Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Best movie of this year hands down!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Female Trouble (1974): Dir: John Waters / Cast: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Edith Massey, Mink Stole: Amusingly disturbing followup to Pink Flamingos with a theme that takes mental stability to whole new lows. Divine plays Dawn Davenport, a loud obnoxious overweight teenager who ends up hooking up with Donald and Donna Dasher, a flamboyant couple played with questionable fashion by David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce. They enlist Dawn to be their poster girl of crime and film her doing all sorts of horrendous antics. John Waters lavishes in the depraved but his filmmaking hardly improves here. He seems to rejoice in inserted penis shots as well as pointless inserts of a boar head on a wall. The sets are flimsy but his cast have the right kind of over-the-top presence to be entertaining. Divine as Dawn demands our attention, applauding even the very notion of going to the electric chair. Lochary and Pearce play the very enemies poising as friends. Edith Massey as a neighbor despises Dawn because she got her nephew fired. For her crime Massey is locked in a big bird cage and has her hand chopped off. Mink Stole plays Dawn's sassy daughter Taffy who resents her mother and plays smash-up derby in the house in one of the funniest moments. While vulgar and often gross Waters seems to attack celebrity and society's wayward desire for self importance. Score: 7 / 10

I first saw this film without its soundtrack while at a gay bar in a now gone San Francisco bar, the Phoenix, riveted to the film as disco music pumped in the background. As soon as I returned home to Los Angeles, I had to rent the film to see what I hadn't heard, and I was not bored for a minute. To say that Dawn Davenport had a lot of problems is an understatement. I'm sure she was right down the hall from Tracy Turnblad (of "Hairspray") as these both took place in Baltimore around the same time, so watch it with that thought in mind.Tracy was sent to detention for "a hair don't" while Dawn (the over-sized Divine) was expelled after fighting the girl who tattled on her for eating a meatball sandwich in class. Dawn is then furious when on Christmas day, she opens her present to find sensible lady-like shoes while she wanted "cha-cha heels". A fight with her father follows and Dawn rushes out into the cold in nothing but a coat and a slinky, too-tight nighty. Then, she is picked up by none other than Divine, in male guise, and ravished by him, leaving her pregnant and alone. You'll be mesmerized as Dawn delivers the baby herself, goes from hash slinger to go-go dancer to a part of a mugging ring.Divine isn't the only gross-out character here; There's the enormous Edith Massey, stuffed into a one-piece leather outfit, as the aunt of the long-haired man Divine becomes lovers with. If the sight of Divine having sex with herself/himself isn't enough to drop your jaw, try Massey fondling herself topless then strutting around in this leather sausage wrapper as she begs her nephew to convert to homosexuality. "The world of heterosexuality is a sick and boring life!" she protests, even more aghast by Divine's womanly presence in his life. Daughter Taffy grows up into a Rhoda/Bad Seed/Nellie Olsen like brat who rebuffs her "daddy" then sets off to find her real father, now a disgusting drunk who ends up repulsing her.Their world changes when Massey throws acid in Divine's face, but Divine uses the scars to accentuate what she already feels to be beautiful. I can't really repeat a lot of the dialog here, but even if I could, it would take away the pleasure of hearing some of the most obscene words put together in a reviling type of poetry. The film sort of falls apart when Divine goes on a major crime spree towards the end, but it really is spoofing all of those bad girl 50's and 60's movies, so that's a necessary evil. I can guarantee that while Waters' later films "Hairspray" and "Cry Baby" went on to become Broadway musicals, this one will remain where it belongs, as a midnight cult movie where the somewhat tipsy audience members shout out the lines along with the stars.

John Waters made Female Trouble when he still had one foot in the crude (Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos) and the other in the relatively slick (Polyester, Cry Baby, Hairspray, Serial Mom, etc.). Female Trouble is presented in a palette of lavish colors, inspired and off-the-wall set designs, preposterously decadent costuming and generous dollops of grotesquerie.POSSIBLE SPOILER Divine plays Dawn Davenport, who progresses from high school ne'er-do- well in 1959 to hardened career criminal, ending up in the electric chair by 1974. END OF POSSIBLE SPOILER The whole enterprise is clearly meant to be ludicrous and over the top. There are superb camp comic turns by Divine, the unforgettable child-woman Edith Massey as her vindictive neighbor, David Lochary as an ultra narcissistic fashion plate, Mary Vivian Pearce as his snooty wife, Cookie Mueller as a tough-cookie gang member, and last but not least the versatile Mink Stole as Davenport's long-suffering, viper-tongued daughter. These performances are just as effective today as they were more than 30 years ago. Time cannot dilute their on-target expertise; this is as good as camp acting gets.Alas, we also encounter stupidities, inconsistencies and downright narrative sloppiness here and there, but Waters always did have an incurable silly streak. Even though the only obviously dated part of Female Trouble is the litany of now-unfamiliar serial killer references the heroine makes in a monologue toward the end, a look at this director's recent films shows that time has caught up with and surpassed him. Who could have imagined in the 70s (well, I did!) that his aesthetic would become the norm of American popular culture in the 21st century - in a non-ironic way!? Just watch prime-time TV any day of the week or read the latest Hollywood/celebrity gossip, or pick up the Starr Report, or watch a TV news special about methamphetamine labs in Iowa, or go to a Tony Award-winning hit Broadway musical called Hairspray. So unless Waters engineers some kind of unanticipated late-career breakthrough, he will never have anything else to satirize and can collect royalties from continued Broadway musicalizations of his films. Could "Female Trouble: The Musical" be next on the Great White Way?

I am at a complete loss to understand why this film was not nominated for an Oscar for costuming, makeup and set decoration. It had the most outrageous costuming that I have ever seen. The sets were so hideous that they made me nauseous. The makeup was beyond belief.That was the good things about the film that featured an outrageous star in Divine, a transvestite that played Dawn Davenport. He was so over the top that I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.This is the first John Waters (Hairspray, Pecker) film that I have seen. He is definitely on the cutting edge in outrageous humor, horror, and satire.This film on the outrageous cult of celebrity is no more outrageous than the current obsession in the media with Paris Hilton.If you haven't seen a John Waters film, check out the Sundance Channel for this one.