Multiple Maniacs opens with Lady Divine’s Calvacade of Perversion: a circus sideshow, of sorts, set up with the purpose of robbing its patrons. We spend the balance of the film watching the complete mental breakdown of central character, Lady Divine. One thing that really stood out for me on this re-watch of this old favorite is the amount of then-current event references in the film. Cookie’s boyfriend Steve is a member of the radical left-wing underground organization the Weathermen; Bonnie compares amyl nitrate to sex; Lady Divine blackmails her lover Mr. David into claiming he participated in the Tate murders; and Mink fantasizes about people she’d like to kill, including Trish Nixon, Barbra Streisand and Shirley Temple Black. Multiple Maniacs is a twisted time capsule that I had long hoped to add to my DVD collection.
I lost my mind when I read Criterion would be releasing Multiple Maniacs. If that wasn’t enough, Janus Films did a limited theatrical run, which I was lucky enough to see last August 2016 at the Bell Lighthouse Theatre in Toronto. I have every available Waters flick on DVD, but Multiple Maniacs would be my first acquisition on Blu-ray. Criterion DVDs and Blu-rays do come with a higher price tag, but in my experience the quality restoration and supplementary
features make it well worth it. I always invest in a Criterion version of a beloved flick if it is available. Waters was queried on the level of
restoration he wanted to see on the film, which was full-bore; clean up as much as possible. The Blu-ray features an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, and George S. Clinton’s restored music is terrific. The supplements include “The Stations of Filth,” an entertaining ten-minute video essay on Multiple Maniacs by film scholar Gary Needham. There are thirty-two minutes of interviews with cast and crew members Pat Moran, Vincent Peranio, Mink Stole, Susan Lowe and George Figgs. As is the case with all of Waters’ older films, the entire cast of Multiple Maniacs were friends of the director. They share some great stories on working with Waters on the film. The trailer included was for the Criterion restoration release.
The real highlight here was the fabulous commentary from John Waters. Waters is hilarious; I always enjoy hearing him speak. The commentary is a funny, informative and sentimental trip through his experience making Multiple Maniacs. Watching the film with the commentary is an absolute must in my opinion. This is the first time Maniacs has been released on DVD/Blu-ray, so no comparisons to note there, but it is certainly a world away from the VHS copy I once owned. Criterion does not disappoint; the picture and soundtrack quality are more than I could ever ask or hope for, and at the end of the day this is ultimately the reason I fork out cash for Criterion. Seeing Multiple Maniacs in 4K is one of my cinematic highlights of this decade!
PLOT: A woman is rushed to the emergency room; flashbacks explain the troubled relationship between a psychology professor and a free-spirited younger woman that brought them to this pass.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Extremely subtle weirdness + adequate Nic Roeg representation on the List already + shrinking available space (only 85 slots left at the time of this writing) make it a bad time for Bad Timing to come along. Had this review been written earlier in this site’s existence, this movie’s layers of mystery might have convinced us to shortlist it, but now we have weirder candidates waiting in the wings.
COMMENTS: Nicolas Roeg shows excellent, if somewhat deceptive, timing with Bad Timing. He feints that he’s about to give us a bittersweet meditation on a failed love affair, but instead probes ever deeper into a psychology of paranoia and obsession, using a subtly dislocating style to keep us off guard. Opposed dualities appear everywhere: male vs. female, rational vs. emotional, East vs. West, law vs. crime. The setup is classic amour fou, pairing successful academic Dr. Alex Linden with the hard-drinking, free-loving Milena. As the relationship is slowly revealed in flashbacks, we see the power balance between the two shift back and forth, as both parties become mired in an increasingly destructive relationship, in different ways. Alex appears coldly rational—Milena bitingly advises him to try to love her instead of trying to understand her—but his advanced training doesn’t inoculate him from human frailty; he’s as subject to jealousy as the next man, and when he falls from his logical perch, he falls hard, into a churning id.
Paranoia and second-guessing are the rule in Alex’s world. The ever-present Cold War background, which is seldom explicitly mentioned, aroused more paranoid associations at the time than it does now. Alex lectures his Intro to Psych students about how everyone is a spy, starting with children peeking on their parent’s lovemaking; later, it appears that the psychiatrist himself is being analyzed by the detective, whose intuition and experience may lead him closer to Alex’s essence than Freudian methodologies would. Alex’s nemesis is a source of mystery and paranoia, too. Harvey Keitel’s obsession with investigating what on the surface seems to be an open-and-shut suicide attempt is itself obsessive, and seems almost unmotivated (until a last minute revelation). Wearing a greasy mullet, Keitel doesn’t make the slightest pretense of being Austrian; I don’t think this is bad casting, but deliberate dissonance, a clue that his character is pure metaphor.
