Maybe I should have worked up to him instead of putting him this early in the series.

In the John Waters episode of her series Taboo on Screen, Broey Deschanel lists the following epitaphs for him: The Baron of Bad Taste The Godfather of Gross Out, The Sultan of Sleaze, The Prince of Puke, The Duke of Dirt and The Pope of Trash. After some deliberation, I would like to add Ombudsman of Obscene to this list as my own contribution. Yet, according to IMDb, as of this writing John Waters is mostly known for playing the role of “pervert on phone” in Pecker, a movie he directed and wrote. To add insult to injury, the role is both voice only and uncredited. Aren’t algorithms great?

John Waters is the patron saint of guilty pleasures. John Waters is the kind of director we would need to invent if he didn’t exist. Even if you have never enjoyed any of his movies, just his ability to push the line to open more space for other directors to work in, is in itself valuable. He purposefully went for obscene and was even willing to pay the price for that even in terms of fines.

Calling him just a director is also a mistake as he wrote, produced, shot and cut his first four features before shedding those roles one at a time until he only directed and wrote them. This was probably more out of necessity than anything else. The budgets for his early movies were very limited.

While his style evolved over the years (with him letting others take over responsibilities probably affecting this) and he was able to attain higher budgets (relatively speaking), he never lost his sense of having fun at the expense of the “respectable” people. This is the basis for pretty much all of his movies. We have a group of outsiders who have to fight for their right to be who they want to be. The exception to the “respectable” people is that sometimes the group they are fighting would be condemned even harder by those “respectable” folks, assuming they are not Republicans.

He was never big. Even in his heyday, his biggest hits would gross less than 8 million worldwide and didn’t even make their budgets back on theatrical revenue. But he had been a cult star since Pink Flamingos which was one of the original midnight movie hits in the 70s and was covered in the documentary Midnight Movies alongside El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Eraserhead. That’s a prestigious group. The full title of the documentary is actually Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream but that didn’t really happen to any of them or their directors. (Lynch probably got closest but refused to work in the mainstream after a very bad experience with Dune.)

There is surprisingly little nudity in Waters’ movies. That is in general an easy way to shock people, but he just uses it very sparingly. Sure, we get the occasional transwoman performing a helicopter, or someone spreading their ass cheeks, but he said in his first book that he has always found hardcore porn to be boring.

It would appear that talking about his work in the past tense might be a little premature as he is, once again, after 20 years, working on a feature film, this time based on his debut novel, Liarmouth (he had written non-fiction before it), from just two years ago when he was 76. The movie will star Aubrey Plaza. That’s an intriguing combination.

A few words on Divine’s gender identity: I don’t know. The problem is that our understanding has changed quite a bit on these topics. Below, I kind of assume they were a cismale, but you could easily argue that they were a transwoman. Waters asks Divine about this in his first book and Divine said that they considered going through a gender corrective surgery (although, again, language in that book is very different regarding this), but they were talked out of it by Waters’ production designer, because of the inherent risks involved. Based on this, it seems quite obvious that they were trans. However, Waters apparently preferred they/them. On the other hand, they played women, so in this context I feel I should use she/her pronouns. Now, I just need to remember this chain of thought when I talk about the actual movies.

I just wasn’t able to procure his first movie, Mondo Trasho, as it has never been released on DVD or streaming. There is a VHS version, but I don’t have a VHS player, the only copy I could find is in NTSC and we use PAL here in Finland, so I would have to find an American player to play that singular VHS which in itself has an asking price of over £200 as of this writing. Waters has stated that it would just be too expensive to release as there are… irregularities with the rights to the music used in the movie. So, let’s talk about it.

Mondo Trasho
United States, 1969, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: I’m sorry John.
But this is an absolute chore to watch.

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Just had a recovered memory that in the NINETIES the local Blockbuster inexplicably had this in their LE BAD CINEMA section and when my teenage self begged my parents to rent it, I got in DEEP shit over the opening unsimulated chicken execution.

Yes, after all that, you can just find it on YouTube. It is nine minutes shorter than the “official” length and I can’t say what was cut, but I would guess that there some material missing from the end as the movie does cut off pretty abruptly. However, that might also just be because he ran out of money.

