Desperate Living

"It's like war! Don't tell me I don't know what Vietnam is like!"

Peggy Gravel

Woo-wee! A movie that looks as bad as it smell!

I'd like to start off by mentioning that this film opens with the POV of a gourmet diner dining on a dead rat.

What follows this appetizer, the main course, is par for it.

Ahem.

Filth and vulgarity are beautiful things, cinema-wise; sex, violence, and degradation being staples of entertainment since, like, forever ago. I won't comment as to the morality of it; at least we don't really, literally, thrill to the bloody spectacle of death in the Circus Maximus, as those ancient Roman plebes.

Before he became a chichi purveyor of slightly edgy, middling movie comedies, writer/director John Waters made gutter movies that tested the social fortitude of Vietnam-era America. Sticking his finger in the eye and his thumb up the ass of a bunch of aging Eisenhower-era old women with blue beehives, and sturdy, God-fearing what-for hulking male American macho beasties, all of whom carried heavy metal lunchboxes custom-built for Herman Munster (I have no idea what the f*ck I'm talking about, but, you know, Dada emphasizes the sound of the verbiage over the coherency, dig?), none of whom could be said to be sympathetic to a gay, lapsed Catholic movie director with a pencil-thin moustache and a penchant for doggie poo.

Anyway, Divine isn't in this one. I can't remember why.

Peggy Gravel (the redoubtable Mink Stole) is a histrionic, screaming bourgeois cunt on the edge of a nervous breakdown—she could make even Ana Kasparian seem sane by comparison. Her world is one in which kids playing baseball outside are part of a grand conspiracy to drive her batshit battiness even shittier. Or, well.

Desperate Living - I hate you

Her husband is a put-upon but thoroughly assholish little suburban everyman who gets executed by the fat, black alcoholic maid Grizelda (Jean Hill), when she sits on his face. Peggy/Mink and the maid escape, Connie having a meltdown all the way to an encounter with a lingerie-clad cop-cum-pervert with bleeding gums (Turkey Joe).

Then, they cross over dimensional space into Mortville, a run-to-riot slop haven of criminality living in a toilet-esque slum that is like a muddy dirt track in between some tarpaper shacks and houses constructed chiefly from sheetrock and cardboard combinations. The denizens are the gutter dregs of society: perverts, killers, criminals, what-have-you. "Filth is my motto!" declared Divine in Pink Flamingos, and here, the motto holds.

Mole (Susan Lowe) and smoking hot Day of the Locust Jayne Mansfield wannabe Muffy (the gorgeous Liz Renay) live together in a no-tell motel wherein Griz and Peggy reside. Mole, whose face is covered with moles, scars, and whatnot, has gender issues, and at one point gets a "sex change" wherein a plastic dong is attached—but then this is scissored off in angst.

A horrible queen, played by Mama Edie herself, the late, great Edith Massey (former whorehouse madam and egg enthusiast), rules over Mortville and humiliates the scuzzy citizens, declaring they must walk backwards, etc. She and Peggy (clad in a black Anton LaVey cloak-and-devil-horns ensemble) mix up a batch of rabies.

Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce, a notable and perennial Dreamlander) loves a nudist beau who I think is a garbage man (he has ample work in Mortville) and, after he is killed by the bisexual biker guardsman underling henchman of the Queen, still serves as a necrotic love doll. Everything here is maximum gross-out.

Coo-Coo is injected with rabies and starts burbling up and puking. There's lots of sex, straight and gay, no small amount of nudity, and, at the conclusion, a deep dive into cannibalism.

I'm not really sure what else can be said about this rancid fairy tale, this inversion of generally accepted societal norms, and this perverse wallow in the gutter slop of debased human minds.

Oh, yeah.

It's an allegory for the decline of Western civilization. That doesn't necessarily disqualify it from being sordidly entertaining.

Whew!

Bon appétit.

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