CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

JUST PLAIN FOLKS

Mondo Trasho Multiple Maniacs Desperate Living (Cinema Group Home Video)

Richard C.

by

At some time in the mid-70s (depending on where you lived) there appeared on the midnight movie circuit what was possibly the strangest, and certainly the most grotesque, low-budget comedy gross/freak-out film yet. Poised somewhere between the summer of love and the Sex Pistols, Pink Flamingos was both an inheritor of the new freedom of the ’60s and a foreshadowing of the nihilism which was soon to become codified as a pop culture subdivision. The film depicted the efforts of several degenerate underclass weirdos to determine who among them was deserving of the title “the filthiest person alive.” It climaxed with the heroine, Divine, an obese transvestite in a sort of punk/clown outfit, eating (on camera) a poodle turd.

Flamingos was in the tradition of cinema outrages that goes back at least to the Bunuel/Dali razor-in-the-eye surrealism of Un Chien Andalou (’29). The difference was that in the reeling 70s there was a sizeable market for such things— a blasphemous prankster like Flamingos’ conceptualizer, Baltimore-bred-and^based filmmaker John Waters, received a certain amount of kneejerk censure (that was part of the fun), but he also received some good, old-fashioned useable fame. The success of Flamingos allowed him to create two more twisted visions (Female Trouble and Desperate Living) before graduating to a relatively more “mainstream” budget and outlook with the Tab Hunter/Divine smell-o-vision dramedy Polyester (’81). It’s important to keep in mind, during a period when the Pre-Menstrual Resource Center threatens to run amok over a few words, that recent history has shown that guerrilla-like offenses to good taste and common decency can lead to those two pillars of the American dream, fun and profit.

Not that Waters was an opportunistic berserker cynically rushing in to fill that space made available during the post-Watergate/Vietnam moral recession—no, Waters was a man with a coherent point of view and a world-class pervert’s sense of his cultural heritage. Thanks to Cinema Group Home Video we can now crank up the VCR and sample a couple of his early atrocities in the privacy of our homes (though these sleazy romps are best viewed with select friends— the humor is intensified by some kind of communal configuration, don’t ya know).

When Mondo Trasho was made in ’69, the 22-year-old Waters, although severely limited by his inexperience and low budget, already had a distinctive style. His homosexuality (like Warhol’s, never bluntly acknowledged, that would be too crass) and creative sensitivity gave him an appreciation of those sexual subterfuges that are often labled perversions; shoe fetishism is a recurring motif in Mondo. The corrosive contradictions between the promises of moral grandeur and the empirical evidence of Earthly pettiness in his early religious experiences—in this case, Catholicism, though the phenomenon is trans-denominational—engendered the kind of encompassing anger that comes from being deeply disappointed, and which is at the root of his virulent anti-religious satire: at one point in Maniacs, seeking sanctuary in a church, Divine is anally assaulted by a rosarywielding lesbian. Finally, there is the goodnatured compassion with which Waters

views his gallery of freaks, mutants, and unredeemable pond scum—in Mondo and Maniacs, anyway (later, in his more willed than spontaneous efforts to top himself, the grotesqueries become increasingly mechanical and abrasive).

None of this, though, quite conveys the humorous zippiness of the best parts of these two early films. Filmed in glorious Baltimore in Living Dead black and white, Mondo has no direct sound but only occasional out-of-sync dialogue and appropriate snatches of old R&B/rock/pop/classical sides. The story involves a luckless pedestrian who looks like a would-be Betty Boop impersonator and who, after having her shoes raped by an especially disreputablelooking hippie, is run over by Divine, who is backing up her car in order tq,better glom a hunky hitchhiker, who has aroused her frightening libidinal impulses. The rest of the film concerns Divine’s anecdotal quest for redemption until the climax when, after a protracted demise in a pigsty, the rotund penitent is whisked away to heaven—a typical Waters happy ending.

Multiple Maniacs is technically a notch above the inspired home movie level of Mondo—there’s still a lot of hand-held camera incompetence, but we now have direct sound, allowing Waters’s gift for dialogue to flourish. Ittells the show biz saga of “Lady Divine’s Cavalcade Of Perversions,” a rolling tent show complete with a barker who announces such attractions as “puke-eaters, lesbians, and mental patients” and porn stars who will publicly display “their sacred reproductive organs.” Again, neither synopsis nor analysis quite conveys the tone—it’s sketch humor with an especially nasty edge and when it works,

TURN ME ON, DEAD MEN

GRATEFUL DEAD: SO FAR (6 West Video)

by Steve Peters_

There’s a popular bumper sticker, plastered on VW vans up and down the California coast, that bears the basic creed of a fanatically devout subculture which has managed to survive for over two decades. It’s a simple declaration/excuse, but one when Waters is breaking new ground, it’s fascinating. When it doesn’t, when both the surface repulsiveness and the underlying moral outrage seem forcibly dredged up, everything goes flat.