And yes, it does start with unnecessary cruelty towards animals. Fun. Sure, he is just trying to shock and it might have even worked in late 60s, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything else in the movie, so don’t just torture animals for your own entertainment.

The actual story, is about two women, The Bombshell and Divine. Divine hits The Bombshell with her car, which leads to a series of seemingly random events, including Holy Mary giving Divine a wheelchair so that she can push The Bombshell around instead of having to carry her, and the pair of them ending up in a mental institution.

Unless you are a John Waters completionist or you have ambitions to become a director yourself and want to see what kind of shit famous directors did when they had no money or experience, this isn’t going to be for you. This is very slow and chaotic in a very uninteresting way. It’s just someone playing around trying to make a feature. He succeeded in this technically as it is a series of frames that add up to about 86 minutes (in this version), but not really. Sure, I’ve seen worse, but not much. It is included here just because it would have been weird to leave it out and cover all the 11 other movies Waters has made.

I can see where the problems with the soundtrack come in. They just use music from Elvis, Ike and Tina Turner, Frank Sinatra, Link Wray, Pat Boone, Judy Garland, Bill Haley and the Comets (oh, I just realized the joke here), Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Wilson Picket, Ray Charles, Perry Como, Jerry Lee Lewis, Shangri-Las and a bunch of others often for just a few seconds. Someone would really need to put up a lot of cash to release a movie that would be a big risk. Sure, Waters is now a cult director, but a bit too cult-y to invest that much money in just to get something like this out. I bet physical media would sell pretty well, but these days selling pretty well might just not be enough.

Multiple Maniacs
United States, 1970, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: I genuinely wonder how many people were arrested for exhibiting this movie in the 1970s. I actively did not enjoy this one, but was I supposed to?
(Author’s note: There were arrests surrounding Waters’ movies, but they usually happened during the production.)

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Common lesbian Mink Stole

Thank you, Criterion Collection, as this is one of four John Waters movies they have released, which is great as it would be so easy for a company like that to fall into releasing only Oscar-winners, Ozu movies and indecipherable European art movies. Instead, they acknowledge that important movies is a much wider concept. At one point they streamed Golden Raspberry winners.

Divine and her gang present Cavalcade of Perversions. This is just a front for their operation where they rob people. Divine is bored of this and wants to go into mugging people without the elaborate setup. When she finds out that her boyfriend is cheating on him, she begins to lose control and goes on a rampage.

Waters has some weird ideas sometimes. At one point we hear Divine’s inner monologue in a church, where she talks about her disgust of lesbians while a lesbian, Mink played by Mink Stole, is fondling her and they end up having sex with a rosary that’s apparently been used often for similar purposes and considering how ready Mink was to make a move in that environment while there’s even witnesses.
Of course, that’s just your usual fare from Waters as he does his best to be transgressive. I mean, good on him. That would still shock many people and is shocking enough to be funny for people like me.

Speaking of Mink Stole, she is one of the three Dreamlanders (named after Dreamland, Waters’ company, the other two being Pat Moran and Mary Vivian Pearce) who have been in each of Waters’ features. You know what she does on the side on top of acting? She does weddings as an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church. I have no interest in marriage, but I had to, I would definitely try to get that into the budget somehow (legalities aside).

Pink Flamingos
United States, 1972, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: loved it. 1/2 star.

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Like my 8th rewatch, every time I get more impressed, enthralled and disgusted in equal measure. One could give this film any rating and be justified in their opinion, conflicting art in it’s truest form. The most subjectively brilliant film of all time, if there even can be such a thing.

Based on the five-star reviews, a lot of people in Thailand love this movie. I have no idea what to think about that. Maybe claiming to be from Thailand is some kind of an underground code for something.

Divine has proclaimed herself to be the Filthies Person Alive. When a couple, the Marbles, challenges this, each faction needs to do worse and worse things in order to show themselves to be the filthiest.

Not that the movie really needs a plot. As the marketing stated, “An exercise in poor taste”. That’s it. Waters just pushes things he finds funny and assumes most of people won’t. And I assume he was right.

According to the fine folk and critics taking part in the Sight & Sound Critics’ Poll, this is tied as the 211th greatest movie of all time. Considering that there are at least half a million movies in existence, this places it among the top 0.02-0.04% movies of all time, depending on how many movies there actually are (no-one actually knows). This is better than any movie by Nolan or Fincher or even Bay.

