Multiple Maniacs

A film from the American underground. A show tent has been set up. People in the street are promised a free spectacle: strange scenes to be seen inside. The show is a trap. Visitors are robbed once they are in, and some meet worse. The woman running the tent is at the head of the operation. Then she turns on her own people. She learns her lover is with someone else and makes a plan for revenge. From there the film becomes a series of scenes that keep crossing lines: a passage inside a church, a long killing, a parody of a trial, and a giant creature loose in the city. It was made for almost nothing. Black and white, the sound added afterwards, the actors the director's friends, and the shooting done in Baltimore without permission. What the narrative is interested in is not story but provocation: the film takes aim in turn at every moral boundary of its period and openly wants to. The director's later films are better known; this counts as the hardest and rawest example of that time. Divine plays the lead. David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce are in the cast. John Waters wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone curious about underground cinema, cult films and the far edges of film history. Who it is not for: almost everyone; the film is deliberately disgusting and many of its scenes still land the same way.