Saturday, November 3, 2007

Mondo Trasho

     This was John Waters's first full-length feature film. Before this, he had only made some short films that cult fiends are still dying to be released. So far the only one that can be found on YouTube is The Diane Linkletter Story.  This is the earliest John Waters film out there, and I had a heck of a time finding it. I managed to locate an old VHS copy, and I'm not sure it's gotten a DVD release yet.  

     It's a simple film really, and even JohnWaters himself admits that it should've been a short film instead of a full-length movie.  There's no actual dialogue, only sound clips from records in John Waters's personal collection. This movie has often been referred to as "the gutter film", mostly because it was actually filmed in the gutters and alleyways of downtown Baltimore. As I said, there's no real dialogue and the plot is a bit hard to grasp, but the best that I can surmise, the story goes something like this: 

      A blonde bombshell (Divine of course) accidentally runs over a woman that has spent most of her day getting her toes sucked on by a strange man in a park. Divine stuffs the girl in her trunk and carts it around town, running into the Virgin Mary along the way in a laundromat while a naked mental patient dances around, as Divine slowly has other religious visions. The blonde bombshell's downfall culminates in a strange ending of Divine dying in a pigpen. And that's really it, the whole plot.

      This is the only John Waters movie that I have a hard time sitting all the way through. The sound clips used, are used over and over and over again. The story, which is so completely thin, is stretched out for an hour and a half. I definitely agree that it should have been a half-hour short film much like his early ones, rather than a full-length movie. But hey, it was a start. Recommended only for true John Waters fans who absolutely must see everything he's ever made.  I guess you could call it art, but it's never gonna be found at The Louvre.

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