John Waters's MONDO TRASHO (1969)

 

Welp... this is definitely John Waters's first feature-length film!

It's almost unfair in my mind to give this a specific star rating because Mondo Trasho most reminds me of a student film. Of course that's not exactly the case as Waters was purely an independent filmmaker always meaning his art to be underground, that something like this or Multiple Maniacs or Eat Your Makeup might not play in a traditional theater and so what a church or local Cafe would do just as well. That it's all so No budget and shot like a hazy drug fueled nightmare adds to the appeal for a certain audience.

But also because I can relate - when I was college I made films not quite like this (there's nothing quite like Mondo Trasho anywhere else) but similar that I had no money, only friends and random people and a light or two (if I was lucky) to work with and I was still trying to figure out what I was interested in and with influences coursing through my veins like amphetamines. I know if I revisited them today I'd be embarrassed, and Waters has said more than once that he finds Mondo Trasho in retrospect to be too long and should have been a short film.

And while he may be right, and that there isn't so much a story as it's a very ragged outline to follow with a young woman (Pearce) getting her feet sucked (and LOVES it) by a foot fetishist and then hit by a car via Divine who brings her along town and winds up captured by workers at an insane asylum who sit there and watch a, uh, nude dancer I guess before everyone breaks out and Divine finally takes her to a doctor (oh good old David Lochary, but he's wearing a mask and you should be too) who proceeds to saw off Pearce's feet and attach those of a chicken, and then the movie just wanders a bit more with Dorothy in Oz heel clicking to end up in another part of low-end Baltimore and concluding with two broads (in one of the few times they have people talking in the audio) spewing a stream of "oh look at that speed freak etc etc"... I kept watching this because I wanted to see where this would go next.

For all of its (over) length the fact that there is a car accident in this lends itself to the style- you want to keep watching because of the crazy turns it will go to and how insane Waters fills the frame with his people acting like there's never been a top high enough to go over. And all put to that soundtrack!

The two most prominent 'children' so to speak of Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising when it comes to using music, often in wall-to-wall style, were clearly Martin Scorsese and John Waters, but for the latter there was also Andy Warhol and that is what makes Mondo Trasho so engaging even as (or despite) there not being a whole lot going on at times or scenes being stretched past their limits. There is a conflict in approach though as Warhol was very much about elongation and making the audience feel bored because being bored is good for you and Zzzzz. Waters didn't work like that even from early on as he was an outsider who wore his Freak Flag proud and wanted to get a rise out of the then easily shockable audience.

So a scene where we are watching Pearce wait for a bus for five minutes has a fascination to it - Waters once said this is what hitchhiking was really like, waiting around till one gave up (incidentally an Anger book is being read by Pearce on the bus) - but it isn't very engaging, even with the uh Graduation music put to it. Or the foot sucking scene, which has a great lead up with the fetishist sneaking around and looking like a would be Manson Family fucker, goes on past the point where there's even the laughter over how long it is (and are those cutaway shots to her fantasies while being pleasured? Search me). Or the dance in the asylum is another scene that goes on for so long that it becomes boring, and it shouldn't be because Waters is a natural entertainer. So it's at times frustrating to take as a film and not viewed as an early experiment by a guy trying to figure his shit out.

But what's interesting further is that it feels like Waters is growing as a director while the movie goes on - by the time we get to the Doctor's office, there's more of an energy and a filthy comic spirit to the edits and the song choices get even wilder. It's not that the movie before doesn't have these moments, a few pretty funny, where Waters gets his groove as a shameless provocateur, but till this set piece it's in fits and starts. I can't stress enough how unique the soundtrack here is, that it's a bit more eclectic than straight rock and roll (though there's lots of that) as Wagner and the Wizard of Oz soundtrack get time alongside Motown and Link Wray.

Mondo Trasho should be unclassifiable, a largely meant to be silent film (no sync sound, that came later) but also a Jukebox musical about a desperate lady in a convertible in Divine and the poor car crash victim and the Maniacs and bastards and bitches they meet along the way... but it's ultimately a John Waters/Dreamland Studios movie. I'm glad I saw it, even though I'm not sure I'd sit through it again any time soon.

Kathleen Turner in John Waters's SERIAL MOM (1994)

 

Among lines that haven't aged well, "I just love Bill Cosby pictures" is among the most haggard and bone-chilling.

