Tag Archives: John Paizs

Pink Flamingos

Divine Pink Flamigos
Still of Divine in Pink Flamingos (1972) © New Line Cinema / Lawrence Irvine

Format: Cinema

Screening as part of It Isn’t Very Pretty… The Complete Films of John Waters (Every Goddam One of Them…)

Enjoy a 2-4-1 ticket offer on all events in this season by simply quoting Waters241 online, in person or over the phone 020 7928 3232. For full programme info and to book tickets online, visit the BFI website

Screening Dates: 6, 19, 25 September 2015

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: John Waters

Writer: John Waters

Cast: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Danny Mills, Edith Massey

USA 1972

107 mins

***** out of *****

When I first saw Pink Flamingos at the age of 14 on a battered 16mm print in a University of Winnipeg lecture hall, used most nights as a ‘Cinema Gallery’ repertory house, I knew I was seeing something unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Its grimy underground quality, dappled with occasional crispy blue skies, a mix of gloriously overcast and sunny days, mostly (if not all) natural light, almost-fluorescent pinks, blues and reds emanating from various set elements to make the drab look even more beautiful than it seemed and, super-gleefully, an oddly familiar patchwork quilt setting – at once modern, yet anchored in a kind of sad, dilapidated 50s architectural ennui, all contributing to an overwhelming feeling that seemed diametrically opposed to the aforementioned notion of seeing something unique.

The bottom line: I knew this burgh as if it were my own backyard. I’d never been to Baltimore, where the film was shot, and at this time of mid-adolescent purity, I had no idea it even was Baltimore. What thrilled me to no end is that it reminded me of Winnipeg, the sleepy midwestern prairie city in the longitudinal centre of Canada where I was born (in spite of conception in Detroit and a last-minute sentimental sojourn by my Mommy back home to pop me into the awaiting hands of some bushy-eyebrowed gyno with a ciggie dangling from his lips). Even the film’s warped sense of humour, its cast of perverse characters, a blend of trailer trash, cooler than cool freakazoids and some of its skewed, often deliciously viscous, vicious dialogue all crackled with a kind of perverse Winnipegian attention to ludicrous details.

Seeing this movie seemed like having a dream of home, and the world of the movie made me feel like I’d found my true home.

In retrospect, I realise why my immediate connection to the picture was a more-than telling detail, which ultimately reflected just how many friends, neighbors, teachers, priests and relatives regarded me with an occasionally bemused, but mostly wary suspicion.

Big deal! Fuck ’em. I loved the movie so much that years later I connected with regional filmmakers like John Paizs (Crime Wave) and Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, Keyhole) to produce their early films, both imbued with similarly post-modern familiarity with both art and life. I also programmed my own rep cinema that unspooled mostly ‘cult’ films, managing in those halcyon pre-video-boom days to pack the joint and collect a whole lot of like-minded sickos as regulars, all living in dark corners and deep closets to escape the more repressive qualities of Winnipeg (whilst embracing said restrictively coercive delights with equal fervor).

It’s the dichotomous nature of John Waters’s great film that drives it. Every perverse element is rooted in a love and respect for all that is old, decrepit and yes, even horrifically, titillatingly straight-laced.

The simple plot involving the rivalry for the tabloid-bestowed title of ‘Filthiest Person Alive’ between vivacious Babs Johnson (Divine) and the nastily cruel Marble couple, Connie (Mink Stole) and Raymond (David Lochary), was a magnificently solid wooden coat hanger for Waters to proudly hang all manner of sheer, demented, ever-so-cool sickness upon. (Or, if you will, wellness, depending, of course, upon your particular persuasion.)

Babs lives in hiding in a small trailer on the outskirts of town with her sexually deviant son Crackers (Danny Mills), her jolly, roly-poly, mildly retarded and goofily sexy mother Edie (Edith Massey) and Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce), the beautiful voyeuristic ‘traveling companion’ to Babs. They’re a happy family; perhaps even happier than ‘normal’ nuclear families in post-war urban housing developments.

For me, Edie proves to be the true spiritual mascot of the film. Unaware of the squalid surroundings, the aberrant qualities of her children and the fact that it might not be entirely normal to live her whole life in a playpen, adorned only in her ill-fitting undergarments, Edie is 300 pounds of innocence, purity, magnificent mounds and folds of milky white corpulence and, ultimately, a one-track mind.

Edie loves eggs. Well, who doesn’t?

Edie wants them scrambled, fried, boiled or fluffed-up into sumptuous omelets. Her greatest (and seemingly only) fear is that chickens might cease to exist and, as such, eggs would go the way of the dodo. Though Babs tries to reassure her that chickens will never become extinct, Edie won’t have any of it and, like a child resembling a record stuck on a skip, she continues to fear the worst until Babs finally has to admit to her, ‘Now, Mama, that’s just egg paranoia.’

All calms down, though, when Edie gets a visit from the friendly Egg Man (Paul Swift). Adorned in his sharp dairy-white duds and sporty sideburns, he opens his traveling salesman’s case full of eggs and provides the spiel that makes Edie’s fretting so much dust in the wind.

‘Just look at these,’ the Egg Man beams proudly. ‘Eggs so fresh you could hardly believe it. How about it, Edie? What will it be for the lady that the eggs like the most?’

Though Edie is placated, her ‘egg paranoia’ seems to rear its head once more, this time in the Egg Man’s presence as she begins to shudder desperately, almost orgasmically, screaming ‘Oh God, Oh God!’ However, the Egg Man will have none of it when he declares, ‘Miss Edie, as long as there are chickens laying and trucks driving and my feet walking, you can be sure that l will bring you the finest of the fine, the largest of the large and the whitest of the white. ln other words, that thin-shelled ovum of the domestic fowl will never be safe as long as there are chickens laying. I am your Egg Man and there ain’t a better one in town!’

