Desperate Living

A film that begins in an American suburb. Peggy is a wealthy woman. She has fits of hysteria, takes pills, and shouts at everyone in the house. Grizelda is the maid. Large, strong, and she has worked there for years. One day Peggy's husband dies. Grizelda sits on him and that is how it ends. The two of them run. A policeman stops them on the road. He looks at their papers and asks for something strange in return. Then they arrive somewhere. Mortville is a town where criminals take refuge. It is built in mud, the houses are wooden, and everyone came because of something they did. Queen Carlotta rules it. She has her men, sets arbitrary rules, and lets nobody leave. From there the film becomes a story of revolt. A disease, an accident, an uprising and a siege. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but exclusion: Mortville is where everyone society does not want is gathered, and the film builds its own hierarchy there too. The tone is deliberately ugly. The image is coarse, the acting is extreme, the costumes are exaggerated, and the film never tries to be beautiful. This is the first film the director made without Divine. The cast is again from his own company and a former runway model is in the lead. The violence and obscenity are direct. The narrative implies nothing and uses shock as a method. On release it stayed in a small number of cinemas and travelled through late-night showings. Liz Renay, Mink Stole, Susan Lowe and Edith Massey are in the cast. John Waters wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes underground cinema and deliberate bad taste. Who it is not for: nearly everyone; the film is repellent on purpose and carries that as its aim.