Female Trouble (1974)

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

I'm a student of film, I've seen well over 1,000 70s films and many of Waters' films, so I get why this is loved. But let's be honest, moving past the cult features of the movie, it's really awful in just about every way. This may have played well when I was a 20 year old in my college suite, but for anyone else, this movie borders on unwatchable. Of course it's depraved, etc. that's the whole point of all these movies. 40+ years ago it may have been shocking, in 2017 it's just silly.

I watched the 97 minute version. This and Pink Flamingos was lent to me by a friend of mine, and they are my first and only exposure to Waters, other than his guest appearance in an episode of The Simpsons and his role in Seed of Chucky. Well, I'm not a fan. I would have to say that this is the better of the two. Instead of being one long excuse to shock and put the nastiest things they could think of onto the screen(this may have the same amount, but in a much lesser range), this has genuine plot and even sort of a point... crime as beauty(seemingly related to Charles Manson and his "family"), and the pursuit of the latter. Well, yeah, it's *strange*... remember who we're dealing with. The substance does help this considerably(a little absurd stuff is better than absolutely nothing). There are a couple of funny lines(such as the one in my summary), if on the whole, I didn't find this humorous(the "don't want eggs" bit was amusing), only offensive. Not a lot of it is in the language, it's largely visual and in the occurrences. Divine is yet again wearing excessive make-up, and again there are characters with odd names wearing weird clothes and hair being obnoxious and not necessarily credible. While the dialog is not as repetitive, and doesn't feel as improvised and "ok, guys, we only have time for one take so keep going if you flub a line" as in the earlier movie, it's not impressive. Performances are decent, same for the FX. This has a little good music. The technical aspects remain underwhelming. There is a moderate measure of sex and full frontal nudity of both genders in this. I recommend this to those who enjoy John's work, or find what I describe here to be appealing. 6/10

Female Trouble (1974) ** (out of 4) Divine plays a schoolgirl who runs away from home, gets pregnant and then hits the hard life. Soon she meets a strange couple who talks her into a life a crime so they can capture her true beauty. It's really hard to judge this early Waters' films because they are technically horrid with awful performances yet that's their charm. The charm also comes from Waters trying to be as disgusting as possible and he does that here up to a point. If you are easily offended then you'd be best to skip this film as we see rape, crap stained underwear, a father trying to rape his daughter, child abuse, Edith Massey naked and a lot worse. I'm not sure I'll ever get the image of Massey naked out of my head and frankly, that scares me. I laughed a lot during the film but it eventually ran out of steam towards the end and I grew very tired. Some of the dialogue is very funny especially the stuff with Massey trying to talk her nephew into becoming gay because she feels gay people are better.

It's hard to imagine that there can be any middle ground where director Waters' early films are concerned. Either one goes along for the ride in his outrageously, at times mind-blowingly, lunatic stories or simply turns off the TV in disgust or disappointment. Here, in another one of his early classics, Divine plays a fat, selfish high school student who wants nothing more desperately than a pair of cha-cha heels for Christmas. When she doesn't get them, she tears off into the world, experiencing molestation (from a male character also played by Divine!), motherhood and life devoted to crime and slovenliness. When she goes to an exclusive salon to get her mammoth tresses washed and set, she winds up falling into a relationship with the lanky, listless Potter. Then she is spotted by the salon's owners, who exploit her for their own salacious and degenerate purposes. Meanwhile, Divine does battle with Potter's overly-dependent and protective aunt Massey and with her own daughter Stole, a latter day "bad seed" who hilariously complains about everything in sight. There just isn't any way to fully describe the "plot" of one of Waters' "masterpieces". Characters exist in their own rarefied atmosphere of filth, ignorance, selfishness, primal desire and excess... and it's preposterously funny! Divine (occasionally resembling Kirstie Alley when she was at her heaviest!) invests the role with a heaving dose of personality and humor. It's wonderful to see the dual role at work, especially when Divine is shown sexually assaulting him/herself! other notable Waters' favorites include the truly one-of-a-kind Massey who is just too full of gleeful abandon to allow an audience to despise her or be revolted by her as they would with anyone like her (if anyone COULD be like her!) They just don't make 'em like this anymore! Potter's unintentionally funny non-acting, complete with horrid mid-western-trash accent, is amazing to behold. He seems to have appeared from nowhere just long enough to do this film and then receded back into the world. One longs for a latter-day interview with the man who, while fully nude, took a tool box to bed with Divine, utilizing needle-nose pliers for kicks! One huge asset is the always hysterical Stole who plays a 14 year-old girl when she was 27 at the time! There's nothing socially redeeming in the least about this film (or in a lot of his others), but there's an undeniable shock value and an over-riding sense of calamitous hilarity that can't be denied and which sets them into a class all their own. It was guerrilla film-making on a $2.47 budget and it's almost sad that he eventually had to go mainstream and become palatable to the masses (not that "Hairspray" and other examples of his newer work aren't fun on their own terms.) As for this one, it does go on a tad too long, with a couple of overindulgent sequences right near the end, but the homages to those old "teen rebel" flicks and the 50's melodramas that focused on family angst are so entertaining, it still counts as a hit!