Art Garfunkel, on the other hand, really is bad casting, and his presence damages what could have been an unqualified classic. Roeg’s good taste in casting David Bowie as an alien The Man Who Fell to Earth doesn’t carry forward here. Not only is Garfunkel a stiff in the acting department, but we’re asked to view him as a suave sex symbol, someone whose magnetism would ensnare the heart of a young woman who could have her pick of any stud in Vienna. Fortunately, an excellent, brave performance from the underappreciated Theresa Russell blows through Art’s inadequacies in their scenes together.
The finale is truly shocking, but well-earned. Also of note is the excellent soundtrack, featuring hits from Tom Waits, Billie Holiday, The Who, and Keith Jarrett. The difficulty of re-securing the rights to all of this music for home video release put Bad Timing out of circulation for many years. It was released to mixed reviews and big controversies: it was rated “X” in the U.S. (a commercial death sentence), and the U.K. distributor called it “sick” and had its logo pulled off prints. Although the film is better appreciated today (even receiving a Criterion Collection release), the furor over Bad Timing led to a perception of Roeg as box office poison. After starting his career off with five memorable films, the director’s career fell off precipitously in the 80s, with 1990’s Roald Dahl adaptation The Witches marking a brief comeback to relevance.
(This movie was nominated for review by sometime contributor Eric Gabbard, who pleaded “The odd juxtapositions and time shifts. It’s a definite weird candidate. Give it a chance.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
PLOT: With the help of 400 pound maid Griselda, suburban housewife Peggy accidentally murders her deceptively bucolic husband and goes on the lam. A cop directs the fugitives toward a Pleasure Island for criminals called Mortville. Things go south with the village’s fascistic matriarch, until there’s a mutiny in the ramshackle town.
BACKGROUND:
Divine was originally intended for the role of Mole McHenry (eventually played by Susan Lowe), but could not back out of an alternate commitment. Desperate Living is the only film Waters made during Divine’s lifetime in which the hefty transvestite did not appear.
Waters did not cast regular David Lochary for the film due to the latter’s drug use. Lochary died soon after Desperate Living was released, either from a PCP overdose or from bleeding to death during an accident that occurred while he was tripping on PCP (reports differ).
The tagline was “It isn’t very pretty”—a radical understatement.
Budgeted at $65,000, this was Waters’ most expensive film to date. 1974’s Female Troublehad a budget of $25,000, while 1972’s Pink Flamingos cost a mere $10,000.
The extras of Mortville were homeless residents from the Baltimore skid row, bused in for a single day’s shoot.
According to Waters, lesbian groups in Boston protested the film, forcing its cancellation in Beantown.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The opening credit scene of a dead rat served on expensive china, salted, and eaten at a swank dinner party. It sets the table for what’s to come.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Cross-dressing cop; toddler in the fridge; scissors self-castration
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Waters outdoes Multiple Maniacs‘ “cavalcade of perversion” in this grunge fairy tale that includes systematic lesbianism, cross-dressing, odious hippie sex scenes, cannibalism, necrophilia, bat rabies, copious facial warts, and gap-toothed queen Edith Massey sexually serviced by leather-bound Nazis.
Opening credits for Desperate Living
COMMENTS: The finale in John Waters’ “Trash Trilogy,” Desperate Living is the most mean-spirited of his films, so much so that even Waters himself has claimed that he went too far with it (he criticized himself for not including a normal protagonist to offset Mortville’s outlaw denizens). Desperate Living, however, is a rogue burlesque with Waters at his most consciously surreal. Indeed, this is what Surrealism is supposed to be: provocative, revolting anarchy. Its première only lacked an actual riot, which is what the original Surrealists repeatedly aimed for (Luis Buñuel reportedly took a pistol to the movement’s early events, preparing to whip rioters with it). After Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, the midnight circuit knew what to expect of Waters, and were perhaps too pacifistic to wreak havoc.
Waters’ posthumous self-disgust with Desperate Living is understandable, and explains his eventual move to nostalgia with Hairspray (1988). Despite, or perhaps even because of, Desperate Living‘s descent into a kitsch Gehenna, Waters inched towards becoming a more multi-faceted filmmaker after this (as much as he could while still remaining John Waters). Actually, sentimentality had always been an essential part of his Waters’ diet, having worshiped at such diverse altars as William Castle, Busby Berkeley (surprisingly to some), and The Wizard Of Oz as well as Doris Wishman, Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis. There’s not even a sliver of that vital part of himself here, however. Rather, Waters retains a brilliantly narrow focus that expanded and buttressed the rotten punk fortress he had been shrewdly building for a dozen years.
