DESPERATE LIVING videocassette (1977, directed, written and filmed by John Waters, 90 minutes, colour, USA; starring Liz Renay, Mink Stole, Susan Lowe, Edith Massey, Mary Vivian Pearce and Jean Hill)

I confess I hesitated for a reason. It is the only full-length John Waters movie made during Divine’s lifetime/collaboration with the director that did NOT feature the big star, due to his commitments elsewhere, and, while I admire individual aspects of the productions made without that enormous talent, it does not feel the same.

However, on the plus side, Desperate Living allows Mink Stole to have the spotlight on her, and she strikes me as the second-most-talented member of the Dreamland Productions troupe (Edith Massey has moments, but, as I always suspected and interviews I have read confirm, she was a difficult person to work with, since she could not remember a line from one moment to the next (one scene in the movie compels me to wonder: ‘Was that the BEST take?!’) – not that early John Waters pictures are full of people who CAN…).

Like many John Waters works, this one opens in the terrifying wastes of suburbia , where Peggy Gravel (Stole) is recovering from a mental breakdown (one wonders how bad she was during its height, as the scenery-chewing and grand paranoid drama here is beyond camp and into the realm of discomfort – not that John hasn’t taken us there before…). Her husband wants to help her, but he is a pathetic worm who is interested in ‘normalcy’ and ‘quiet’ (is he not in the wrong movie, then?), and he ends up dead for his ‘trouble’, thanks to Peggy and her maid Grizelda Brown (Jean Hill), who stumble into Mortville, a town for the depraved and criminal, overseen by Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey) and her gang of yummy leather henchmen/sex slaves.

What ensues is a warped fairy tale, with evil queens, ‘spells’ and princesses in love with commoners. As this is by the man who gave us Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, there is a gleeful nihilism to it all, and it ends with violence and bad taste. It does prove that I was wrong in a review I wrote of Pecker – there HAVE been lesbians in his work before, and even a would-be transgendered one. Very twisted and sexual – but mostly in a good way. J

Everybody’s favourite, mostly loveable, San Franciscan eyeballs in tuxedos put out a career spanning DVD, full of everything from the truly disturbing video for Third Reich and Roll (1976), in which the then-newspaper-wearing group are attacked by aliens and the one survivor is seemingly compelled to perform for Hitler’s amusement to the actually quite lovely (if still troubling) video for The Gingerbread Man (2000), with stops at the strangely pretty Just For You (Disfigured Night Part 7) done live for a German audience and featuring large portions of the theme from Pepsi, er, ‘We Are The World’, exposing the egomania of that irritating, if, I suppose, worthy-cause tune.

Hello Skinny is still as starkly beautiful, sad and grim as when I first saw it, benefiting greatly from a cleanup and remix (one of the more interesting features of this DVD is that the group actually re-recorded the music for each film so you can choose between original and new soundtrack – in the case of Third Reich and Roll, it was kind of sad that the availability of digital technology made the horns sound ‘real’ in their skewering of ‘Land Of A Thousand Dances’, and that drum machines made the idiotic thump of the beat more ‘professional’ – so I don’t listen to the new version very often…). Hearing ‘This Is A Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ sung by a woman in the new soundtrack made the irony of their performance (as close to a hit single as this outfit had or will ever have) even more acute.

This DVD also incorporates 17 minutes of their never completed film ‘Vileness Fats’ from 1972. While it has some very intriguing set design and costumes, and the new version has drastically cleaned up audio (to its benefit this time), I can see why it was never completed, and I don’t suppose it will be. For one thing, I would imagine the mother figure is probably dead by now (she looks 70ish). For another, the plot seems very disjointed, and there seem to be huge sections where dialogue was never overdubbed, or has been lost. Besides, a multiple-personality midget (preacher/cowboy) tormented by Siamese twin wrestlers? It’s been done… J

The computer animated videos are particularly good (even the very primitive Man’s World from 1984 looks pretty good for what they must have had available at the time), which leads one to suspect some of this enigmatic crew do work in this area (they ARE from the Bay Area, after all, once the peak of the computer boom…). Certainly not always easy viewing, but invariably intriguing (and the clip, "Songs For Swinging Larvae", included by ‘Brits’ Renaldo and the Loaf, who were on the Residents’ label Ralph, and, heck, probably WERE the Residents, is astonishingly clear and sophisticated for a video from 1981, if troubling, dealing as it does with kidnapping, and evidently banned from television and festivals).