Available on Blu-Ray Mon March 20 2017
From the beginning we are offered by the emcee (David Lochary) of Lady Divine’s Cavalcade travelling show: ‘not actors, not paid imposters, but real actual filth!’ This is the sleaziest show on earth where the audience can witness ‘the most flagrant violations of natural laws known to man’. The film’s cast of assorted ‘sluts, fags, dykes and pimps’ are in fact torpid teens desperately seeking to shock. And for 1970’s Catholic Baltimore (and the rest of the world – or the student film societies where the movie was usually shown) it really did seem that the cast had ‘committed acts against God and nature that would make any decent person recoil in disgust’.
This is John Waters’ high tidal mark in his early canon and it was only his second feature. His pervy schoolboy fascination for schlock certainly promises much and delivers, from the outset, everything from a woman licking a bicycle seat to two bearded men French kissing (an eye-opener in the years before gay lib); there are glue sniffers, gender fuckers, a cold-turkey heroin addict in a fine pair of Y-Fronts and the famous Puke Eater (don’t ask!). It’s like the hippies never happened.
The film was made years before mainstream feminism, Watergate, Aids and the great global homogenisation. Back then everything was different and mavericks could often make a breakthrough. Waters’ mid-period and later work was more polished (he gave Johnny Depp his edge in 1990’s Cry Baby) but it’s his early movies for which he is most famous. Made on a zero budget with his buddies for actors, Waters set out to cause affront from the start. Using locations in and around his native Baltimore (the Redneck Riviera) his plots borrowed from soap opera and were given a subversive, scatological twist. Multiple Maniacs was made when Waters was only 23.
With a juddering storyline and hints of underground movies, Warhol’s Factory, Kenneth Anger and Rocky Horror, what saves Multiple Maniacs from the trash compactor is some genuinely funny writing and inspired moments of lunacy. Hardcore monstrosity, the 160 kilo Lady Divine (Glenn Milstead – more BLT than LGBT – playing his drag alter ego) in her Joker make-up, enormous pert breasts and pop socks has one over on emcee Mr David. She knows he was involved in 1969’s Sharon Tate murders (his amnesia prevents him countering her accusations). Divine is like a psycho Liz Taylor who squeals proudly, ‘there’s hardly a law I haven’t violated’. It’s easy to believe she could go on a hand-gun rampage at any moment.
There are diversions involving the Crucifixion and a lesbian clinch in the chapel pews where a lewd act with rosary beads takes place. A loaves-and-fishes parable, reimagined with tins of tuna and Wonderbread, won’t please the Pope. Oh, and a horribly realistic cannibal scene. No, the script was never in contention for the Pulitzer but the movie has huge energy, great music, and an art school aesthetic (all shaky camera, static scenes, zooms that go out of focus and acting which, in places, makes most am-dram look like the RSC).
It’s hilarious and totally irresistible. The suburban parents of the cast must truly have recoiled in disgust, perhaps no more so than when Divine, the Sarah Bernhardt of the midnight movie circuit, is ravished by a giant papier mâché lobster.