![]() |
Director : John Waters
Producer : Christine Vachon
Screenwriter : John Waters
Starring : Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Chris Isaak, Selma Blair, Suzanne Shepherd, Mink Stole, Susan Allenback, Paul DeBoy, Wes Johnson, Patricia Hearst
Ultra-trashy provocateur John Waters returns to crude, campy form with A Dirty
Shame, a risqué, ribald NC-17 sex-a-thon that finds the iconoclastic director
reveling in his most beloved vices. The story of a frigid housewife who,
because of an accidental head injury, becomes indoctrinated into a gang of
raging sex addicts, Waters’ ultra-vulgar comedy about fornicating buffoons and
boobs is both a sarcastic rebuke to the traditional notion of “family values”
and a heartfelt paean to Baltimore’s freakish misfit population. Barely
resembling the director’s exasperatingly toothless Pecker and half-baked Cecil
B. DeMented, the film – a delirious explosion of genitalia jokiness and raunchy
social satire that’s coated in an incongruous sheen of ‘50s-era movie
mannerisms – is as nasty as it wants to be.
Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) is a grumpy, prudish convenience store employee
who can’t stand her husband Vaughn’s (Chris Isaak) sexual advances and is
ashamed of her stripper daughter Caprice’s (Selma Blair) insanely enormous fake
breasts, which the young harlot willingly displays (at least, before being put
under house arrest for indecent exposure) down at the local biker bar under the
stage name “Ursula Udders.” Sylvia is disgusted by the rampant public displays
of affection infecting her quiet town, yet after suffering a concussion, a
strapping mechanic named Ray-Ray (Johnny Knoxville) does some voodoo on her
libido, transforming Sylvia into an unhinged sex-aholic destined – as the
Christ-like Ray-Ray preaches to his choir of fetishistic cohorts – to discover
a truly unique new sexual act. With the rallying cry “Let’s Go Sexin’!”, Sylvia
and Ray-Ray orchestrate a debauched sexual revolution against the square
“Neuters” who – led by Sylvia’s mother Big Ethel (Suzanne Shepherd) and Marge
the Neuter (Waters regular Mink Stole) – have organized a counter-coalition of
the “moral,” and Waters, through the sheer abundance of explicit material on
display, goes for the jugular (or somewhere slightly lower) in his attempt to
appall and offend.
Those with unadventurous opinions about sex will surely find much to object to
in Waters’ scattershot comedy, which is inundated with bizarre sexual
obsessions (adult babies; homosexual “bears;” defecation and fellatio
fanatics), suggestive imagery (even the trees and bushes are taken with the
deviant deity Ray-Ray’s sensual sermons), in-jokes for the Waters faithful
(including an amusingly apropos appearance by Ricki Lake) and bad taste set
pieces highlighted by Sylvia demonstrating – during a game of hokey-pokey at
the senior center – a unique way for women to pick up plastic bottles without
using their hands. Waters’ fondness for these eccentric sexual creatures and
their inappropriate behavior is palpable, yet his overriding purpose is to
lampoon conservatives whose objection to sexual expression is, in the director’
s opinion, a fundamental opposition to tolerance. “My daughter is a good girl.
She hates sex,” says Big Ethel about her nymphomaniac offspring Sylvia, and the
Neuters’ priggish, slogan-heavy rally against these perverts (“Sex is Dirty,”
“Down with Diversity” read their placards) exemplifies Waters’ sardonic mockery
of those who virulently (and oft-times hypocritically) stand in opposition to
anyone different from themselves.
Though Waters’ flat visual compositions don’t completely do justice to his
sidesplitting potty humor, there’s a newfound go-for-broke experimentation
visible in the director’s stylistic choices. Waters embellishes this carnal
carnival with goofy “subliminal messages” (spelled-out words such as W-H-O-R-E
and H-O-R-N-Y frequently flash across the screen), erotic B-movie stock footage
collages whenever someone is hit in the head, and ironic allusions to Douglas
Sirk and similar ‘50s melodramas, and his cast – led by the superbly
out-of-control Ullman and Knoxville – joyously embraces this goofy, headstrong
brand of cinematic extremism. Culminating with a hilariously idiotic Night of
the Walking Nymphomaniacs orgy in which everyone – and everything, including
squirrels – indulges in their basest fantasies, Waters’ lewd, crude A Dirty
Shame is nothing less than a form of perverted cinematic Viagra.
In addition to extensive featurettes on the making of the film, the DVD
includes commentary from Waters and a deleted scene.
Blairy chested.
| Write for us |
" Excellent "
Rating: NC-17, 2004