Part of DEEP WATERS -- a twisted series of early work by John Waters, one of cinema's greatest and boldest button-pushing moviemakers. Waters is the 2016 recipient of FilmScene's annual Cinema Savant honors. See the films before his live show at the Englert on October 1, where he will also receive the Cinema Savant award.

Pink Flamingo specialty drinks on Art House Theater Day, September 24!

PINK FLAMINGOS

Renegade filmmaker and noted aficionado of expressive bad taste John Waters exploded into international infamy with this darkly comic, no-budget parade of the perverse (his third feature film, and first in color), in which plus-size cross-dresser Divine stars as Babs Johnson, a flashy criminal on the lam from the FBI who is hiding out in a trailer outside of Baltimore, Maryland.

"I am not giving a star rating to Pink Flamingos," Roger Ebert wrote of Waters' most controversial film, "because stars simply seem not to apply. It should be considered not as a film but as a fact, or perhaps as an object." The movie's long lineup of abuses—bestiality, indecent public exposure, cannibalism, sexual violence, forced impregnation, incest, castration, and, in the movie’s infamous finale, on-screen coprophagia—made it an instant sensation on the midnight-movie circuit. But the story of ferocious trailer-park resident Babs Johnson (Divine) and her quest to upstage her neighbors as the "filthiest person alive" is, at its heart, a warped celebration of community and a showcase for Waters’s particular brand of pitch-black humor. The result is a classic of transgressive cinema, less a scream against convention than a gleeful laugh in its face. (Film Society of Lincoln Center).

"The pope of trash." -William S. Burroughs