutterstock Starring: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Edith Massey.
When rebellious high-schooler Dawn Davenport (Divine) is denied the shoes she covets for Christmas because “nice girls don’t wear cha-cha heels,” she destroys her gifts, pushes the tree over on her mother and runs away. She is picked up a lecherous man (also Divine) and they have sex on a dirty mattress. She gives birth to a daughter, Taffy (Stole), who is often beaten by her mother. Dawn weds her hairdresser, who eventually dumps her, and his aunt throws acid on her face. But that doesn’t stop her from having a nightclub act. This soap opera-ish saga owes a great debt to Douglas Sirk, but with a higher body count, as Dawn dies in an electric chair for her crimes. The chair resides in the front hall of Waters’ home.
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8. A DIRTY SHAME (2004)
Image Credit: Fine Line Features/Kobal/Shutterstock Starring: Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Selma Blair, Chris Isaak, Mink Stole, Patty Hearst.
If Waters had a movie that would be considered an epic, this one would be it. Two camps of believers with polar-opposite sexual inclinations feud with one another. The chaste neuters reject anything remotely carnal while the perverts flaunt their unique sexual fetishes after they suffer accidental concussions. At the center is the repressed Sylvia Stickles (Ullman). She keeps her promiscuous daughter Caprice (Blair), nicknamed Ursula Udders for her huge breasts and a proclivity for indecent exposure, under house arrest. When Sylvia is hit on the head by a car, she meets Ray-Ray Perkins (Knoxville), a local mechanic and a sex guru who expands her sexual horizons. Eventually, everyone in the community gets knocked on the noggin and turns into sex addicts, while Ray-Ray shoots semen out of his head while leading a movement called, “Let’s Go Sexin’!” Waters has said that when he asked the MPAA what to cut to get an R rating, they replied, “After a while, we stopped taking notes.”
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7. PECKER (1998)
Image Credit: Polar/Kobal/Shutterstock Starring: Eddie Furlong, Christina Ricci, Lili Taylor, Mary Kay Place, Martha Plimpton, Bess Armstrong.
A reflection on the downside of fame. Pecker (Furlong), a Baltimore teen whose avocation is photographing his oddball friends and family, is “discovered” by a New York City art dealer (Taylor) who seizes the opportunity to exploit the grainy pictures of his quirk-filled acquaintances. Pecker’s photos create a sensation that has unwanted consequences for his friends and family, whose habits become exposed and are cruelly judged, with his family labeled “culturally challenged.” Pecker decides to get back at the Big Apple art world by turning his camera on them. The outrageous anarchist in Waters has clearly been tamed, but the film has its charms.
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6. CECIL B. DEMENTED (2000)
Image Credit: Le Studio Canal+/ Polar Entertainment Starring: Melanie Griffith, Stephen Dorff, Alicia Witt, Michael Shannon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mink Stole, Rikki Lake.
A-list actress Honey Whitlock (Griffith), whose sweet public persona is at odds with her actual demanding diva-esque behavior in private, is kidnapped by a gang of terrorist filmmakers known as SprocketHoles, who force her to star in an underground film. Dorff is the title character, whose name is a salute to Cecil B. DeMille, while the plot is inspired by the 1974 abduction of Patty Hearst, who makes a cameo. After initially being reluctant, Honey decides to go with the flow, providing the over-the-top performance Cecil wants. Possibly suffering from Stockholm syndrome, Honey soon adopts the position of her captors. One of the dark comedy’s funnier conceits is its takedown of such mainstream hits as “Patch Adams” – claiming it has a director’s cut — while depicting the disruption of a “Forrest Gump” sequel being shot in Baltimore. Griffith was nominated for a Razzie for her efforts but lost to Madonna in “The Next Best Thing.”
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5. CRY-BABY (1990)
Image Credit: Moviestore/Shutterstock Starring: Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Polly Bergen, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop, Ricki Lake, Traci Lloyds.
A campy musical comedy with ties to “Romeo and Juliet” and Elvis Presley, Waters’ follow-up to his mainstream breakthrough “Hairspray” features Depp, a teen heartthrob thanks to his TV role on “21 Jump Street” who gets to lampoon his own image. He’s ‘50s rebel Wade Walker, who is part of a gang of juvenile delinquents known as the “drapes.” He falls for Allison (Locane), who belongs to the “squares,” upsetting the status quo in Baltimore. Wade’s trait of shedding a single tear earns him the name Cry-Baby and drives girls wild. The two attend a party, but her jealous square boyfriend starts a riot and blame is placed on Cry-Baby, who is sent to jail. The climax features a chicken race a la “Rebel Without a Cause” between Allison’s former beau and Cry-Baby, who, of course, triumphs. The movie traffics in “Grease”-like nostalgia but without the box-office.
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4. PINK FLAMINGOS (1972)
Image Credit: Dreamland Prods/Kobal/Shutterstock Starring: Divine, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, Danny Mills, Edith Massey.