Phew!

So, does anyone reading this summary of egg obsession feel like the events are perfectly normal? Oh, good. I’m glad you think so too.

If you accept this as truth, then you will also accept the Marbles couple kidnapping young women, chaining them in their basement, getting their butler to rape and impregnate them and then to sell the babies to well-heeled lesbian couples.

If you accept the Marbles couple as truth, you will also accept Edie’s son screwing a new girlfriend (Cookie Mueller) whilst shoving live chickens into their mutual pubic areas, squashing them with his manly thrusts and culminating in the decapitation of a chicken and spilling its warm blood upon the naked flesh of his sex partner whilst sexy Cotton spies the proceedings through a window whilst seemingly masturbating.

If you accept the chicken-shack antics as truth, you will also accept how Babs marinates her (stolen) steaks from the butcher shop by shoving them up her dress to rest against her precious petals of liquides du quim.

If you accept all of the above and more as truth, then you, like I, will accept Winnipeg as Baltimore and Baltimore as the world and the universe of John Waters’s Pink Flamingos as the place we’d all rather be living in – a Milky Way of magnificent perversion, nestled in the purity of heart that is Miss Edie and her unbridled passion for eggs.

This is my yellow brick road to the Wizard of Oz.

Hopefully you’ll feel likewise.

Greg Klymkiw

Crime Wave

Crime Wave
Crime Wave

Director: John Paizs

Writer: John Paizs

Cast: Eva Kovacs, John Paizs, Neil Lawrie, Darrell Baran

Canada 1985

80 mins

***** out of *****

Not including the spectacular 4K restoration by the TIFF Cinematheque unveiled at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve seen Crime Wave.

Has it been 40, 50, 60 times? Have I seen it 100 times, perhaps, even more? Whatever the final tally actually is, the fact remains that each and every time I see the film, I’m not only howling with laughter as hard as I did when I first saw it, but absolutely floored by how astoundingly brilliant and original it is.

This is a movie that has not dated and will probably never date.

It’s a film that has inspired filmmakers all over the world and not only is it the crown jewel in the ‘prairie post-modernist’ crown – coined and bestowed upon it by film critic Geoff Pevere – it’s paved the way for Guy Maddin, Bruce McDonald, Reg Harkema, Lynne Stopkewich, Don McKellar, Astron-6 and virtually any other Canadian filmmaker who went on to blow the world away with their unique, indigenous cinematic visions of a world that could only have been borne upon celluloid from a country as insanely staid and repressed as Canada.

Borrowing from his favourite childhood films – sleazy, garish crime pictures, Technicolor science fiction epics, film noir, weird-ass training/educational films, Roger Corman, Terence Fisher, Kenneth Anger, the Kuchar Brothers, Elia Kazan, Orson Welles, Walt Disney, Frank Tashlin, Douglas Sirk, John Ford (!!!) and yes, even National Film Board of Canada documentaries – John Paizs made one of the most sought after, coveted and beloved cult movies of the past 30 years. For everything it pays homage to, the picture is ultimately 110% ALL John Paizs. There’s nothing like it.

Taking on the lead role of Steven Penny, Paizs created a character who is hell-bent upon writing the greatest ‘colour crime movie’ of all time. He rooms in the attic above a garage owned by a family of psychotically normal Winnipeg suburbanites whose little girl Kim (Eva Kovacs) befriends the reclusive young man. Every morning, she rifles through the garbage where Penny has disposed of his writings and as she reads them, we get to see gloriously lurid snippets of celluloid from the fevered brain of this young writer.

These sequences are dappled with colours bordering on fluorescent and narrated with searing Walter Winchell-like stabs of verbal blade-thrusts.

Contrasting this, we also get Kim’s gentle, natural, non-colour-crime-movie narration. She innocently describes Penny not unlike serial killers upon whom have been bestowed, après-capture, fond reminiscences like: ‘Gee whiz, he was a really nice guy.’ Indeed, Steven Penny inhabits Kim’s words like a glove: ‘He was a quiet man,’ she says sweetly.

As Crime Wave progresses, Penny’s creative blockages become dire. As he locks himself up for weeks, his room, so foul and fetid, invites rats to scurry upon his immobile depression-infused carcass. Kim finds salvation in a back page ad of Penny’s Bible-like magazine Colour Crime Quarterly. It seems that one Dr Jolly (Neil Lawrie), a script doctor, exists in Sails, Kansas. Kim insists, that HE is what Steven needs. Dr Jolly provides comfort to burgeoning young screenwriters. What they really need is the one important thing he can provide:

TWISTS!!!

Unbeknownst to anyone, Dr Jolly is a serial killer who lures young screenwriters into his den of depravity to sodomize and murder them. Dr Jolly’s goal is to truly show young men the meaning of the word:

TWISTS!!!

As a filmmaker, Paizs eventually leads us on an even more insane journey than we’ve already been on board for, and during the dizzyingly final 20 minutes of the film, he delivers one of the most brilliant, hallucinogenic and piss-your-pants funny extended montages you’ll ever experience. John Paizs then teaches us the meaning of the word:

TWISTS!!!

Twists indeed.

You’ll see nothing like them in any film. Crime Wave is one of the most ravishingly original films ever made. If you haven’t seen it, you must.

If you have seen it, see the picture again and again and again and yet again.

That’s why they call them cult films.

This review is part of our TIFF 2014 coverage.

Greg Klymkiw