Female Trouble
Female Trouble
NC-17 | 04 October 1974 (USA)
Female Trouble Trailers

Dawn Davenport progresses from a teenage nightmare hell-bent on getting cha-cha heels for Christmas to a fame monster whose egomaniacal impulses land her in the electric chair.

Reviews
Inadvands

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

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Brendon Jones

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

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Delight

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

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Brooklynn

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

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Bluegrass

Absolutely the grossest movie I've ever seen all done without gore which I have to give John Waters some credit for. It has been a long time since I saw this movie but some scenes will probably be with me for life. My first sense that this might not be the movie for me is when I noticed I was the only female in the theater. I had to bail about 20 minutes from the end. My ex-husband watched the rest without me. Anyway not recommended for women or most men. It might be of use for preventing pregnancy with teen girls.

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kevjfarrell

This really isn't a movie for everyone, but over the years I have been introduced to John Waters movies and they re my guilty pleasure! Before John Waters became mainstream, he made a whole series of art-house movies like this using grotesque characters and ridiculous story lines, but somehow they worked. I guess you gotta be a little weird and twisted in the head to enjoy them!!!! He should not be dismissed as a Director who's out to shock you for the sake of it, he's showing you a slice of life that most of us have no real knowledge about. Of course, all the characters are larger than life (in more ways than one!!!). I enjoy his style of movie making - it may be quite amateur in his early days, but you can see that his skill improves with each movie. I'm not ashamed to say that I enjoy a lot of his work!! Mark my words, this movie is certainly NOT for everybody!!! Make sure you know what you are letting yourself in for before you watch it!!!! It's pretty gross in places!! It's so tasteless it's good!!!!

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sandover

There are very few films of sublime bad taste."Female Trouble" transcends even that.The moment Divine asks "Who wants to die for Art?", and after somebody from the audience stands up, says yes, and Divine starts shooting, something really unnerving happens: we pass from fierce satire - and as satire goes, the confines of the social - to the realm of the unconditional. We are not back into Breton's old surrealist adage "a surreal act is to get out and start shooting people", with its haughty, bourgeois accent, but in a new territory that challenges even that! I still cannot fathom this shifting of gears which exposes our pretensions, if not our infection; John Waters is accustomed in making categories collapse, and oppositions fall into each other, but this is unprecedented and followed by an assault that ends up in picturing Divine as a preposterous conversion of Dreyer's "Joan of Arc"! I would put this gem in the rare American tradition which starts with Gertrude Stein's Ida, a bizarre writing about the modernistic sainthood of fame and its vicissitudes. John Waters and his Divine saint make that miracle happen again: a sublime collusion between fame and shame, saint and quaint, and somehow a cry for affection.

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strangerdave-2

John Waters certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea, but those who appreciate his sense of humor and his sense of bathos will love this film, and won't be satisfied (or fully appreciative of it) until they see it multiple times.The fabulous Divine stars as Dawn Davenport, a juvenile delinquent turned stripper/petty thief/hooker/abusive mother turned shrewish wife/model/celebrity turned mass murderer turned death row inmate, and pulls the multiple transitions off flawlessly. (He/she also transitions into the role as the father of Dawn's daughter Taffy, the result of a Christmas day quickie - one of the most disgusting and hilarious sex scenes ever captured on film - at least for public viewing.) While Divine, Mink Stole (as teenage Taffy Davenport), and David Lochary (as Donald Dasher, the beauty salon owner) are the only actors with real ability, the rest of the oddball cast complements perfectly the oddball storyline and dialog.I saw the film as a satire of life in America (or maybe life anywhere) - its obsession with celebrity, scandal, and materialism at the expense of family, faith, and true self-fulfillment, conveyed on film as only John Waters can.

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