A "review" of John Waters's A Dirty Shame

Reviewing a John Waters movie is easy. A young person growing up in the suburban Baltimore area has aspirations of transcending a class barrier and finding true happiness despite meeting strong resistance from his or her friends and/or family.

Yep, that's about all of 'em.

The really interesting part of a John Waters movie isn't that it's going to be campy, retro, derivative, and offensive. The interesting bits are seeing each of these things unfold in some bizarre and probably illegal way.

In A Dirty Shame, which was released in 2004 and got the MPAA's kiss-of-death NC-17 rating, the young girl in question is the same woman who played Liz Sherman in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy. By writing this, I have guaranteed that Monk's head will explode when he reads this. Liz isn't a firestarter here, though. She's just a stripper named Caprice (or Ursula Udders, depending on who you ask). She is locked in her room 24 hours a day by her parents, Tracey Ullman and Chris Isaak, in order to keep her deviant sexual urges in check and assert that she doesn't run off to the seedy neighborhood biker bar to flash her comically huge breast implants at the patrons.

The twist in this picture is that Caprice's uptight mom gets clocked in the back of the head after a simple traffic accident. Apparently in Baltimore, experiencing any kind of head trauma turns you into a sex addict. The movie is quite clear at spelling out — literally, like a badly-conceived subliminal message — that because of her bump on the head, Tracey Ullman is now a W-H-O-R-E.

Tracey Ullman then spends the entire rest of the movie doing perverse things like inventing cute euphemisms for cunnilingus and embarrassing her husband. You can at this point draw the logical John Waters conclusion of what the ending to this movie will be, right down to the elementary Flintstones/Honeymooners-style physics of reversing personality changes caused from head trauma by merely inflicting more head trauma. If you like John Waters, you are OK with this fact.

John Waters is a sweet anachronism, a throwback to an earlier, simpler time when movies were short, the plots were razor straight, and completely random serendipitous things happened to the characters all the goddamn time. It's kind of like the beginning to the film Man of the Century, wherein our hero Johnny Twennies has a heart-to-heart with his local record store clerk. Johnny worries that he could soon lose his girlfriend if he doesn't find a way to prove he loves her. The clerk kindly tells him that the secret to a great relationship is to look her in the eye and say the exact words "I'm crazy about you, baby." If you don't know how Man of the Century ends after what I've just told you, I will excise your gonads to prevent you from bringing any more retard babies into this world faster than you can say Buck v. Bell.

So now there's a problem. Tracey Ullman and her daughter are raging nymphos, but her husband still stands on the side of town that takes cold showers and stirs saltpeter into their coffee. The town promptly divides, all the Neuters thumping for decency and all the people with concussions trying very hard to mate with the Neuters.

John Waters is famous for making a movie where a man in drag eats real dog shit, so you can probably guess who wins this fight.

I deeply enjoy this movie because it is a uniquely funny view of suburban angst when taken to an absurd degree and mixed with a liberal dose of aberrant, nigh-fictitious sex practices that you seldom hear mentioned outside of junior high school locker rooms. If I'd known, I would have whipped up quick sex act bingo cards so Monk, Stef, and I could have played along as we watched the film. Infantilism, road head, FREE space, sploshing, autoerotic asphyxiation — bingo!

I would watch A Dirty Shame again if for no other reasons than to see what all I missed the first time around, like a kinky version of Primer but with ejaculations instead of time travel. It's a fine, fucked up movie that has made me finally appreciate seeing Johnny Knoxville in something. Seven thumbs up.