“If you accept a strange story told to you as true,
Then a certain enlightenment comes to you.”
—Hugo the Hippo theme “It’s Really True” (as sung by Marie Osmond)
DIRECTED BY: Bill Feigenbaum, József Gémes
FEATURING: Voices of Paul Lynde, Burl Ives, Ronnie Cox, Robert Morley
PLOT: The Sultan of Zanzibar kidnaps a herd of African hippopotami and relocates them to Arabia to defend his harbor from sharks. After the shark menace is ended and the city prospers, the citizens forget about the hippos, until one day the hungry herds’ excursion to eat local farmers’ crops leads the Sultan’s evil Vizier Aban-Khan to organize a slaughter of the beasts. Only the youngest, Hugo, escapes; he flees to Dar es Salaam and makes friends with the local children, but Aban-Khan continues to hunt him out of pure malice.
BACKGROUND:
The story is inspired by an actual hippo nicknamed “Hugo”, who ate farmers’ crops before being adopted by the real Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam.
The film was a Hungarian/U.S. co-production. All of the animation was done on the cheap in Hungary. It was released dubbed into both languages.
Hugo the Hippo is co-writer/director Bill Feigenbaum’s only film credit. József Gémes went on to direct many Hungarian animated features.
Young Marie and Jimmy Osmond perform most of the songs on the soundtrack, along with two songs by Burl Ives and two numbers by jazz/funk session bands.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: It has to be something from the wild vegetable hallucination montage: the apple samurai? Jorma and Hugo climbing onto the space butterfly and sailing through the fruity cosmos? We selected the Dalí-esque shot of three massive monolith potatoes triangulating and transfixing our heroes with the magical beams that shoot from their literal eyes as our take-home image.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Cigarette-smoking shark; cloud massacre; sliced apple ninja
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Hugo the Hippo was released to widespread indifference. Contemporary reviewers were bored and strangely dismissive, failing to catch the undercurrent of weirdness here, but a generation of youngsters scarred by the hippopotamus massacre kept Hugo‘s underground legend alive. The combination of kitschy songs, psychedelic animation, bizarre plotting, tone shifts, hallucinatory episodes, and the inimitable Paul Lynde as an evil hippo-hating vizier blend to create a children’s film gone awry in all the most delightful ways.
FEATURING: Voices of Peter Ustinov, Arthur Dignam, Ed Rosser, Ric Stone
PLOT: Baffled by the rise of little men who fear him, Grendel chews over his strange life experiences while talking to his silent mother, questioning the nature of his existence until his purpose is made obliquely clear when he visits a nearby dragon.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: After fruitless efforts to find reasons why it shouldn’t make the List of the Weirdest Movies Ever Made, I realized that Grendel Grendel Grendel must deserve a slot. There’s marvelously unrealistic animation, witty soliloquies, and even a few musical numbers—none better than when a singing Grendel interrupts a ballad with, “Who’s the beast that looks so swell? G-R-E-N-D-E-L. What’s his purpose, can’t you guess? N-E-M-E-S-I-S!” Yes, this little monster ‘toon from Australia has what it takes.
COMMENTS: In my brief but busy history here at 366, I’ve encountered many kinds of weird movie. Scary-weird, grotesque-weird, unnerving-weird, incomprehensible-weird… but Grendel Grendel Grendel marks the very first time I’ve encountered cute-weird. Through its simplistically expressive animation, Grendel brings us the less-known story of the eponymous monster (charmingly voiced—and sung—by the great Peter Ustinov). The novelty of the perspective, the coloring-book-come-to-life feel of the imagery, the drollery, and the musical numbers collide in a wonderful spectacle of light, sound, whimsy, and weird.
On a “Tuesday Morning, Scandinavia, 515 AD”, we see warriors troubled by a massive footprint. Thus appears the first sign of Grendel. Indeed, as we learn early on in a song, this monster is a hulking 12’4″ and covered in scales and fur. He eats forest game and the occasional human—but kills far fewer humans than the humans themselves. The humble origins of the up-and-coming King Hrothgar (Ed Rosser) show a man of only slightly greater intelligence than his peers who has, in effect, a three-member posse and a kingdom in name only. But as Hrothgar’s kingdom grows, so grows the body count (with, admittedly, a few in the tally racked up by Grendel). It is only through a misunderstanding that things take a serious turn and the King calls for an exterminator.
So we’ve got our adorable anti-hero, our petty humans, and wondrous color-block environment. Grendel is urbane and witty— similar to Peter Ustinov. The narrative conceit is that Grendel talks to his (unspeaking) mother, with an interruption every now and again for song. Simultaneously the “shaper” Hrothgar hires for his mead hall forges a mighty ballad about the King’s nose and its battle-earned scar. Also, a mystical dragon discloses facts of life to Grendel, in song and dance form. By the time Beowulf arrives on the scene, we know exactly for whom we won’t be rooting—although Grendel ‘s Beowulf is hilariously snide and lecherous. All told, there’s not much going on in this movie that one would describe as “normal”, particularly for a G-rated animated feature.
With its unlikely ingredients, Grendel comes together far, far better than one would readily think it should. The director, Alex Stitt, also wrote the screenplay and produced, so we’ve obviously got a labor of love here. It was a fortunate turn of events that his labor was executed with competence, grace, and ample style. It was also fortunate that the (also great) James Earl Jones turned down the lead role when offered to him (ostensibly when he found out it would be an animated picture). Peter Ustinov provides one of his greatest and most memorable performance as the lovable Grendel. His personality underscores the beast’s humanity, and allows us an anchor in the vibrantly fanciful world of Grendel Grendel Grendel.
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.