In hindsight, we can see Desperate Living as Waters’ personal query. “It’s a fairytale for fucked-up children,” he once said. Visually, the film verifies that assessment, with the psychedelic sets of Mortville ((Fabulously designed by Vincent Peranio, who also was responsible for cooking the rat)) evoking ludicrous adolescent nightmares. There’s also the derelict hippie commune, the type of which we can imagine being constructed for the childlike followers of Charles Manson. Fauvist paintings, along with portraits of dictators Adolf Hitler and Idi Amin, decorate the plywood castle walls of Queen Carolotta. It’s the most ferociously idealistic of Waters’ films, but also the angriest. Self-proclaimed dystopian films are run-of-the-mill—and, given the current climate, we will undoubtedly see a renewed wave of the genre—but the pessimism of Desperate Living is internally authentic and, like Tod Browning before him, Waters’ ongoing obsession for crime aligns him with camp outcasts.
A film about desperation, Desperate Living is aptly named; a summation of everything Waters had been navigating toward. Having reached an apex here, possibly unwittingly, it becomes the filmmaker’s shrill, skid marked tightie-whitie. And we can locate the pulse of Waters’ sympathies; although here, that pulse was ultimately too faint, missing the puritan heart of Divine (no, that’s not a typo) and the sibling center of Lochary. Their absence casts a callous pall over the film. The initial takeaway is something akin to Freaks (1932), but without the redemptive postlude. It’s Waters’ most rewarding challenge, which apparently he can’t revisit. For those willing, Desperate Living has the potential to produce a maniacal euphoria. It’s far less offensive than the moralistic platitudes being bandied about in cinema (and culture) with the sincerity of a hypocritical shrug. Waters’ finale to his trash trilogy is not merely what Surrealism is supposed to be about; it’s a cinematic obligation.
G. Smalley adds: I actually disagree with those (including Waters himself) who think this is his “least joyous” (again, Waters’ words) film. Waters is certainly kinder to his actors here; in Pink Flamingos he asked them to do things he shouldn’t have, whether they were willing or not. (Although a couple of Desperate Living‘s scenes involving children just cross the line into irresponsible filmmaking, at least no chickens were killed, no friends go down on each other, and no one eats feces). No one can suggest that Peggy Gravel is a nastier character than Female Trouble‘s Dawn Davenport; Peggy at least has the excuse of mental illness. There are no jokes in Desperate Living crueler than the Marble’s scheme in Flamingos to rape and impregnate runaway girls and sell their children, or than Trouble‘s subplot where Edith Massey is caged in a birdhouse, only to have Divine cut off her hand. Nor could there be; Waters quickly found the limit of what he could achieve via shock in Pink Flamingos, and spent the rest of the “Trash Trilogy” refining his aesthetic to make it less shocking and more witty. Female Trouble does this by introducing an actual plot and focused satire. Desperate Living buffers its cruelties with the unreal fairy-tale plot, the gaudy production design, and, most importantly, with Waters’ best dialogue writing. Lines like “I don’t want no white man looking at my Tampax!,” ” Look at those disgusting trees, stealing my oxygen!,” and the exquisitely ironic ““I have never found the antics of deviants to be one bit amusing” are so ludicrous, and delivered with such hysteria, that they’re impossible to take seriously. Waters uses his camp ear to transform misanthropic harangues from the merely hateful into the realm of the transcendently droll—he takes the piss out of his own nihilist impulses. And Desperate Living drips with these maliciously delicious mal mots. The fact that this is Waters’ funniest movie makes it, to me, his most joyous film. I don’t think Waters stopped making shock films after Desperate Living because he had gone too far, but because he had finally gotten the formula just right. There was nowhere left to go; it was time to try a new challenge.
DVD INFO: The unrated New Line DVD (buy) is out of print but readily available. It contains the trailer and a commentary by Waters and Liz Renay (recorded separately). Waters is, as always, charming, and the aging Renay retains a saucy, offbeat charisma that makes it easy to understand why the director cast her.
Desperate Living is also available in the New Line editions packaged together with Polyester in the collectible “John Waters Collection #2” (buy) and the rare and expensive 8-disc “Very Crudely Yours, John Waters” set (buy) (where it appears alongside Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Polyester, Hairspray, A Dirty Shame, Pecker, and a disc of extra features).
Desperate Living is also available to rent or buy on-demand (courtesy of current rights-holder Warner Brothers).
Desperate Living is not currently available on Blu-ray, but with Warners holding the rights and the Criterion Collection expressing interest in canonizing Waters with their recent restoration and release of Multiple Maniacs, there is hope that it may someday join the high-def ranks.
UPDATE 6/22/2026
The Criterion prediction finally came true, many years later. The label has released a remastered Desperate Living on Blu-ray (buy) or Blu-ray + 4K UHD (buy). Extras include a recycled commentary track from Waters and Liz Renay (R.I.P.); an Italian dub (!); new interviews with Waters, Susan Lowe, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, and production designer Vincent Peranio; a location tour; and of course, a booklet with essay.
