John Waters
John Waters is one of the last true freaks America has left.
He's been making movies and celebrating bad taste for the last thirty years. His movies, often set in his native Baltimore, are usually campy send-ups of suburban conformity and the unrelenting depravity that lurks beneath the surface. In an era before pride parades and the mainstreaming of gay culture, Waters was beautifully, perfectly, unrelentingly weird long before it became commonplace. His movies were sometimes shocking, sometimes offensive, sometimes gross, and always wonderfully entertaining.
Waters' sensibilities were forged by the hipnamed performers, like Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci, and controversial former criminals, like Patty Hearst, to former porn stars, like Traci Lords. If this level of cheerful lunacy appeals to your warped sensibilities, check out Waters' movies. There's really nothing like them.
"Bad taste is what entertainment is all about."
If you're a neophyte Waters fan, you've got a few entryways into his work. Waters had some mainstream success with ''Hairspray'', a rollicking musical about 60s teenage rock and roll that later became a huge Broadway hit. His greaser film, ''Crybaby'', starring Johnny Depp, is probably his most popular mainstream work, and closely following is ''Serial Mom'', a campy take on a suburban serial killer. The first two movies I saw of his were ''Cecil B. Demented'', a hyperviolent tale of a kidnapped movie star who develops Stockholm Syndrome for the insane film crew that captures her, and ''Pecker'', a movie about a misfit photographer thrust into the New York art scene. Waters has also appeared in productions like ''The Simpsons'' and ''Bride of Chucky'', and this has introduced him to a new generation of fans.
If you want to start with the pure stuff, you'll want to check out Waters' earlier work, where he partnered with legendary drag queen, Divine, to deliver no-budget movies of utter tasteless insanity. The best known collaborations are ''Pink Flamingos'', ''Female Trouble'', ''Multiple Maniacs'', and ''Desperate Living''. Trying to describe these movies is very difficult to do, but you'll never see anything else like it.
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