FEMALE TROUBLE (1974)
Oh, sure, Pink Flamingos has the shit-eating and the egg lady and Hairspray’s the big fat crossover hit, but to my way of thinking, Female Trouble is probably the masterpiece of John Waters’ cinematic career, an epic faux biopic spanning the life of Divine’s iconic Dawn Davenport from adolescence to the electric chair by way of High School Confidential, Butterfield 8 and the weirdest episode of Batman ever. Shock value has always been Waters’ aesthetic and if, say, you were to attend an all-night marathon of his early films tripping your balls off on LSD (like, uh...this friend of mine did once), your jaw would remain in constant droppage at the cavalcade of perversion, blasphemy and scrub-your-brain imagery on relentless display, from Flamingos’ notorious “singing asshole” to Desperate Living’s hung leather goons “digging for gold” in aged Edith Massey’s queenly honeypot. But Waters’ brand of exploitation is so funny and cheerful that, in the end, his off-putting worlds take on a cozy familiarity and you feel nothing but affection for his crackpot characters and the actors who play them, especially Massey (we miss you Edie!)...and never more so than in Female Trouble, which features an endless stream of quotable lines, memorable moments and a brilliant comedic performance by Divine who, as Dawn, not only does flips on a trampoline and trashes Christmas morning like a hell-spawn tornado ("I told you cha cha heels!"), but also gets s/himself pregnant, gives birth and bites through the umbilical cord. Top that, Streep!
MANSON (1972)
This true-crime film, the movie equivalent of one of those instant paperback accounts of tabloid horrors that have been largely displaced by the Internet and reality TV, has the special, weird distinction of being perhaps the only old-Times Square favorite to be nominated for an Academy Award. (It lost out in the Best Documentary Feature category to Marjoe, religious-con-man-turned-Earthquake-cast-member Marjoe Gortner's self-expose, which was almost as sleazy but a lot more self-aware.) Co-directed by Robert Hendrickson, who never made another film, and Laurence Merrick, whose previous credits included The Black Angels and a gay-porn vampire movie alternately called Dracula and the Boys and Does Dracula Really Suck?, it employs a mix of interviews, news footage, home movies and "recreations", with plenty of emphasis on the freaky hippie-orgy scene it imagines as having gone down at the Spahn Ranch. The movie is less concerned with explaining what happened or why than in infecting the viewer with a sense of unease, based on the idea that it all might not be over; it was, after all, made at a time when plenty of Charlie's followers were still living in society and not yet arthritic. The soundtrack, which is made up of dreamy-sounding '60s trance-rock, some of it taken from the Family's own recordings and some of it composed especially for the soundtrack by a couple of Manson's former associates, adds considerably to the overall creepiness. So did the news, in 1977, that Lawrence Merrick had been murdered by an unbalanced stalker, a development that the film's publicists were not shy about hinting at having possibly been delayed "retribution" from the Family.
HELLS ANGELS ON WHEELS (1967)
This biker flick, starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Rourke, is about as good as the wheeler genre got. It's certainly better than The Wild Angels, the Roger Corman movie that kick-started the genre and, um, Easy Rider, the counterculture statement that grew out of it. As in Easy Rider, Nicholson plays the audience representative, a fed-up working stiff who impulsively throws in his lot with the biker gang, but here we get to enjoy him for the length of the whole picture. Hells Angels on Wheels was directed by Richard Rush, who would later become best known for the cult film The Stunt Man starring Peter O'Toole -- but the more important reference point here may be that he'd already worked with Nicholson on the West-Coast-hippie-scene movie Pysch-Out. (The list of future Hollywood luminaries who worked on the movie also includes the stuntman Hal Needham and the late, great Hungarian-born cinematographer László Kovács, back when he was billing himself as "Leslie Kovac".) The movie also boasts a wordless appearance by Sonny Barger, the president of the Oakland, California chapter of the Angels, who is also credited as "technical advisor". The movie was made during a brief window when the Angels were willing to work with people who professed to be interested in telling their "story", before they withdrew after becoming rankled about being exploited by sundry show-business types, such as Roger Corman, who they felt screwed them over on The Wild Angels. Add it to Corman's list of accomplishments that he left the members of a self-styled outlaw motorcycle gang with a bad taste in their mouths.
THE INTRUDER (1962)
Roger Corman directed this tabloid melodrama about racist rabble-rousing, from Charles Beaumont's adaptation of his own novel. William Shatner plays a leather-lunged agitator from "the Patrick Henry Society" who arrives in a Southern town torn apart by school desegregation and hits the ground running, making hateful speeches and stirring up trouble. Corman has been known to say that this is the one movie he made in his exploitation-movie prime that he lost money on, always with the implication that he got artistically ambitious and made something too good for his target audience. On the contrary, opines Bill Landis of Sleazoid Express: the film failed in its initial release simply because "not many distributors in [Corman's] distribution network wanted to play a film that used the word 'nigger' every few seconds." Corman wound up selling the movie to a rival exploitation master, Mike Ripps, who made a bundle on it by linking it up on a double bill with another Southern melodrama, Poor White Trash, and devising a two-headed marketing campaign, selling the movie to Northern black audiences under the title Shame and to Southern audiences under the name I Hate Your Guts. Of course, it was its star's later promotion to Starfleet Captain that helped Shame to achieve belated, self-contained lift-off. The movie and Shatner's character lack depth -- it's just a picture of a hateful blowhard, with no psychological layers -- but Shatner's youthful brio gives the picture energy, and after he turned into William! Shatner!, grindhouse audiences loved to come out to screenings of the movie so they could see James T. Kirk toss around the "N"-word.
THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)
This man-eating plant movie, which Roger Corman directed from a script by Charles B. Griffith (who also wrote A Bucket of Blood, The Wild Angels, and Death Race 2000), is kind of awe-inspiring as some kind of ultimate example of just what Corman and Griffith were prepared to throw into the pot to keep one of their stews cooking. (Accoring to Griffith, Corman instructed him to concoct a script as soon as the sets became available, and that he immediately went to work spitballing ideas at Corman, who rejected several proposals before Griffith came up with the man-eating plant idea, by which time, Griffith recalled, "We were both pretty drunk.") Largely shot in two days -- the amount of time Corman had to use the sets, which were left over from another, completed production, before they were torn down -- at a cost of about $30,000 and with a running time of just seventy minutes, Little Shop's performances range from Corman regulars such as Jonathan Haze and Dick Miller, doing their character-guy shtick, to the Borsht Belt delivery of Mel Welles as the flower shop owner Mushnik to Jack Nicholson's unrestrained bit as a masochistic dental patient. The movie's sheer freakishness kept it alive on TV and the drive-in circuit until Nicholson became a star, an unexpected development that instantly turned it into an unlikely classic. It would, of course, go on to be adapted into a 1982 Off-Broadway musical that was in turn adapted into a big movie musical in 1986. None of which did Corman any good, because he had such sad hopes for the movie's commercial prospects that he never bothered to copyright it, allowing it to slip into public domain.
Warning! No one will be admitted after Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six!
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent