Multiple Maniacs

I love the grainy, inky black and white look of this movie, the bad cuts and scratches and even all the jumps in sound. It's just so gorgeous and couldn't be duplicated today...just a strange feeling is captured here, amplified because it's populated with so many hedonistic weirdos and perverts. Of course, these perks only exist because Waters and his crew were completely inept in the technical ways of cinema, but hey, I'll take what I can get.

Content wise...this has at least a flash or two of brilliance, which is impressive for a film that cost around "5000" bucks. The opening at the Cavalcade of Perversions is great ("She is an auto-erotica copraphrasiac and a gerontophiliac!"), but modern audiences might not know what to make out of all the dated cultural references (too much Manson/Tate stuff)...then there's an incredibly tedious and overlong delusion with Divine narrating her version of Christ. Even more time is padded with endless scenes of characters sitting and/or lying in bed talking (and often forgetting their lines), plus topless jitterbugging from Cookie Mueller, people riding around in cars and Mink Stole ("the religious whore") and Divine walking down the street.

Despite all that, the closing sequences (starting with Lobstra) make up for it and are just priceless. Best use of the song "God Bless America" right here folks! And the film is still completely unique and original 30+ years later, so you really have to admire it on that front as well.

This is what the conventional world looks like to me, so John Waters seems to say: Hollywood performances that are all pretty fake if you think about it (so who cares if the poor acting here just takes that to the next level), Suzy Homemaker housewives who revile in disgust over those they consider freaks, and hypocritical followers of Christ, whose type probably brawled over the food created by his miracles.

Conversely, this is what we (different, marginalized people) must appear like to you: deviants who eat their own vomit, sacrilegious heathen who turn rosary beads into anal beads in a church, and rampaging murderers who need to be put down before they harm to 'normal' people.

In several ways it's a pretty awful film; the plot is padded with lengthy scenes of silly dialogue, and Waters sometimes seeming to go for shock rather than having a point (the lobster rape, really? But his fans would probably say the shock is the point, you dolt). Regardless, in the subversive way that he shakes things up, gleefully upending all of our expectations, and in its final moments, to the tune of "God Bless America," he triumphs.

Multiple Maniacs (1970) was Waters' second feature length film. Heavily influenced by the Manson Family murders, Waters creates this film about a band of murdering, sideshow freaks/performers who travel from town to town robbing and murdering their rich,nosy customers. This is a weird film that showcases what Waters likes to do best. Try and repulse the audience as much as he can (mirroring the side show performers themselves).

Unfortunately, most of the humor is pretty dated and the very low, low budget might turn off most viewers (if they were not repulsed by the first twenty minutes). Other than that, it's a very enjoyable movie.

Waters will finally perfect his film-making a few years later with the back to back to back releases of Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living. Shot on 16mm, B/W.

Recommended

The key to understanding this, John Waters' most profound film, is a understanding of its Roman Catholic content and allusions. Divine's long interior monolog inside the church, essentially a long meditation on being different, the Way of the Cross, and the crucifixion scene are all keys to the film's message. Notice that the actors who play the Way of the Cross and crucifixion scenes are the same ones who played in the Carnival of Perversions which opens the movie. And who plays Christ? The heroin addict. Now Waters doesn't use these actors again just to save on budget. The meaning is clear: those people that you smug, suburban do-gooders rejected and made fun of are Christ and his followers. Remember that Christ didn't hang out with sanctimonious, middle class people, but rather with whores, fallen women, the sick, the rejected, the stigmatized, the sinners. Waters draws the parallels very clearly, but most people view the film in such a middle-class way that they can't see Divine and Waters' troupe of hippie- weirdos as allegorical Christ figures. The real giveaway to this interpretation is the actual text of St. Francis's late medieval Way of the Cross which Waters quotes verbatim in the film. And of course, did you ever think about the literal meaning of "divine." Poor, abused Divine's symbolic sacrifice at the claws of Lobstora is yet another variation of the Passion theme. A very literary film indeed.

This film suffers from what a lot of low-budget-inexperienced-director films suffer from: long intervals in which nothing happens in an attempt to get to the better parts of the movie. This one has it is spades, which makes it hard to sit through to get to the highlights. But the high points are some of the most inspired of any John Water's flick: the surreal appearance of "The Emperor of Prague," played by small boy in full monarch regalia who guides Lady Divine, and the completely unsolicited cameo of "Lobstora," the enormous lobster prop who, like nearly everybody in the early films, has its way with Divine. I found these scenes far more interesting than the film as a whole, despite the (possibly unintentional) social commentary of the opening sequence. Here, a crowd of "straights" visit the Carnival of Perversions and witness horrors ranging from the "Puke Eater" to the "Homosexuals." Each attraction is viewed with similar disgust from the suburbanites, yet they make no effort to leave the show, which seems to call to Water's fascination with the American public's fascination with the fringe of society.