It's so wonderful to feel this far gone.
How far is too far? When John Waters filmed Multiple Maniacs in 1969 and screened it for audiences the following year, there was no such thing as "too far" for him. There was just Waters dreaming up the most outlandish, filthy, degrading, deviant, and borderline pornographic things to put on screen and getting his friends to help him realize his cracked vision. Multiple Maniacs was more of a challenge than his first feature Mondo Trasho and his early shorts had been, though, because it was shot with sync sound, so his friends -- non-actors, all of them -- had reams and reams of dialogue to memorize and attempt to keep straight in the long takes Waters then favored since it made his job easier in the editing room. Even then, enough flubbed lines and garbled words makes their way into the final product that it's clear Waters knew he couldn't afford to be a perfectionist with the limited film stock at his disposal. (Along with his sound test, the improvised ten-minute short The Diane Linkletter Story, Multiple Maniacs was the last film Waters shot in black and white before switching to color for Pink Flamingos.)
Prefiguring The Blair Witch Project by three decades, the titular maniacs all go by their real names -- or their stage name in the case of Divine, who tops the bill as Lady Divine, whose Cavalcade of Perversion attracts gawkers from straight society so they can be robbed blind, although if Divine had her way they would all be killed instead of just one or two of them. Attended by her boyfriend, barker Mr. David (David Lochary), and bare-chested bodyguard, Divine runs roughshod over everyone around her with the sole exception of her daughter Cookie (Cookie Mueller), with whom she's staying while the Cavalcade is in Baltimore. Meanwhile, Mr. David is two-timing her with blonde floozy Bonnie (Mary Vivian Pearce's childhood nickname), a sexually voracious hanger-on who wants to perform unspecified acts with him. Then there's Mink Stole as Mink, the Religious Whore, who single-handedly converts Divine to lesbianism by performing an act on her that is specified but must be seen to be understood. And making her auspicious screen debut is Edith Massey as a friendly neighborhood bartender who doubles as the Virgin Mary during the low-rent recreation of the Stations of the Cross that probably did more to earn Multiple Maniacs its X rating than anything else in the film. And that includes the scene where Divine is raped by a giant lobster while the rest of the cast lies dead on the floor around her. That, as one might imagine, needs to be seen to be believed.
