Female Trouble

This film is my favorite of all time! All of the great elements of John Waters' films mesh together perfectly in this hilarious romp that operates around the theme of 'crime is beauty.' All of the classic John Waters' actors are here, and most of them give their best performances. John Waters has said that this film is the 'ultimate Divine vehicle', and he's right. Her look literally changes every ten minutes as she mutates from a teenage hair hopper with an attitude to an unwed, abusive mother, to crime fashion model to death row inmate. Divine also has a small male role as the father of her own illegitimate child. Edith Massey, my personal favorite actress, gives her funniest and best realized performance as Aunt Ida, the bitter, veangful fag hag who lives next door. This is not the most accesible of Waters' films, and truthfully, this probably isn't the one to start with if you're not yet a fan (I would recommend Polyester or Hairspray in that case), but if you want to see an early work thats not quite as gross as the others, check it out! Waters himself says that this is his favorite of his underground films.

This really isn't a movie for everyone, but over the years I have been introduced to John Waters movies and they re my guilty pleasure! Before John Waters became mainstream, he made a whole series of art-house movies like this using grotesque characters and ridiculous story lines, but somehow they worked. I guess you gotta be a little weird and twisted in the head to enjoy them!!!! He should not be dismissed as a Director who's out to shock you for the sake of it, he's showing you a slice of life that most of us have no real knowledge about. Of course, all the characters are larger than life (in more ways than one!!!). I enjoy his style of movie making - it may be quite amateur in his early days, but you can see that his skill improves with each movie. I'm not ashamed to say that I enjoy a lot of his work!! Mark my words, this movie is certainly NOT for everybody!!! Make sure you know what you are letting yourself in for before you watch it!!!! It's pretty gross in places!! It's so tasteless it's good!!!!

God bless John Waters. He's made some of the best, crudest feel-good movies, and this is one of his crowning achievements. It's amazing how his film, ugly-looking and full of lipstick-smeared freaks, can feel positive and upbeat; while he's mocking everything in sight, he doesn't stand back and protect himself with irony or winks -- he jumps right in there, and that involvement, that energy, is easy to see and feel. It's amazing that he can feature masturbation with needle-nose pliers, beating a child with a chair, a game of "car accident," and Divine literally screwing himself and not have it be off-putting.

The very idea that Waters uses a fat transvestite with a beehive hairdo to illustrate his scorn for school shows he's not so interested in subtlety. And Divine is awesome, as always, his prissy, gravely scream -- a freak you want on your side. This is one of Waters' best satirical attempts -- there are digs at hippies and Hare Krishnas, and two scenes in particular are very prophetic: the gay encouraging, and the killing for art. Waters even mocks his own shameless exhibitionism in the testimony of the Dashers. 9/10

Although John Waters is best known for "Pink Flamingos", his two best films are "Female Trouble" and "Desperate Living". Why? Well, as far as "Female Trouble" is concerned, it is the film that invented Dawn Davenport (Divine), one of the trashiest white schoolgirl tramps ever to strut her stuff in a pair of cha-cha heels. Dawn's amazing life is documented in this film and it's a cracker from beginning to end. You will laugh, you will cry, you will vomit and you will die as you behold the deliciously disgraceful antics of the indefatigable queen of crime and sleaze.

All the delightful Waters regulars (the achingly gorgeous Edith Massey, the fantastically filthy David Lochary, the marvellous Mink Stole and the putrid Ms. Mary Vivian Pearce) are paraded about like proud circus exhibits as Waters' weaves a rags to bitches story of one woman's rise from the suburbs of Baltimore to her fall in a city without pity.

Certainly this was one of the first films to explore the issue of criminals becoming celebrities. Dawn Davenport's ascent to the ceiling of crime is hilarious and perceptive and Waters clearly knew where all this was going. For mine, Waters lost his zing after "Desperate Living" when his movies got softer and his characters started turning up on TV shows like "Wally George", "Jerry Springer" and the earlier "Oprah" eps. What was fresh when Waters started doing it felt redundant when he kept doing it into the eighties and nineties.

Divine is, was and always will be a legend, and I consider myself fortunate that I once spent half an hour chatting with the great man and actor. Vincent Peranio's production design is spectacularly obnoxious and Van Smith's costumes, as always, are knitted from the threads of trash heaven.

Waters does not put a foot wrong and ends proceedings on a surprisingly emotional note.

A relentlessly building, frame-by-frame crescendo of deliberate offensiveness. It grows increasingly difficult to separate the broad satire against square society from the equally obvious, near-Sadean delight John Waters and his uniquely talented company of offbeat Baltimoreans take in discovering and displaying new combinations of the perverse and outrageous in nearly every scene. But tracing the roots of crowd pleasers like 'Polyester,' 'Serial Mom' and 'Hairspray' here (and even further back to 'Pink Flamingos') is somehow yet more odd. Edie Massey alone remains above it all: charmingly oblivious, preternaturally sweet despite her physical unloveliness and, well, human as always, even locked in a cage threatening to gouge out Divine's eyes with her hook. Her best line: 'I don't want no G-d d-mn eggs!'