Pink Flamingos (1972)

Directed by

John Waters

Genre

drama film, comedy film, crime film, LGBTQ-related film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 33m

Rated

NC-17

Rating

6.1 of 10 from 565 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A woman known as the filthiest person alive lives in a trailer with her family. A jealous couple tries to steal her title by doing even dirtier things. The story follows the two sides as they try to outdo each other with disgusting acts.

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What happens

Pink Flamingos is a 1972 American independent black comedy crime film by John Waters. It is part of what Waters has labelled the "Trash Trilogy", which also includes Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977). The film stars the countercultural drag queen Divine as a criminal living under the name of Babs Johnson, who is proud to be "the filthiest person alive". While living in a trailer with her mother Edie (Edith Massey), son Crackers (Danny Mills), and companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce), Divine is confronted by the Marbles (David Lochary and Mink Stole), a pair of criminals envious of her reputation who try to outdo her in filth. Characters caught in their feud include the Marbles’ sadistic butler Channing (Channing Wilroy), their spy Cookie (Cookie Mueller), and The Egg Man (Paul Swift), an egg salesman whom Edie is infatuated with. The characters engage in several grotesque, bizarre, and explicitly crude situations, and upon the film's re-release in 1997 it was rated NC-17 by the MPAA "for a wide range of perversions in explicit detail". It was filmed in the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland, where Waters and most of the cast and crew grew up. Displaying the tagline "An exercise in poor taste", Pink Flamingos is notorious for its "outrageousness", nudity, profanity, and "pursuit of frivolity, scatology, sensationology [sic] and skewed epistemology". It features a "number of increasingly revolting scenes" that center on exhibitionism, voyeurism, sodomy, masturbation, gluttony, vomiting, rape, incest, murder, animal cruelty, cannibalism, zoophilia, castration, foot fetishism, and concludes, to the accompaniment of "How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?", with Divine's consumption of dog feces – "The real thing!" narrator Waters assures the viewers. The film is considered a preliminary exponent of abject art. The film, at first semi-clandestine, has received a warm reception from film critics and, despite being banned in several countries and even in some parts of the United States, became a cult film in subsequent decades. In 2021, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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