All of the details of these events are shown in the film—oh, and more, including the notorious scene in which Divine actually ingests that least appetizing residue of the canine. And not only do we see genitalia in this movie—they do exercises.
Pink Flamingos appeals to that part of our psyches in which we are horny teenagers at the county fair with fresh dollar bills in our pockets, and a desire to see the geek show with a bunch of buddies, so that we can brag about it at school on Monday. (And also because of an intriguing rumor that the Bearded Lady proves she is bearded all over.)
After the restored version of the film has played, director John Waters hosts and narrates a series of outtakes, which (not surprisingly) are not as disgusting as what stayed in the film. We see long-lost scenes in which Divine cooks the chicken that starred in an earlier scene; Divine receives the ears of Cookie, the character who costarred in the scene with her son and the chicken; and Divine, Cookie, and her son sing “We Are the Filthiest People Alive” in Pig Latin.
John Waters is a charming man, whose later films (like Polyester and Hairspray) take advantage of his bemused take on pop culture. His early films, made on infinitesimal budgets and starring his friends, used shock as a way to attract audiences, and that is understandable. He jump-started his career, and in the movie business, you do what you gotta do. Waters’s talent has grown; in this film, which he photographed, the visual style resembles a home movie, right down to the overuse of the zoom lens. (Amusingly, his zooms reveal he knows how long the characters will speak; he zooms in, stays, and then starts zooming out before speech ends, so he can pan to another character and zoom in again.)
After the outtakes, Waters shows the original trailer for the film, in which, not amazingly, not a single scene from the movie is shown. Instead, the trailer features interviews with people who have just seen Pink Flamingos, and are a little dazed by the experience. The trailer cleverly positions the film as an event: Hey, you may like the movie or hate it, but at least you’ll be able to say you saw it! Then blurbs flash on the screen, including one comparing Pink Flamingos to Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dali’s Un Chein Andalou (1928), in which a pig’s eyeball was sliced. Yes, but the pig was dead, while the audience for this movie is still alive.
Note: I am not giving a star rating to Pink Flamingos, because stars simply seem not to apply. It should be considered not as a film but as a fact, or perhaps as an object.
Piranha
(Directed by Joe Dante; starring Kevin McCarthy, Bradford Dillman; 1978)
I walked into Piranha wondering why the U.S. government would consider the piranha to be a potential secret weapon. After all, I reasoned, you can lead the enemy to water but you can’t make him wade. I was, it turns out, naive. Piranha is filled with people who suffer from the odd compulsion to jump into the water the very moment they discover it is infested by piranhas.
Consider, for example, the case of Kevin McCarthy. He plays a government scientist who has developed superpiranhas, which can live in salt or fresh water, reproduce with amazing speed, and are smarter than your average fish. If anybody knows how dangerous these piranhas are, Kevin McCarthy does. And yet when a little kid’s father falls into the river and is gobbled up, and then the kid is clinging to the top of an overturned canoe, and Kevin McCarthy sees him, what does Kevin McCarthy do? Why, jumps in the water, of course, and swims toward the kid, and is eaten.
He is the first of many victims. By the time this movie is over, half a kids’ summer camp and three-quarters of a crowd of potential homesite buyers have been eaten alive. That often happens to potential homesite buyers, but for the kids it’s rotten luck.
There they are, the little tykes, splashing about in their inner tubes when the deadly piranhas attack. The kids bleed a lot, and people in the audience cheer a lot, and finally there is this to be said: It is in the nature of a piranha to eat flesh, so the piranha can be forgiven. But why is it in the nature of a movie audience to cheer?
This movie has really bad special effects. We kinda expect that, though, since it’s hard to actually show thousands of tiny fish ripping peoples’ legs apart. It’s a good thing that it’s hard, too—because if it were easy the producers would have shown it. Because it’s so hard, what we get instead is a weird noise on the sound track, like a window fan being fed Styrofoam. And what we see are dozens of piranhas that share a curious trait: They all swim at exactly the same speed and without moving anything. That’s probably because they’re phony little models being pulled through the water.
The movie’s plot is mostly an excuse for showing people thrashing about in bloody water. When it gets more specific, though, it turns out to be a rip-off of the first two Jaws movies. In both of them, you will recall, the danger of shark attacks was concealed by venal real estate speculators who didn’t want to scare the buyers away. That’s the case this time, too: The Realtor throws a party for prospective homesite buyers and denies that there are piranhas in the lake until most of his would-be customers have been digested. Implausible, you say? Try telling that to the piranhas. Next I am anticipating a movie called Realtor.
Pirates
(Directed by Roman Polanski; starring Walter Matthau; 1986)
There hasn’t been a pirate movie in a long time, and after Roman Polanski’s Pirates, there may not be another one for a very long time. This movie represents some kind of low point for the genre that gave us Captain Blood. It also gives us a new pirate image to ponder. After Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power—Walter Matthau? Matthau is only partially visible behind his makeup and his costumes, but the part we can see appears to be totally at a loss to answer this question: What is Walter Matthau doing on the bounding main, wearing a peg leg?
The movie stars Matthau as Captain Red, a vile old swashbuckler who eats fishhooks for breakfast. Cast adrift in the open sea, he is picked up by a passing Spanish galleon and soon learns that the ship’s cargo is a priceless golden throne. He sets about trying to steal the booty, but not before the movie bogs down in a hopeless quagmire of too much talk, too many characters, and ineptly staged confrontations in which everyone stands around wondering what to do next.
Pirates proves, if nothing else, that Matthau is not an action star and that Polanski is not an action director. We kind of knew that already. Matthau is, however, a very capable comedy actor, and there are times when Polanski seems to be trying for comedy, although search me if you can find a laugh in this movie. One of Polanski’s worst films was The Fearless Vampire Killers, and again this time, he is totally adrift trying for laughs with an expensive takeoff of a B-movie genre.
The real star of the movie is the Neptune, the full-size, functional galleon that was constructed as a set for most of the scenes. It’s one of the finest sailing ships I’ve ever seen in a movie, but I couldn’t see much of it, because Polanski steadfastly refuses to give us blood-stirring shots of the Neptune plowing through the waves. He begins with a real ship, then treats it like a studio set.