Luis Bunuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Terence Malick, Wes Anderson, Jonathan Demme, Robert Altman, Alfred Hitchcock… and now John Waters. Baltimore’s infamous auteur is set to join those illustrious filmmakers in The Criterion Collection —the boutique label has given a fresh restoration to one of the director’s most notorious and long out-of-print works.
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This “celluloid atrocity” features Waters regulars Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Edith Massey and Cookie Mueller amidst no shortage of gloriously hard-to-watch perversity. However, the crowning achievement in that regard is Divine violation by a giant 15-foot broiled lobster. Here’s the official synopsis:
Made on a shoestring budget in Baltimore, with Waters taking on nearly every technical task, this gleeful mockery of the peace-and-love ethos of its era features the “Cavalcade of Perversion,”a traveling show put on by a troupe of misfits whose shocking proclivities are topped only by those of their leader: the glammer-than-glam, larger-than-life Divine, who’s out for blood after discovering her lover’s affair.
Starring Waters’s beloved regular cast the Dreamlanders, (including Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Edith Massey and Cookie Mueller), Multiple Maniacs is an anarchist masterwork from an artist who has doggedly tested the limits of taste for decades.
“Multiple Maniacs” opens in New York City on August 5th and will roll out nationwide from there. After that, it’s a safe bet you can snag a copy of your own from Criterion.