DRIVE-IN SATURDAY

DRIVE-IN SATURDAY

DESPERATE LIVING (Is This Your Suburb?)

by

Edouard Dauphin

Like some pill-crazed Mongoloid brother-in-law who keeps turning up at family reunions, director John Waters continues to make films. First there was Pink Flamingos, in which an elephantine drag queen named Divine literally and figuratively ate caca. Then came Female Trouble, which even managed to gross out Rex Reed (guess he's forgotten Myra Breckenridge). ' Now we have Desperate Living and all I can say is I'd like to have the airsick bag lobby concession on this sucker.

Waters makes his pictures in Baltimore, MD, so it's no wonder they're stomach-turning. Desperate Living is even more revolting than Spiro Agnew, another Baltimore product that should be wound around a reel and put in a small, dark room.

Though he's been kicking around the movie biz for more than a decade, Waters still isn't a household word. Unless your house happens to be in a burg like; Mortville and, if that's the case, good luck.

Mortville, the fictional setting for Desperate Living, is a nightmarish hamlet near Baltimore, where the vilest, most despicable criminals can find asylum.. .provided they obey the commands of rotten Queen Carlotta, played with delicatessen charm by Edith Massey, a sawed-off runt of a woman who has become a regular in the Waters stable.

Carlotta's idea of a good time is forcibly injecting rabies into the hind quarters of select members of the populace. (I suppose it's better than having to watch Don Kirshner.)

Heading the cast is the ultra-silly Liz Renay, perhaps the sleaziest woman of our time. Former gun moll of mobster Mickey Cohen, Liz, at a ripe old 51 (with bust size to match), hereby lays claim to the title of World's Oldest Ingenue. v

Liz has an interesting background: Served three years'in the slammer for perjury, masterminded a mother-daughter strip act on the bump & grind circuit, and once had the bright idea to streak Hollywood Boulevard. She beat the indecent exposure rap in a full jury trial, despite the testimony of witnesses who saw her squatting bare-assed on the star of Rin Tin Tin.

Liz plays Muffy St. Jacques, an oversexed lesbian who smothers her baby sitter in a bowl of dog food. Take that, Lome Greene.

She is joined in Mortville by an unlikely pair fleeing the law: Peggy Gravel, an hysterical suburban housewife and Grizelda, her uppity 5 foot tall, 400 pound maid. The latter has just rendered Peggy a widow by sitting on Mr. Gravel, a well-meaning nerd, whose last words are lost in Grizelda's unsightly thighs.

Peggy is portrayed with a certain convulsive charm by Mink Stole, another Waters favorite. In her screen debut, playing the gargantuan «

Grizelda, is a behemoth named Jean Hill, who works as a substitute teacher in the Baltimore school system. (Bet the little brats don't fuck with her.)

Also in this menagerie is Susan Lowe in the part of Mole McHenry, a hideous looking lesbian whose kisser resembles the top crust on a bowl of French onion soup.

Mole and Muffy are lovers but something's gone wrong. When Muffy mouths off at the dinner table, Mole nonchalantly drives a fork through her hand and Muffy hardly even screams. "That hurt," she mutters about five minutes later and Mole senses that something is missing froYn their S&M relationship. Namely the M.

Her solution is to spice things up with a sex change. With the gelt she wins in the Maryland lottery, she skulks off to Baltimore for a Scandinavian special. Upon returning to Mortville, she finds that Muffy is repulsed by her new, masculine look. Whereupon she grabs a scissors and, in gory close-up, proceeds to return to her former, feminine state. (Several men left the screening room right about here.)

Despite its shortcomings (much of it stinks), Desperate Living is a brilliant and disturbing film. Made at an astronomical cost of $65,000, it is reputed to be Waters' most lavish production. To his credit, it doesn't look a dollar over $10,000.

Catch Desperate Living. It's like catching bubonic plague.