"It’s great to make movies with your friends. I think my audiences have liked getting old with my characters. Mink was just up here in Provincetown. We met her 50 years ago. And I’m still friends with Mary Vivian Pearce; she lives in Nicaragua. I’m in touch with every person that’s alive with the exception of the puke eater. Maybe this will bring him back."
-John Waters
Multiple Maniacs is a 1970 independent American black comedy horror film composed, shot, edited, written, produced, and directed by John Waters, as his second feature film. It features several actors who were part of the Dreamland acting troupe for Waters' films, including Divine, Mary Vivian Pearce, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Edith Massey, George Figgs, and Cookie Mueller. The travelling sideshow 'Lady Divine's Cavalcade of Perversions' is actually a front for a group of psychotic kidnappers, with Lady Divine herself the most vicious and depraved of all, but her life changes after she gets raped by a 15-foot lobster.
The film holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Waters' highest-rated film on the site.
At first, I had a hard time making sense of this movie. The actual events unfolding are easy enough to understand most of the time, and I'm a big fan of this movie's black-and-white homemade look and feel. A lot of that lovely feeling is thanks to the Dreamlanders, the cast and crew of regulars whom John Waters has used in his films ever since this one. Many of the original Dreamlanders were friends of Waters from his native Baltimore Maryland, which is also where this movie was filmed. It's so homespun in fact, you can see the small close Water's grew up in, including a few shots on his own front lawn.
Before I had even finished this movie, I found myself diving down the rabbit hole of John Waters. After watching a few interviews, appearances on David Letterman alongside divine, and even some more recent retrospective chats, I found myself falling in love. Much like John Waters himself, I left her. This movie is so unapologetically queer and in the face of polite society, It's hard not for me to love.
Hearing him talk about both making this movie in the committed group of friends and actors he has been working with ever since, really solidifies the feeling of this being a horror director's home movies. The acting isn't that great, (until you realize the actors had to memorize pages and pages of scripts since they had no money to do any other takes), The scenes of anyone actually dying have no real effects at all, but it's undeniably fun as hell.
Seeing divine gradually lose more and more of her shit until she's foaming at the mouth or chasing people down the street, is a wonderful little metaphor for coming out of their closet.
10/10
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