PLOT: Two well-to-do couples arrive at the home of a third for dinner, but find there has been a misunderstanding on the date, and their hostess has not prepared a meal. The sextet tries to reschedule dinner over and over, but meets with increasingly absurd obstacles: dead restaurateurs, a platoon of soldiers who intrude on the evening, police officers who burst in and arrest the entire party before the first course. Complicating the scenario further is a bishop who imposes himself on their party, flashback ghost stories told by minor characters, a subplot about an ambassador smuggling cocaine and being hunted by a female terrorist assassin, and scenes that turn out to be dreams.
BACKGROUND:
Buñuel had announced that he would retire after Tristana (1971), but was inspired to make this movie by a story his producer Serge Silberman told him about having dinner guests show up unexpectedly due to a calendar mix-up.
Co-written by Surrealist screenwriting specialist Jean-Claude Carrière, who became Buñuel’s most significant collaborator (surpassing even Salvador Dali). He assisted with writing duties on the director’s great 1967-1977 French renaissance period.
Among other honors, Discreet Charm won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (an indifferent Buñuel did not bother to show up to accept the award) and is included in Steven Schneider’s “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.”
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Shots of the six bourgeois friends, walking down an isolated country road, inserted at random between scenes. Their stride is purposeful, their destination… nowhere.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Dinner theater; bishop with a shotgun; electrified piano cockroach torture
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Buñuel’s exercise in bourgeois frustration begins simply, with a canceled dinner appointment, but quickly spirals out of control with a cocaine smuggling subplot, a foxy female terrorist, a vengeful bishop, and dreams inside of dreams. They never do get to that dinner party, although Fernando Rey does get to sneak in a slice of lamb and a midnight snack.
Original trailer for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
PLOT: Roma is a series of vignettes, some relatively realistic and some fantastic, about the city of Rome. The closest thing to a plot are the scenes involving Fellini himself, who dreams about the city as a young man, comes there as a teen, and then is seen making a movie about the city as an adult. Other segments involve a bawdy street meal, a vaudeville show during World War II, modern hippies drifting through Rome, a pair of brothels, and the infamous ecclesiastical fashion show.
BACKGROUND:
Fellini came to Rome from Rimini as an 18-year old to go to law school, although he quickly abandoned that pretense to pursue an artistic career path. Although it seems clear that Fellini means for the young provincial boy who dreams of Rome and the young man who steps off the train and into a Roman pensione to be his stand-ins, the director never makes this explicit. United Artists asked for voiceover narration to make this identification clear in the version that played in the U.S.
The film was shortened by nine minutes (to a running time of two hours) for its international release, and some changes were made for different markets. Slightly different cuts have circulated for years, and there is no restored print of the original Italian version, although the extra footage survives in workprints. Among the deleted scenes was one where Marcello Mastroianni appeared as himself.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The star image here could not be something other than an offering from the ecclesiastical fashion show. Candidates include the bishops’ uniforms with blinking stained glass patterns and a shrouded skeletal “memento mori” carriage that shows up the end of the procession. We’ll select the grand finale, the appearance of a glowing, flying Pope cast as a pagan sun god, with electronic sunbeams streaming behind his beatifically beaming countenance.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Horse on the highway; fading frescoes; light-up miter
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The speedy editing of the U.S. release trailer misleadingly emphasizes the decadent aspects of Fellini’s Roma, making it look like a trippy sequel to Satyricon for the pot-smoking college midnight movie crowd. In truth, while Roma is experimental and disorientingly non-linear, it’s greatly restrained compared to its psychedelic predecessor. Most of the sequences are only subtly strange, pitched in the almost-realistic register of Fellini’s next film, Amarcord. Or at least, that’s the case up until the fashion show, when Fellini ignites the film with a surreal, blasphemous brand. This grand vaudeville sequence, which lasts over 15 minutes, catapults the film from a borderline curiosity from an innovative master to an acknowledged staple of the weird canon.
– Waters’ memoirs outline his bad taste philosophy
) is out of print but readily available. It contains the trailer and a commentary by Waters and Liz Renay (recorded separately). Waters is, as always, charming, and the aging Renay retains a saucy, offbeat charisma that makes it easy to understand why the director cast her.
) and the rare and expensive 8-disc “Very Crudely Yours, John Waters” set (
) (where it appears alongside Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Polyester, Hairspray, A Dirty Shame, Pecker, and a disc of extra features).
(courtesy of current rights-holder Warner Brothers).![Desperate Living (The Criterion Collection) [4K UHD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51TLT2UeiOL._SL500_.jpg)
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