At the same time, according to IMDb this is a 6.0 movie. Barely worth watching. Well, haters will hate. This dichotomy tells you the limitations of each voting system. Sight & Sound props up movies that are for specific audiences, Pink Flamingos definitely being one of them.

This is also the start of Waters’ Trash Trilogy. This feels weird to me, as you could easily put Multiple Maniacs into the same category, so this feels arbitrary, but okay. Let’s just go with that.

Female Trouble
United States, 1974, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: aunt ida could find me a gf quicker than any dating app actually

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Girl power

Dawn doesn’t get the shoes she wanted for Christmas, so she runs away from her home. That very same day she finds a ride from a man she has sex with and gets pregnant. After the father refuses to give her money, she has to find ways to make money, including waiting, exotic dancing, sex work and robbing drunks with her friends. All the while she is raising a daughter (well, raising might be a bit much, but you know, keeping a daughter alive as she doesn’t let her go to school and at one point Dawn ties her down for acting up) and feuding with the neighbor (who is also her husband’s aunt). When a couple finds out that she does crimes for a living, they ask her to participate in their experiment: They are trying to prove that people look better when committing crimes, so they want to document Dawn and her friends in the act by photographing them.

Turns out that whole thing is just a form of class tourism. The couple, played by Waters regulars David Lochary (a key figure behind the scenes as he is the one who brought Divine into the drag culture, for whom this turned out to be his last movie, as he died of a mishap under the influence of PCP soon after) and Mary Vivian Pearce, manipulate Dawn to forgo plastic surgery after her face is disfigured, because they like her that way for their own purposes. Later they backstab Dawn by getting immunity against prosecution for testifying against her in court partly for crimes they were themselves responsible.

Part of the absurdity of the movie is that Divine plays Dawn from the start and Mink Stole plays her daughter at 14. According to Waters, Divine can pull off playing a teenager, but I assumed it was supposed to be funny.

This is the second part of the Trash Trilogy, although this explores a whole different world of trashiness, but that’s fine. You don’t want to retread the same themes anyhow.

Desperate Living
United States, 1977, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: Is this a surrealist movie?

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Mental health is just around the corner indeed

Mrs. Gravel has trouble adjusting to her life back in the normal world after a stint in a mental institution. She is constantly barking at everyone. Her psychiatric nurse is caught stealing by Mr. Gravel, which leads the nurse to kill him, so the two of them go on the lamb. They are caught soon enough, but they are given a choice. Either they go to jail or they join the community of Mortville, a squatter settlement ruled by the capricious Queen Carlotta.

This is the third part of the Trash Trilogy, but once again, the trashiness feels very different. They built a whole little town with their $65.000 budget, so it looks exactly like what you would expect for that kind of money, except that they seem to have actually put some money into a court for Carlotta.

This was the first of Waters’ movies without Divine as she had prior commitments. So, another of his regulars, Susan Lowe, took over the role Divine was planned to do. I wonder if this changed the script, as Divine had been the clear star for such a long time, but here that character has a smaller, if still important, role.

I wonder what Waters was thinking here. The character, Mole, is a transman played by a ciswoman. Considering that Divine was a drag name of an apparent cismale (although, again, I would consider them transwoman or transfemme), the gender gets complicated here. Mole even gets phalloplasty to appease his girlfriend, but as she does not like the look of it, he cuts it off himself. All of this would have had a very different feel with Divine in the role.

While all of his movies thus far have been very outlandish, Waters went above and beyond with this one. The whole Queen Carlotta having her own little kingdom covering all of a small shantytown and somehow she can still afford what basically constitutes a personal army, just puts this movie almost into the realm of fantasy.

The story is very badly paced as it seems to get to the actual story with less then ten minutes left, which also gives us a great and topical quote of “One shot can never destroy the beauty of fascism” by Mink Stole as Mrs. Gravel who at that point has betrayed all her friends and joined Carlotta..

