Female Trouble (1974)

Sorry, this movie sucks

Excellent adaptation.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Female Trouble (1974): Dir: John Waters / Cast: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Edith Massey, Mink Stole: Amusingly disturbing followup to Pink Flamingos with a theme that takes mental stability to whole new lows. Divine plays Dawn Davenport, a loud obnoxious overweight teenager who ends up hooking up with Donald and Donna Dasher, a flamboyant couple played with questionable fashion by David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce. They enlist Dawn to be their poster girl of crime and film her doing all sorts of horrendous antics. John Waters lavishes in the depraved but his filmmaking hardly improves here. He seems to rejoice in inserted penis shots as well as pointless inserts of a boar head on a wall. The sets are flimsy but his cast have the right kind of over-the-top presence to be entertaining. Divine as Dawn demands our attention, applauding even the very notion of going to the electric chair. Lochary and Pearce play the very enemies poising as friends. Edith Massey as a neighbor despises Dawn because she got her nephew fired. For her crime Massey is locked in a big bird cage and has her hand chopped off. Mink Stole plays Dawn's sassy daughter Taffy who resents her mother and plays smash-up derby in the house in one of the funniest moments. While vulgar and often gross Waters seems to attack celebrity and society's wayward desire for self importance. Score: 7 / 10

This was not my first introduction to John Waters' controversial films. Besides watching his more "clean" works, I had previously watched Pink Flamingos, after a period of gathering courage to do so. I had the expected reaction to it, I was disgusted and shocked as I watched him and his Dreamlanders succeed in the task of making the filthiest film ever. I actually quite enjoyed some of the humour - I recall especially the scene where Divine and Crackers try to contaminate the Marble residence, by spitting and rubbing onto the furniture. I hated the incident involving the chicken, though, but oh well.I thought Female Trouble was going to go the same way as Pink Flamingos, filth-wise, but it doesn't (almost), and I think this is John Waters' best film featuring Divine & co. It made me appreciate and understand more the purpose behind it all. If one watches Pink Flamingos without any previous knowledge of the type of movie it is, and what it stands for, one will be simply shocked and tend to never want to hear about it again (although it will forever be marked in one's mind's eye). Watching Female Trouble, I was able to come to terms with the nonsense jokes and the visual glorification of the grotesque. To me, it doesn't just serve as a comedic vehicle, it's also a genius way to defy society and whatever it's thought to be morally acceptable - for all we know, "cleanliness is next to godliness".And can any film be more subversive and profane in its ideology and ironic portrait of human beings? One of the most iconic quotes is Edith Massey's: "I worry that you'll work in an office, have children, celebrate wedding anniversaries. The world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life!". Needless to say Divine is absolutely wonderful in this, the rise and fall of a once typical troubled teenager who ends up getting caught in the twisted desires of others, ending up in a sort of maniac narcissistic frenzy. And questions such as the cult of image, beauty and fame at all costs are all presented to us in a hilarious way.Anyway, I'm glad I got to discover this different kind of filmmaking, which is often dismissed for its graphic content, rather than being taken lightly as an interesting critique of American society and a fine exercise of trashy/nonsense humour.

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.

John Waters made Female Trouble when he still had one foot in the crude (Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos) and the other in the relatively slick (Polyester, Cry Baby, Hairspray, Serial Mom, etc.). Female Trouble is presented in a palette of lavish colors, inspired and off-the-wall set designs, preposterously decadent costuming and generous dollops of grotesquerie.POSSIBLE SPOILER Divine plays Dawn Davenport, who progresses from high school ne'er-do- well in 1959 to hardened career criminal, ending up in the electric chair by 1974. END OF POSSIBLE SPOILER The whole enterprise is clearly meant to be ludicrous and over the top. There are superb camp comic turns by Divine, the unforgettable child-woman Edith Massey as her vindictive neighbor, David Lochary as an ultra narcissistic fashion plate, Mary Vivian Pearce as his snooty wife, Cookie Mueller as a tough-cookie gang member, and last but not least the versatile Mink Stole as Davenport's long-suffering, viper-tongued daughter. These performances are just as effective today as they were more than 30 years ago. Time cannot dilute their on-target expertise; this is as good as camp acting gets.Alas, we also encounter stupidities, inconsistencies and downright narrative sloppiness here and there, but Waters always did have an incurable silly streak. Even though the only obviously dated part of Female Trouble is the litany of now-unfamiliar serial killer references the heroine makes in a monologue toward the end, a look at this director's recent films shows that time has caught up with and surpassed him. Who could have imagined in the 70s (well, I did!) that his aesthetic would become the norm of American popular culture in the 21st century - in a non-ironic way!? Just watch prime-time TV any day of the week or read the latest Hollywood/celebrity gossip, or pick up the Starr Report, or watch a TV news special about methamphetamine labs in Iowa, or go to a Tony Award-winning hit Broadway musical called Hairspray. So unless Waters engineers some kind of unanticipated late-career breakthrough, he will never have anything else to satirize and can collect royalties from continued Broadway musicalizations of his films. Could "Female Trouble: The Musical" be next on the Great White Way?