Pink Flamingos - DVD Review

MOVIE
VIDEO
AUDIO
EXTRAS
OVERALL

Two Discs (See Female Trouble review for first disc)
1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
English Dolby Digital 2.0
English Subtitles
Theatrical Trailer
Deleted Scenes
Audio Commentary
Run Time: 93 Minutes
Foldout Case

MOVIE
Rated NC-17 for language, drug use, violence, perversions and...dog poop eating.

Once, long ago, I was staying at my Uncle's house and we watched a movie called The Flamingo Kid with Matt Dillon. I was little and all I remembered, long after that was the word Flamingo in the title. So, in high school, while reading a book about cult movies, I came across Pink Flamingos, read that STRANGE description and wondered: "Did I see this" No, I hadn't but I became convinced that I had. I started a city wide search for the movie, trying to rent it, buy it, borrow it, steal it, ANYWHERE! But it was nowhere to be found. Then, a fellow film geek found it for me and dubbed it, along with Female Trouble, Multiple Maniacs and Mondo Trasho. I rushed home and had to wait for the family to go to bed, I wasn't about to risk someone walking in and seeing this. It's a good thing I did. It lived up to its hype too. It IS filthy. It IS disgusting.
The story is absurd and hilarious. Babs Johnson (Divine) has been proclaimed the filthiest person alive. She lives in a trailer in Phoenix, Maryland, just outside of John Waters' beloved Baltimore, with her son Crackers (Danny Mills) her traveling companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) and her mother Edie (Edith Massey) a three hundred pound senior citizen who wears only a girdle and spends her days and nights in a playpen in the corner of the trailer. Across town are Raymond and Connie Marble (David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce) "two jealous perverts" who crave the notoriety and prestige that come with the title the filthiest people alive. They run baby ring out of their house, having their butler Channing (Channing Wilroy) impregnate one of the two girls they keep naked in their dungeon, then they sell the babies to lesbian couples and use the money they make off of that to set up heroin rings in the inner city elementary schools. A war of filth begins between the two families culminating with Babs proving her filthiness by follow a dog until it does its business, dropping down and shoveling it into her mouth.
Okay. If that hasn't completely offended and turned you off, then you're one of those special few that this film intrigues. You're interested in the strange and bizarre, and its both of those things. I've often compared the movie to a fungus, the more times you watch it, the more it grows on you. You get to appreciate the inane yet witty dialogue, you come to enjoy the over the top hammy acting, you even get to the point where you think the final scene is funny. I've seen it several times now, even, luckily enough, on my eighteenth birthday in 1997, getting to see the 25th anniversary re-release down at the fabulous Music Box theater in downtown Chicago. Standing, waiting for the theater to open, I mingled with the doctors and lawyers and other upper class looking people, asking many if they knew what they were getting in to. All did. And in the theater they all laughed. And it was great!

VIDEO QUALITY
This is the best Pink Flamingos is ever going to look. As he edited the film, Waters didn't have a video display, so he was forced to keep feeding the cuts through the projector to see if they worked, scratching and rescratching and rescratching the film. The first copy I saw was faded almost to black and white, the sound was horrible and so was the video. The restored 25th anniversary print was as good as can be expected. The colors were bright again and the best that could be done was. The film is presented in its 25th anniversary format of 1.85:1 widescreen. This transfer was supervised by Waters himself and approved. So, while it isn't the original format (once again the 1.33:1 16mm full frame), it's the way he likes it.

AUDIO QUALITY
Unfortunately, audio that's never been good couldn't be made much better. The dialogue is often muffled or hushed and seems to be mixed at too different a level as the music Waters is often blaring. This is probably, as with the video, the best it'll ever sound, but one wishes for more.

EXTRAS
First off we have another Waters commentary and it's a thrill to hear him discuss in length this film that he says is "like the baddest of children, he'll never live it down." He offers so many insights to what he was thinking and even expresses shock at his literal parody of the porno film Deep Throat (think about it) suggesting that if he had to do it again, he'd cut it out. As with his other commentaries, he's urbane and witty and always an enjoyable listen. Second we have an extra that was created for the 25th anniversary re-release. This is a collection of deleted scenes or pieces of the deleted scenes (supposedly an extra hour was cut from the film) along with Waters appearing between scenes to comment and introduce them. Those expecting Waters to be some sort of monster will find it surprising to see the thin balding man that sits before them with a sly grin and a pencil thin mustache and his comments are often funnier than the tapes they introduce.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
Pink Flamingos is like an endurance challenge, flying from one set piece to another just trying like hell to offend each and every member of the audience at least once. The key to it is just to be amused. Perhaps the saving grace of this film is that John wasn't trying to offend in a mean way, he was trying to amuse everybody who thinks like him. He didn't know then that he would eventually be considered a true original and be honored by film groups all over the world, even having Pink Flamingos inducted into the New York Museum of Modern Art. It's truly an American original, and for that alone I salute it.

Go to The John Waters Collection, Volume 3 (Part II - Female Trouble)