After Pink Flamingos, the flat stretches increased (CG Home Video is offering both Female Trouble and Desperate Living, though they wouldn’t loan me a review copy of Female, so to hell with it). Living, in color, is Waters’ most professional job up to that point and has a rather elaborate conceit-most of the film takes place in the mythical Mortville, an aggressively ugly fantasyland of criminals and nudists ruled over by the evil and apparently retarded Queen Carlotta and her goonsquad of Village People rejects, dressed in stylistic biker gear

that holds true for aging hippies and young, upwardly mobile college-types alike: There Is Nothing Like A Grateful Dead Concert.

As a declaration, it’s a valid statement: on a good night, the Dead can be positively mesmerizing, churning out almost three hours of the spontaneous magic they’ve been concocting virtually non-stop since 1965. It works as an excuse too, since even the band’s best attempts to commit their aural sorcery to vinyl have fallen short of their kinetic energy onstage, and attempts to explain this to the unenlightened might be construed as a cop-out.

But any Deadhead worth his or her tiedyes might be a little hesitant about a marriage between the good ol’ Grateful Dead complete with see-through bodV-shirts. In this context the unrelieved insults, both verbal and physical (including a graphic castration scene) become gloomy—this is humor and morality tale-telling on the level of a wrestling match but with good and evil so similarly shaded that you don’t care who wins.

. Today Waters is a respected elder statesman of the punky cultural counterpunch, writing for prestigious film journals, lecturing in prisons (true!) and generally proving that there is life beyond wretched excess. By the time you read this his new film, Flairspray, should be out. The cast alone is an affront (Sonny Bono, Debbie Harry, Pia Zadora) and indicates that even in the doddering ’80s a courageouslilmmaker can find a way to peddle his bad attitude.

and the (relatively) new video medium. More than any other current band, the Dead, with their legendary, loosely-structured jams, invite personal interpretation. Besides, past Deadvids have been mediocre at best; the two-hour plus Grateful Dead Movie lost most of its wide-screened stereo splendor when transferred to the confines of the VHS format, and Warner Bros.’ 1982 made-for-VCR release, Dead Ahead, boasts audio quality that, quite frankly, sounds like shit—not a desirable factor for those endangered artists who still rely on music rather than image to get their point across. Plus the band’s 1987 ventures into videolanch, hot on the heels of their first bonafide hit single, ran the gamut from cute to corny. The idea of the Dead turning into skeletons for “Touch Of Gray” was inspired silliness, but the stinging lyrics of “Hell In A Bucket” lost some of their bite when coupled with images of guitarist/lead vocalist Bob Weir traipsing through a version of Hades that looked like it was conceived by the set designers of Solid Gold.

So Far, thankfully, is more than a Dead retrospective for the MTV generation. According to Jerry Garcia, it’s “just another Grateful Dead attempt to describe the indescribable,” and it’s a commendable effort, interspersing concert footage from Oakland Coliseum and live-in-an-empty-concerthall renditions of past and present Dead tunes with visual images that range from thought-provoking to mind-blowing (all insparkling hi-fi stereo, no less!). The key word in Uncle Jerry’s quote, however, is attempt— trying to cram a colorful, 23-yearold musical history like the Dead’s into 60 minutes worth of videotape is somewhat akin to paring the complete works of Shakespeare down to Cliff’s Notes.

The high points, of course, come when the band does its thing in front of a real audience. The tape kicks off with a beautiful (albeit tame) rehearsal version of the classic “Uncle John’s Band,” but the best moments here are live treatments of “Playing In The Band” and the perennial favorite “Not Fade Away.”

Also included is “Drums/Space,’* a lengthy instrumental excursion that has long been a staple of the band’s live set and, depending on your own tastes and any external influences you might have indulged in before the show, can be either completely captivating or excrutiatingly dull. But the Dead use it to great effect here, augmenting an urgent tribal beat (laid down by drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart) with Koyaanisqatsi-like images of nature, ‘modern society and the apocalypse. This eases into the anti-nuclear diatribe “Throwing Stones” (from last year’s In The Dark LP), which features grim clips of war to punctuate its message.

There are some criticisms to be* levied against So Far. The uneven vocals that have plagued the band for years sometimes slightly mar otherwise terrific performances, and the concise length of the tape is compounded by the fact that “Terrapin Station,” the band’s lengthy, multi-part opus, is presented in abbreviated form as “Lady With A Fan.” Blasphemy!

But like the most successful Dead shows, So Far leaves its viewer in a buoyant, uplifted mood. After the sobering visions of “Throwing Stones,” the band segues into the lively “Not Fade Away.” As they leave the stage to the audience’s unending chant of “Love is real, not fade away,” the camera pulls back to reveal the coliseum, the city of Oakland, the planet earth and eventually space, demonstrating that the Grateful Dead still adhere to those same lofty notions of cosmic unity and happiness that have threatened mankind’s time-honored traditions of hate and violence since the ’60s. In 1988 those values may seem a bit idealistic, but the Dead apparently feel they’re still something to aspire to. And you know that can’t be bad.