Renegade filmmaker and noted aficionado of expressive bad taste John Waters exploded into international infamy with this darkly comic, no-budget parade of the perverse (his third feature film, and first in color), in which plus-size cross-dresser Divine stars as Babs Johnson, a flashy criminal on the lam from the FBI who is hiding out in a trailer outside of Baltimore, MD. Accompanying Babs are her mother (Edith Massey), an obese and dim-witted woman who is malignly obsessed with eggs; her
degenerate son, Crackers (Danny Mills); and Cotton (Mary Vivian Pierce), Babs' duplicitous "traveling companion" and Crackers' co-conspirator in unwholesome erotic play. While Babs would prefer to be left in peace, she takes great pride in her status as "the Filthiest Person Alive" (an honor confirmed by one of America's sleazier tabloid newspapers), and when Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary) announce their plans to take the title away from her, Babs is not about to stand idly by. The Marbles are a hateful couple who kidnap women, force their homosexual manservant, Channing (Channing Wilroy), to impregnate them, and sell the babies to lesbian couples found unfit for legal adoption; the Marbles then turn the profits back into pornography and narcotics trafficking. Impressive stuff, to be sure, but Babs is not about to take a back seat to anyone in a battle of filth, and when the Marbles throw down the gauntlet, Babs and her family retaliate in a no-holds-barred battle to determine who truly are "the Filthiest People Alive." Featuring murder, bestiality, rape, dismemberment, coprophagia, a dizzying variety of sexual perversions, and a performance of "Papa Oom Mow Mow" you will not soon forget, Pink Flamingos is nonetheless a comedy, and a surprisingly successful one; shot on a budget of only 12,000 dollars, the film has grossed close to ten million dollars around the world, and its success launched John Waters into a career as America's leading authority on poor taste. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
While the film now looks primitive and even more amateurish, it is laudable, if that's the right word, because unlike most movies being made these days, almost everything that happens in it is absolutely, horrifyingly real.
I am not giving a star rating to Pink Flamingos, because stars simply seem not to apply. It should be considered not as a film but as a fact, or perhaps as an object.
People complain about shock cinema and how far it has to go now to penetrate our jaded, desensitized sensibilities. Come meet the grandfather of it all!
Sometimes John Waters is a little too obvious for his own good and this is one of those cases. I typically either love or hate his stuff. I like what he was trying to say with this, but it's just too much. I mean you can be trashy, but at least attempt to do it with some sense of style and grace. It's almost like he
was trying to imitate Andy Warhol instead of present an actual message. Sometimes comedy doesn't work when you're characters are so disgusting and impossible to find interesting. It brings up important questions, but it doesn't mean anything when there's zero follow through.
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