Anyway, Serial Mom is a fabulous, 50 story flaming apple pie of a movie as John Waters brilliantly in a giant cartoon fresco merges ideas and themes from at least two of his previous works, most specifically (and this may be because I've been going through his oeuvre piece by piece the past few weeks) the inverse of both Female Trouble and Polyester, where the tough but damaged heroine of the former gets transmogrified by trash people into a mad killer who ultimately (spoiler) is sent to death at the chair and the downtrodden and gobsmacked housewife with an awful husband and useless couple of units (err children) has to reckon with her life and what's become of it - here we have a woman (Kathleen Turner, who should have in any just world won the Nobel peace prize nevermind the Osvar for this) who is loony tunes all on her own yet in a fine contradiction totally within her faculties, an absolutely equally terrible yet totally delightful force of nature who's husband is a simmering coward (Sam Waterston, who you've never seen like this before and wouldn't again) and who's kids are lovable dolts obsessed with pop culture and being adored (ie Ricky Lake and the various men she oggles- and likewise, in a great running gag). And as the bodies pile up, well... can you really blame her??

This is consistently hilarious work, full of perfectly executed scenes where the actors get to behave I'm the biggest and broadest strokes and dialog that constantly catches you off guard - especially because you should (or really I should) know by now with Waters what he'll put in the script to get the biggest laughs from the lowest blows. And yet what I admire so much when I ponder more on it is that Waters isn't punching down necessarily; this is upper middle class (white AF) suburbia where everyone has it pretty darn good, Beverly included as the housewife of a (I guess successful) dentist, the other wives and various supporting characters are self-absorbed nitwit people or just suck, and it's almost like Beverly cum Serial Mom is strangely enough a breath of fresh air for "Normal" society. If he's mocking anything in particular, and this is certainly a consistent throughline through all his movies, it's how tasteless and pathetic most people are, while it's all emaculately designed by Vincent Peranio for all this gonzo satire to spring from.

And of course the punching up also extends to the legal system and the media circuses that turn killers into All Star People, whether they intend to or not (and usually they do, or did back when that was more a thing). By the time Serial Mom becomes a recognized figure, she (one thing certainly akin to the Dawn character in Female Trouble) has to keep feeding the beast and loves the attention - though through that entire bonkers courtroom series of scenes the thing that's most clear is that as Beverly is finding all the ways to make herself lovable and a great scoundrel, she is still clearly not hinged (white heels after Labor Day? Nope!) In other words, as Waters keeps this rightfully ridiculous comic spectacle gaining in momentum, leading up to that big final day with the church, the Annie set piece (maybe the funniest of the murders which is saying a lot), the Camel Lips concert and then into the court, it's like the only way this could work is it it becomes about how this is ALL spectacle, everyone knows it, and maybe we're all the better for accepting it... or no that's not right word, acknowledging it, there.

I hope I made clear that Turner is phenomenal here, because she is, but extra shout outs to Mink Stole, the other end of the prank phone calls (::chefs kiss:: to all those all around), a young but totally game Matthew Lillard, Patty Hearst and Traci Lords's minor roles, and even the guy as Andy from Child's Play 3 gets a wild set piece involving an epic masturbation session to a Russ Meyer movie. And the other important things to know are this: this is directed just right, to be slick and colorful but never forgetting the (sometimes extreme) comic pacing needed for so many of these scenes, and yet it doesn't become so stylized to the point that it overshadows the performances, which brings me to the other movie this made me think of (also 94), Natural Born Killers.

That as well tackled the milieu of Serial Killers as Celebrities and how toxic the media can get in making it less about lives lost than about who can get the best book or movie deal, but Stone's film has aged a lot more poorly to me when compared to something like Waters film. Both films mean to show an extravagant, uber-even-monolithically satirical examination of what kinds of people are Serial killers and how they're seen as figures for mass Capitalist production, but Stone lathers the cinematic style on it so thick that it takes over from whats there on screen, and the people already in it should be strong enough (the characters as well as the performances) to say it all. 

Waters doesn't have that problem because he keeps things relatively simple visually - not to say he can't move the camera sharply or acutely or even in an amusing fashion or find clever editing - so we can focus on how bugfuck the material is on its own. Your mileage may vary, but decades down the line Setial Mom seems to have more to say on a substantive level about what a Suburban life does to people like Beverly, it doesn't bother explaining why she is this way, and the the silliness and violence is nearly invigorating. As the saying is: go big or go home!

So once again, anyway, Serial Mom is one of the underrated American films of the mid 90s, and up there with Waters most important (and fucking just funniest) films for me as far as the Mel Brooksian Rising Below Vulgarity thing.