Polyesterz
United States, 1981, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: You ever see a movie and it just looks like it has a stench of piss, musk, and ass. That’s this bullshit. It’s just fucking bizarre. Ok cool everything goes wrong and the whole theme of this is how everything is wrong even down to the basic idea of a housewife being played by a dude. But it’s really fucking annoying.
(Author’s note: The movie actually has a section in the beginning discussing an experimental technology that allowed the moviegoers to smell what was happening on screen. This amounted to scratch-and-sniff cards in theaters. The Criterion DVD does not provide us with one although there are numbers on screen when you are supposed to scratch them, like when Divine’s character farts in bed early in the film. Also, transphobia regarding Divine in 2024, when this was written? How novel. I wonder what he actually knows about Divine?)

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Introducing my friends to filth ;)

After finding out that her husband, who has been under fire for owning a porn theater (porn consumption has changed a lot after the Internet became a thing), has been having an affair with his secretary, her teen daughter is pregnant and her son has been breaking women’s legs to satisfy his weird fetish, Francine Fishpaw completely loses control of her life.

This feels like a watershed moment in Waters’ career. For the first time he is working with production companies other than his own. This included New Line Cinema who Waters had worked with previously as a distributor. He also gave up on being his own director of photography for the first time. The movie does have a lot better production value than his previous work, but it still maintains a lot of the obscenity he was so known for and the plot is similarly loosely structured as they had been in the past.

This is a melodrama or a morality tale, almost like the life of the biblical Job. Francine faces various ordeals, but in the end she prevails, because deep down she is a good person. She is not alone either, even if she feels like that at some point. In this little world (known as Baltimore or Balmore to the locals), it is also possible to make penance for your past and renew yourself, the need for which is new for Waters. The movie does kind of feel like a parody, but I’m not totally sure that was what Waters was going for. Maybe he really did try to make a straightforward Douglas Sirk homage and this was as close as he could get.

We are also moving away from urban squalor into a suburban, more middle class setting, where people still have those same base inclinations. Some of them have just learned to hide or mask them.

This was the first Waters’ movie to have an MPAA rating and it was R. Obviously.

Hairspray
United States, 1988, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: I think this is the most offensively racist movie I’ve ever watched

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Wtf why was this good?
Also it didn’t click to me that was Debbie Harry until the end credits

Tracy wants to be a dancer on TV in a popular show, but her body type is not traditional for such purposes. She will not let that deter her.

Bit of a jump there from ‘81 to ‘88. Importantly, this is Waters’ last movie with Divine, who died just weeks after this movie was released. As she was so central to his work, this does definitely leave a hole. A lot happened between Desperate Living and Hairspray. While Waters definitely didn’t become mainstream, he is also definitely closer to that. He is, for the first time, actually trying to reach an audience outside of his small cult following. This was probably due to Polyester being a small hit.

Also, for the first time, Divine is embarrassed about her body, whereas previously she had always flaunted it. Am I saying Waters lost his roots? Kind of, but he also needed to. People need to evolve. Jumping from mostly X-rated movies into a PG one is still a bit of curveball. Also, this gave him more money to work with. While the budget was still limited at $2.7 million, that’s quite a bit for him considering that all of his previous movies cost just a little over $400.000 combined. It does show. He had just stopped being his own director of photography during Polyester giving the movie a more professional look.

While the movie was a small hit, it wasn’t that big a deal until early 2000s, when it was adapted into a stage play, which ran for over six years. This prompted a new movie version as well, with almost 30 times the budget, which did go on to be a decent hit and a movie a lot of people saw at the time.

Waters did also start to move away from his usual group of collaborators. I understand that the financiers probably wanted people who were more professional, but I think this is another loss.

Cry-Baby
United States, 1990, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: This movie should be used for torture.

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Pop the culture, iconograph

Trigger warning: Johnny Depp. Wow, things have changed since this movie where he was still a rising star, finding his footing. Although, that would change later in the same year when he starred in Edward Scissorhands. This movie didn’t exactly help his case as this was not a hit. I do have to say that he also seems to be one of the people for whom stardom is definitely a curse. Maybe he should have stuck with Waters movies.

It’s 1954. Cry-Baby is a juvenile delinquent gang leader. Well, that’s pretty harsh as they don’t really commit crimes. They are just rebellious. Which might be why Allison, a square girl, falls in love with him and they start a relationship. Of course, the supposedly normal squares start a conflict over this, but it is the “drapes” who get the blame.