The midnight movie sensation that put Waters on the map beyond his Baltimore roots. The premise is one of his best, with 300-pound Divine at his most outrageous, loud and hilarious as Babs Johnson, a criminal who declares herself to be “the filthiest person alive.” She shares a trailer, complete with plastic pink flamingos outside, with her mentally ill mother who is fixated on consuming eggs as she sits in a crib (Massey), her moron son Crackers (Mills) and pretty hanger-on Cotton (Pierce). The Marbles, Raymond and Connie (Lochary and Stole), think they deserve the title for dealing in porn, selling heroin at elementary schools and having their butler impregnate kidnapped women and sell their babies while Babs is just a whore and a murderess. The movie bounces back and forth as the contenders attempt to upstage one another as the nauseating behavior mounts. Everyone knows the notorious finale, as Divine – after Babs ends the rivalry by killing the Marbles – actually eats fresh dog poop. But the most laugh-inducing scene is when Babs and son Crackers decide to defile and curse the Marbles’ home by frantically rubbing, licking and spitting on the furniture.
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3. POLYESTER (1981)
Image Credit: New Line/Kobal/Shutterstock Starring: Divine, Tab Hunter, David Samson, Edith Massey, Stiv Bators.
I was lucky enough to see “Polyester,” an ode to female-driven melodramas from the ‘50s and ‘60s, when it first opened in theaters. Yes, it was a kick to watch Divine’s mad housewife Francine Fishpaw be wooed by Ike-era hunk Tab Hunter as Todd Tomorrow. But what was really cool was the use of Odorama cards, a scratch-and-sniff gimmick inspired by Waters’ hero William Castle, whose 1960 B-movie “Scent of Mystery” featured Smell-O-Vision. We were handed cards with spots numbered 1 to 10, which corresponded to numbers that flashed the screen. When scratched they omitted an odor, some pleasant but mostly foul, that corresponded to what was appearing in a scene including flowers, flatulence, pizza, glue, gas, grass and feces. As for the plot, Francine is beside herself as her husband, children and coke-addict mother take advantage of her with their disgusting behaviors. But matters begin to look up when she quits drinking, takes charge of her life and meets what she thinks is her dream lover. This was the first Waters film to get an R instead of an X rating, the NC-17 of its day.
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2. SERIAL MOM (1994)
Image Credit: Snap/Shutterstock Starring: Kathleen Turner, Sam Waterson, Ricki Lake, Matthew Lillard, Patty Hearst, Suzanne Somers, Joan Rivers, Brigid Berlin.
Turner was much more in tune with Waters’ wack-a-doo outlandish humor than Melanie Griffith. She is Beverly Sutphin, who is outwardly a typical perky sitcom suburban housewife, married to her dentist husband (Waterson) with two teen children (Lake and Lillard). But little do they know that she is a secret serial killer who will murder anyone for the slightest infraction. Basically, June Cleaver with a cleaver. She makes obscene phone calls to her neighbor Dottie (Stole), who stole her parking space. She runs over and kills her son’s math teacher when he criticizes her child. And she murders a boy who doesn’t show up for a date with her daughter. Police are on to her after she kills one of her husband’s patients and his wife. And on and on. Eventually, as bodies pile up, she gets arrested. Soon Beverly is a headline-grabbing sensation as the media dub her “Serial Mom.” She takes over for her lawyer in court and nimbly discredits the witnesses against her. As I said in my own review for USA TODAY, “The renegade director/writer kicks the nation smack in its collective groan, marvelously mocking the oh-so-current mania over crime figures and tabloid scandal.” My two favorite moments: When Turner drives across perfectly manicured lawns as she tries to run over the math teacher to the tune of Barry Manilow’s “Daybreak” and when she goes after Hearst’s jury member for wearing white shoes after Labor Day.
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1. HAIRSPRAY (1988)
Image Credit: New Line/Kobal/Shutterstock Starring: Ricki Lake, Divine, Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono, Jerry Stiller, Leslie Ann Powers, Michael St. Gerard, Colleen Fitzpatrick, Ruth Brown, Ric Ocasek, Pia Zadora.
Sweet and subversive meet at the crossroads of a buoyant camp-filled musical comedy that is inspired by teen dance shows on the ‘60s TV and also takes a stand against racial segregation. In Baltimore in 1962, plump and pretty Tracy Turnblad (Lake) and her friend Penny (Powers) audition to be dance regulars for local “The Corny Collins Show.” Tracy makes the cut and soon becomes a rival for the show’s reigning teen queen Amber Van Tussle (Fitzpatrick), whose parents run a whites-only amusement park. Soon Tracy steals Amber’s boyfriend Link, which further enrages Amber. Tracy’s bee-hive hairdo causes her to be put in special ed classes where she befriends several black classmates who teach her new dance moves. Tracy uses her new-found fame to fight for integration with help from her sheltered overweight mother, Edna (Divine, who also plays a TV station owner, Arvin Hodgepile, who is against racial equality). The dance numbers are swell, the message is spot on and there is just enough vulgar attitude in this PG-movie to label it a Waters movie. “Rolling Stone” called it, “A family movie both the Bradys and the Mansons could adore.” This was Divine’s last film – he died three weeks after its release. “Hairspray” was turned into a 2002 Broadway musical, which got a 2007 big-screen adaptation.
