Trashed

Pink Flamingos is a film so wretchedly awful, so absent of any redeeming social value, it's hard to believe that it could be repackaged and sold in any conventional sense as "entertainment." Its storyline is epic in scope: it's a classic Shakespearean revenge tragedy, an operatic saga singing its arias from a sewer.

(It was, incidentally, made for just ten thousand dollars. And damn, it sure looks every penny.)

It's the story of Divine (the late Glen Milstead), who is living in an abandoned salmon-pink and blue trailer in the middle of the Maryland forest, with presumed lover Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) and son Crackers (Danny Mills), as well as her corpulent, mentally-deranged mother Edie (Edith Massey, who died in 1984) Edie sits in a playpen, falling out of her tutu and demanding a steady diet of "Eggs! Eggs! Oh, God! Eggs!" You get the picture. (Or maybe you don't. It might be the sort of thing that has to be seen to be believed.)

Divine is living under the assumed name of "Babs Johnson," as she's wanted by the FBI for being the "Filthiest Person Alive" (among other alleged felonious activities). Divine has big hair, lots of stylish drag queen makeup, and is muy Gordo. Trashy glamour is her forte. Cotton affects bleach-blonde hair but has the look of a cast reject from a Fifties JD picture. Crackers (the late Danny Mills) could be the younger brother of Charles Manson. Right away, we understand they are characters that live outside the conventional norms of society.

A car ride with Babs and Crackers, one in which they perform such neighborly acts as leaving a hitchhiking soldier stranded, then driving away laughing hysterically, gives us insight into the truly cruel, Sadeian nature of their characters.

Meanwhile, in a suburban neighborhood of downtown Baltimore, Connie Marble (the anorexic, dyed red-headed Mink Stole), along with husband Raymond (the late David Lochary), are running an illegal "baby ring." They keep two skinny, filthy teen girls in a rubble-strewn basement, one of whom has died. The other keeps up a steady torrent of abuse aimed at the hated servant Channing (Channing Wilroy) whom Connie and Raymond are using to keep the kidnapped girls pregnant. The babies are then sold to lesbian couples. Channing is a weak, seemingly spineless character, and is also presumably gay. He "hates fucking them," he complains to Connie, finally resorting to masturbating into his palm and injecting the girls with a turkey baster.

Connie is shown giving a job interview to a rejected applicant, one who storms out angrily after she is insulted by Connie in a hoity-toity manner. We learn that Connie is miffed that the Midnight and other tabloids are naming Divine "Filthiest Person Alive." She feels this title most certainly, rightfully belongs to her and her husband, the blue-haired Raymond, a somewhat effeminate man with a strange upturned mustache and a fetish for flashing young girls in the public park, with a sausage tied around his, uh...sausage. He wears a mask while doing this, grabs the purses and handbags left behind, and the soundtrack is complete with chickens clucking in the music all the while.

Divine steals a steak by stuffing it up her dress. She walks to a park, squats, and pisses. Cookie (the late Cookie Mueller), a spy, is hired by the Marbles to ferret out the doings of Divine. To that end, she has sex with Crackers, who molests a chicken while she writhes beneath him. It just gets worse and worse.

Mama Edie is abused when Connie and Raymond break into the Babs Johnson trailer and pour eggs over her. They mail Divine a dog turd. This, of course, means war.

Beforehand, Babs and Cotton a birthday party for Edie, which includes transvestites, strippers, a man who "sings" with his asshole (while the song "Surfin' Bird" plays), and other assorted oddities. The cops show up and a shoot-out commences. The raid is kiboshed as the cops are butchered by the assembled freaks; and in a surreally macabre, grotesque comic book horror scene, are devoured by the cannibalistic birthday revelers. Edie is wheeled away in a barrow to marry the Egg Man (coo-coo-ca choo?), played by Paul Swift. The Egg Man is a little like the milkman but dispenses eggs instead. They're the perfect couple it seems, made for each other.

Babs and company figure out real quick who has sent them the dog turd, broken into their home, and who accosted Mama Edie. The final act in this mad drama shows the Marbles burning down the trailer when Babs and the others are not at home. Of course, this is the climax of the movie.

Babs and Crackers go to the Marbles' suburban home, lick everything to contaminate it (including all the furniture), and in exultation of ecstatic, divine filth, mother Babs blows Crackers while he implores her to "Do my balls, mama!"

Getting up suddenly, leaving Crackers with a terrible case of blue balls, they beat a retreat to the basement, where they discover the girls chained up. Channing has been locked in a closet after Connie found him wearing a wig and some of her underclothing, pretending to be her. Babs and Crackers free him, but the girls chained below castrate him and are set free.