“We have tried to create a kind of ‘nether world’ that would seem timeless. A strange place that would be uncomfortably familiar.”–Dave Borthwick
DIRECTED BY: Dave Borthwick
FEATURING: Nick Upton, Deborah Collard
PLOT: When wasp-guts accidentally fall into a jar of artificial sperm, the resultant baby is a fetus-like boy about the size of a thumb. While Tom is still a pre-verbal toddler, men in black suits kidnap him from his poor but loving home and take him to their “Laboratorium” for study. Escaping with the help of a tiny dragon-like creature, Tom stumbles upon other miniature people, who live in a state of eternal war against the “giants,” before reuniting with his father.
BACKGROUND:
The movie’s plot is suggested by the fairy tale “Tom Thumb,” the oldest surviving English folktale, but beyond the presence of a tiny child there are few similarities to the ancient legend.
The movie was originally commissioned by the BBC as a ten-minute short to be shown at Christmastime, but they rejected the end product for being too dark. The station changed its mind after the short became an award-winning hit on the festival circuit, and co-funded this one-hour feature version of the story.
Tom Thumb was also partly funded by Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, who also wrote the theme song.
Besides stop-motion animation, Tom Thumb uses a technique called “pixilation,” which is basically the same idea but with live actors instead of models. Director Borthwick found that professional actors lacked the patience to sit still for the hours sometimes required for shots where humans interacted with puppets, so he used animators and technical personnel in the main roles instead (star Nick Upton is a primarily an animator specializing in pixilation).
After debuting on television, Tom Thumb toured the film festival circuit and even booked theatrical dates in the U.S., paired with the excellent and bizarre short “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life.”
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s so much to choose from—particularly the surrealistic menagerie of disembodied body parts and mix-and-match homunculi from the Laboratorium—that the wilder images cancel each other out. In fact, it’s the faces of our two leads—the innocent, half-formed clay features of Tom and the greasy, beaming mug of his proud working-class dad—that stick in the mind. Indeed, for the poster and DVD cover images, the producers used such of scene of the two principal characters posing together (it’s a promotional still of a domestic scene that does not actually occur in the movie).
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Flying syringe insect; crucified Santa; halo of vermin
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The tone of this fairy tale is hard to explain: equal parts silent slapstick, dystopian futurism, and Svankmajerian surrealism, delivered through twitchy visuals that makes it play like a particularly restless dream. There is an unexpected sweetness to the concoction that helps it go down more smoothly than you might expect, but it still leaves a residue of nightmare behind.
Original trailer for The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb
FEATURING: Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, Bryan Madorsky
PLOT: Moving to a new town and going to a new school can be tough on a young boy, but Michael’s problems may be even worse—his parents might be cannibals.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Parents is a wonderful little black comedy directed by Bob Balaban, better known for his many appearances in off-beat comedies over the past few decades (including Moonrise Kingdom, Gosford Park, and as a recurring character on “Seinfeld”). With three-million bucks and an eccentric performance from Randy Quaid, Balaban put together a fun little romp of the macabre combining “nifty-’50s” schmaltz with nightmarish overtones. If really pressed, I’d say it could make the “Certified Weird” cut; but frankly, we’re running out of space.
COMMENTS: Some years bring us big movies—-movies a generation remembers as iconic. The year 1988 brought us classics like Die Hard, Coming to America, Rain Man, and Big. It also brought us Parents—a movie that, like “the Little Engine that Could”, eschews fame but provides a solid performance. Tucked away among dozens of big-name pictures that year, Parents succeeds at everything it sets out to: it is dark, it is funny, and it is a helluva sinister showcase for Randy Quaid. It fared poorly in theaters—not surprising considering the genre (horror comedy), competition (already mentioned), and stars (great actors, but not Hollywood gods). But who cares? Though not quite a qualifier for Certified Weird status, Parents is exactly the kind of movie for our readers.
A jaunty mamba plays through the credits: a pleasant montage of 1950’s hyper-Lynchian suburbia: helicopter shots of indentikit houses; a beautiful mint-green Oldsmobile filled with wholesome groceries and a nuclear family; a friendly crossing guard. But alas, young Michael Laemle (Bryan Madorsky) lacks his parents’ enthusiasm about moving from Massachusetts. Michael sullenly mopes about the house in near silence, refusing to eat any of the left-overs brought from their old home. His mother Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) is a chirpy kind of perfect housewife, maintaining a spotless home while cooking elaborate, meaty meals. Michael’s father Nick is enthusiastic about his job (developing aerosol defoliants) and is keen to fit in with the new neighbors. What’s eating at the boy, then?
The greatest charm of Parents is its narrative ambiguity. Balaban crafts a tone that matches its hyper-kitschy nostalgia with equal parts menace. Colors pop off the screen while a lack of immediate context and chilling musical cues do a lot of heavy lifting. Nick Laemle is prone to telling didactic “stories” to his son, typically to a discordant, darkened score. And the big question—are the parents cannibals?—is difficult to answer. Early on we see Michael witness his parents being romantic, with mom’s lipstick smeared on her and her husband. What develops is a conflation of his parents’ physicality with his paranoia about the nightly meat dishes. Since everything is through the eyes of the morosely imaginative Michael, the fiery ending could be construed as tragicomic, or just straight up tragic.
Unexpectedly, Parents excels in its characterization. Lily’s emotional distress about her boy is palpable; Nick’s inability to bond with his son is moving. And, time and again, the big question of the film pops up. Others may disagree, but I’m of the feeling that all the “trouble” in the story is in the mind of young Michael. Though he’s the central observer, scenes exist in the film that he cannot possibly have witnessed. But I digress. At 81 minutes, Parents is commendably brief. Balaban created a masterpiece in miniature in 1988, one that has aged substantially better than many of its more famous contemporaries.
– 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)
