John Waters eat your heart out

Rating: 4/10 (25 August 2008)

"It's such a fine line between clever and stupid" goes the immortal line from Spinal Tap, and this film reinforces that message. The direction and cinematography and editing are as look-at-me slick, stylish and gimmicky as the most 80's of music videos. But oh my goodness the plot. I came to this comments board after seeing the film hoping, once my laughter had subsided, to make the obvious "drugs are bad m'kay" jokes, mock the ludicrous plot, and point out that this film outdoes Reefer Madness for camp, self-parodying counterproductive hyperbole. But I see plenty of others have beaten me to the punch in stating the obvious. This film is the Monty Python "Salad Days" skit writ large. Try drugs, and you will end up getting your infected arm amputated, your game-show-addicted mother will get shock treatment in a loony bin after trying to slim down to fit into her red dress, and funniest of all, your white girlfriend will be forced to fellate over-endowed black men and have foreign objects inserted into her anus at orgies in exchange for drugs. I could almost visualise John Waters and Ed Wood and William S. Burroughs making up this plot over a few cones of wacky tabbacky as they laughed and masturbated themselves silly. Except that they would have cast Divine as both the mother and girlfriend if they had been directing, and they would have called it something like "Naked Flamingoes from Outer Space" rather than given it the pretentious title that it actually had. And they wouldn't have taken it all quite so seriously. Watching this film, I honestly expected a Ron Jeremy cameo at any minute. The whole plot sounds like one of his Catskills routines, complete with long-suffering Jewish mothers doting on their disappointing sons. How they managed to avoid having Ellen Burstyn say "You coulda been a doctor like that nice Dr Spencer" I'll never know.
All that said, despite the clichés and the pretentiousness and the ludicrous, heavy-handed, moralising, didactic plot, the film has its merits. I wasn't overly bored, the direction was OK, if a little hammy, and the acting was adequate, if a little hammy. Still, I don't understand the rating of 8.5/10 and the rave reviews. That puts it higher than "2001: A Space Odyssey", which is even more ludicrous than the plot.