Connie and Raymond come home and are tied up and lead out to the woods. A press conference of tabloid reporters is called. Connie and Raymond are put on trial by Babs and her cohorts. They are convicted of "assholism," tarred, and feathered. Their sentence? DEATH.

They are shot by Divine, in a famous pose of her holding a gun.

When asked by the reporters what might happen to them if nothing is printed, Babs answers "We might be looking to have ourselves a barbecue...a human barbecue!" She's insinuating that they'll find the wife and kids of said reporter, kill them, and cook them for dinner. The reaction to this is laughably nonchalant.

Babs having now secured her crown as the "Filthiest Person Alive," the trashy trio decides to head for greener pastures. The scene now having switched to what looks like an old home movie shot on Super 8, they are seen walking together merrily downtown. A puppy dog squats, shits, and in one swift movement, with no cut, Babs scarfs the steaming fresh turd. The image is so utterly repellent, that, to this day, THIS author nearly pukes every time he sees it; and he has seen it multiple times. It NEVER loses its...shock value.

Shock Value was the title of a book director John Waters wrote about his filmmaking experiences, among other things; it's full of anecdotes about Divine, Danny Mills, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, and the rest of the "Dreamlanders," Waters' stock company of Ed Wood-style weirdos and delinquents who became his stable of well-known performers and collaborators. Many have since died; there are others, such as Mink Stole, that he has continued to work with over the years.

Waters obsession with crime, with courtroom antics, with gender-bending and breaking sexual taboos--it's all here. Connie and Raymond live in a house festooned with old movie posters, the trashy ephemera of sleazoid culture, the cultural underbelly of the Eisenhower and Nixon years.

The film is dedicated to "Sadie, Leslie, Patty, and Tex"; the four Tate-Labianca killers of the Manson Cult, who had gained infamy only a few short years before. The film celebrates those who live outside the law, the "filth" that flout the conventions of a hypocritical society, one that would send its sons to kill and die in the jungles of South East Asia, all the while reeling in horror at Woodstock, Janis Joplin, and marijuana. LSD, tie-dyed shirts, long-haired men, gay rights, free love, and Black Power were shocking stuff; the Mai Li massacre was par for the course. It's a thumb up the ass of a hypocritical society still thawing out from the post-war era of the baby boom, the Red Scare, when "peace creeps" and other assorted pinkos were quietly taken out back to have the living hell beat out of them.

Pink Flamingos is a horror cartoon of epic proportions, a raunchy, R. Crumb underground comic come to life, holding a violent and disgusting mirror up to a violent and disgusting culture, one that hummed its own hackneyed rock and roll tunes of consumerist, all-American harmony while dropping napalm on starving, terrorized people on the other side of the world.

The Fifties and early Sixties bubblegum pop tunes offer an ironic, sardonic counterpoint to the goings-on onscreen. For instance, "Chicken Grabber" by the Night Hawks plays while Raymond attempts to molest young girls in the park. The visual oddities of the film, its garish, over-painted surfaces, grotesque makeup, and clothing of the actors, not to mention the down-at-the-heels sets and general bottom-dollar aesthetic, lend it a sense of genuine guerrilla filmmaking; you can, at one point, see the actors' breath, as it must be very, very cold while they are filming. With no heat in that trailer.

There's an American outlaw tradition Pink Flamingos hearkens back to; the characters seem to come from a cultural time warp, a place where the trashy glamour of old film debutantes and the beauty of gun molls mixes with the kitsch rock of the Rebel Without a Cause Era, and the utter cultural revolt of the late Sixties and early Seventies. And, like stepping stones of raunch, we have little "set pieces" of repulsiveness: toe-sucking, male frontal nudity, singing assholes, blow jobs, egg-scarfing, cannibalism, incest, coprophagia. You name it.

The late Roger Ebert once described the Troma movie Mother's Day (1980) as a "geek film." He meant the characters, two backwoods psychopaths, were exhibited in front of the audience in much the same manner as the old-time sideshow geeks, who use to come out and act like subhumans in front of the audience on the Midway, often by biting the head off of a live chicken, or rat.

Maybe so. But, of course, the difference here being that the gross, repulsive, and shocking acts performed in Pink Flamingos aren't staged. They're real. Divine does scarf a turd from a dog's ass; all is not well with the world the viewer realizes, and never has been.

Mother's Day, by comparison, is entirely faked. So on Pink Flamingos, you might say the other film, to use an expression that seems oddly appropriate here, "ain't got shit."

(Dog shit?)

Mmmm...

Bon appetit.