This is still a Waters movie, so it’s pretty much all over the place. There’s some slapstick and some 50s style rock’n’roll and there’s Iggy Pop and Susan Tyrrell as Cry-Baby’s grandparents and some overt comments on racism even though Cry-Baby is stealing their culture and at some points it becomes an outright farce. At the same time, this does compete with Hairspray for the questionable honor of being the most square of Waters’ movies, which still obviously means that it is pretty out there.

My favorite thing about the movie is actually about Traci Lords. She was notorious back in the day for lying about her age and thus making porn when she was underaged (no-one was convicted of anything, because she had managed to acquire a real passport with a fake birth certificate). Somehow she managed to leverage that notoriety into a mainstream career, which is something porn actors just can’t do in general. Here she is one of Cry-Baby’s gang members and is trying to be cool in the way all of them are. Yet, her parents, one of whom is a crossing guard and the other drives the school bus, are just very wholesome, which embarrasses her in front of her friends.

Here’s an interesting fun fact about the mother: She is played by Patricia Hearst. You might have heard the name and not realize where. She is actually the original victim of Stockholm Syndrome (which doesn’t really exist) in 1974 when she took part in a bank robbery. She has since went on to appear in all of Waters’ subsequent movies.

I’m not sure if it’s noteworthy, but Depp is not doing his own singing despite being a lifelong musician. On the other hand, he didn’t sing on screen until Sweeney Todd, so maybe he just had some kind of self-awareness at this point in time.

Serial Mom
United States, 1994, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: i’d like to apologize to all those films i called “the worst”, this one wins

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Finally, a film for the Aries in your life

We are told that this is based on a true story. This is not true. At all.

A housewife and a mother of two adult children (well, one of them is in high school). She is both very protective of her family and can bear a grudge like no other. Where does this lead to? Killing those who would in any way break her ideal. After she gets caught, a media frenzy builds around her trial.

While she didn’t make any movies that really stood the test of time (with the exception of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which she was the voice of Jessica Rabbit, but uncredited), Kathleen Turner was a huge star in the 80s. You wouldn’t really think of her as the type to do a movie like this and that was probably the exact reason she ended up doing this. Of course, she also had the problem facing many women in Hollywood: She was closing in on 40 and that has a tendency to kill the careers of many women because of the derth of roles from mostly male writers.

According to her interview in the Vulture, she wasn’t quite sure about the contents of the script, but eventually she was encouraged to do it specifically, because the people around her wanted to protect her brand and she didn’t feel like that needed protecting. She’s right. That brand is an asset, but using it this way is great. Like Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West, you wouldn’t expect her to do it, so it makes it just that much better.

In the same interview she tells us that the production gave her a painting used in the movie of her character. She couldn’t stand it, because it had eyes she felt were too cold and sold it off.

Because of Turner’s presence and her family, this is relatively wholesome in the filmography of Waters. The idea of messed up families are nothing new to him, but this is different, because the family is upper-middle class, when his families are usually complete outsiders.

Pecker
United States, 1998, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: Furlong is on heroin the entire run time of this trashfest.

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Penis was an awesome movie. It’s always great to see familiar faces in these flicks. I especially enjoyed the scenes with Mary , Mother of Jesus. I’ll give this movie a rating of Five Bags of Popcorn and Four glasses of cold Soda

Pecker is a photographer and decides to have an exhibition in the lunch restaurant he works in. It just so happens that there’s an art dealer from New York who happens by and arranges Pecker to have another exhibition, but this time in New York, where he becomes instantly famous. Of course, this leads to him losing his touch as he exchanges his shitty camera for a top of the line one and now that people know about him, they no longer want to model for him. Things also keep getting worse for the people around him.

This is weirdly constrained for a Waters film. Sure, Pecker’s best friend is a thief, one of Pecker’s most popular works is an image of the pubic hair of a stripper and Christina Ricci’s (who just turned 18) character keeps being harassed in weird ways, but all in all this is almost virginal in comparison to his other work.

I wonder how much this is about Waters’ own life. Does he feel like this happened to him? He started with whatever equipment he could get and with whatever help he could find. Then he started getting bigger budgets, lost some of his friends, lost some of his control and many of his usual collaborators no longer had the same presence in his films as they used to.

