Pink Flamingos
(New Line Region 1 NTSC DVD)
(1972)
review by K-Fear

There are films that try to be goriest, the most sadistic, or the scariest.  Now, what about those that try to be the filthiest?  What happens when a director comes along and decides that they’re going to cross every single line that a filmmaker, outside of snuff and porno, has ever crossed?  Well, when the budget is next to nothing, a director like John Waters emerges to give us a film that is absolutely the vilest, most hilarious, and…hilariously vile…piece of trash to ever be captured on camera!  Prior to throwing Pink Flamingos into my DVD player, I thought that I had fully prepared myself for this notoriously dirty piece of cult history, but, thirty minutes after the opening credits, I lost all ethical reasoning.
               
Say hello to Divine!  She might look like your typical trailer trash: make-up enthused, overweight, foul mouth individual, but really, she is much, much more.  She is deemed as the filthiest person alive, and Divine has no problem, whatsoever, living up to this title on a daily basis.  Divine is also a woman that belongs to a very loving family.  It just so happens that her family is also cannibalistic, incestuous, and murderous.  Divine’s son performs random acts of bestiality, her mother sits in a cradle all day eating eggs (yes, eggs), and her daughter likes nothing more than to see her own brother perform various sex acts (including the animal lovin) on various other victims.  The important thing that Waters wants you to realize is that the members of Divine’s family don’t go out of their ways to be this incredibly filthy; it’s simply their nature.        
               
In a town nearby, a middle aged couple decides that they are filthiest people alive.  They are also successful entrepreneurs; however the business is just a little more than a tad bit unconventional.  They kidnap and impregnate innocent young women, then sell the children off to lesbian couples.  Our entrepreneurs are not heartless however.  Some of the profits from the sale goes to heroin addicts and various pornography shops.  Think of it as charity!  Anyway, this brings us to the basic plot of the film as these two families battle over the title of which is the filthiest.

I could go on and on about the nastiness of Pink Flamingos, but there is a lot more to Water’s film than just disgusting acts or wretchedness.  The actors in the film suggest that they were suddenly costumed from a thrift store, not given any character direction or coaching in the least, and left, by our director, to lollygag throughout their entire roles without the slightest attention given to any semblance of production value.  Does this bring the film down to shit-list status?  Absolutely not, and although the film does take some time to get in to, you’ll soon find yourself in hysterics at the cast, concept, and the way every in which Waters disregards every moral and ethical element of filmmaking established prior to this production.

Pink Flamingos is the high school play that I always wanted to be a part of, but nobody could direct without fear of being thrown in slammer. It may be hard to imagine why this film, which subsists solely on filth, became such a huge cult classic.  Maybe it’s the abundance of nudity or the perverse nature of the film that sends it over the edge, but if you’re anything like me and a rather large handful of midnight film goers, it’s an edge you’ll probably want to cross again and again.