On the other hand, he did tell Filmmaker Magazine back in the day in an interview that while some of the things that happened to Pecker happened to him, he was always too aware to fall into the same traps as the character, but if he was aware, I bet he has seen someone else fall straight into them and thus knew all too well about this world.

Pecker, on the other hand, does fall, but also gets out before it’s too late. He does, at the very end, suggest that he would like to make a movie, so he might be setting himself up to fall again.

Cecil B. Demented
United States, 2000, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: How could anyone wish death upon studio cinema? The MCU has done SO MUCH for cinema. Cecil B. Demented is a terrorist and I’m glad he’s dead.

A five-star review from Letterboxd: Blue balls for celluloid! No budget, one vision.

Turns out this one is hard to find and when I did, the first attempt was lost in the mail and the second one appeared to be as well, as the tracking had it sitting in a facility for two weeks before is somehow appeared in my mailbox.

Miss Honey Whitlock is an A-list star stuck in an event in Baltimore getting bored out of her mind when she would much rather be back home in Hollywood. But something is clearly wrong as certain people around her are packing and have something planned. They have decided to kidnap Whitlock in order to force her to star in their little independent movie.

There is nothing subtle about the kidnapping. They do it right in a theater when Whitlock is having a speech. They even use a Molotov cocktail to create chaos so that they have an opening to escape. Or they just liked the mayhem.

This is very loosely based on the aforementioned Pat Hearst hostage situation (see Cry-Baby above) and Hearst does once again have a small role. However, once again I wonder how autobiographical this was for Waters. If so, I would argue this is a much more interesting look at his early career than Pecker.

The film crew is very ragtag and somehow each of them has a cult director’s name tattooed on their body. These range from relatively well-known, such as David Lynch, Spike Lee and Sam Peckinpah, to true cult figures such as Kenneth Anger and Herschel Gordon Lewis. Whatever their fame, they are all outsiders, who made (or make in two cases) movies on their own terms. Cecil, as the leader of the group, vows to take what these directors are known for and make their movie better or more extreme in all of those ways.

Cecil is actually more like a cult leader. He is exerting control over the lives of the crew, the most prominent ways being keeping them away from their support systems, like families, and forbidding sex until the movie is done. These are common ways of keeping cult members in line. The crew is always ready for actions that would easily be categorized as terroristic by the authorities even if we know that terrorism was not their goal.

Finally, there is surprisingly effective action in this movie. Waters isn’t exactly known for that, which I assume is the reason the second unit director was Steve M. Davison, who was also the stunt coordinator and had been the stunt coordinator or had stunts for some very big projects, such as Armageddon and Point Break.

A Dirty Shame
United States, 2004, dir. John Waters

A half-star review from Letterboxd: My only John Waters experience, I didn’t get it then, i don’t get it now…
Gotta be the maddest cameo ever from The Hoff too btw

A five-star review from Letterboxd: This movie cured my depression!!! I’m horny enough to LIVE!!!!!!!

For the longest time, this was the last John Waters movie and it is fitting. This goes directly back to his original creed of obscenity that he had left behind for a few movies.

A neighborhood is divided between perverts and those proudly calling themselves neuters. The thing is that you can actually be moved between the two groups by having a concussion. This is what happens to Sylvia, is hit by a car, which leads her to meet Ray-Ray, a leader of local sex cult where everyone has their own peculiar fetishes. This sparks a outright hostilities between the two factions and since you can change someone’s loyalties with a simple head injury, that’s where things start to go.

The different fetishes are varied, but they are essentially just different and harmless. Like these things tend to be. We should not be using energy on trying to stamp this behavior out, because it’s just people enjoying their lives in their own ways. Although, please don’t do upper-deckers. That’s just malicious and causes someone a lot of extra work. If you are a cop, please do wear diapers openly.

In the end, it is not mean-spirited. It’s just goofy. The jokes are pretty one-note and they don’t really hold up even with the pretty short runtime. It’s actually so tame that I wasn’t sure whether I have the original cut or the “neutered” version until I realized that there’s actually nudity, so I guess I got the real deal. It’s just that Finns don’t generally really care about nudity.

There’s so many of the themes Waters has worked with throughout his career: family units, outsiders against the normies, normalization of sexuality, small communities and so forth. While this might not be his best movie, you can see how he has reached something here after decades of trying.