You Got Perved
A Dirty ShameNew Line Home Entertainment
“People don’t notice right away,” says John Waters at the start of A Dirty Shame’s director’s commentary. “But in the very first shot there’s a little vagina in the tree.” It is at this point that the easily shocked should reach for their remote, because bark-clad genitalia is the least sexually explicit aspect of a film that features a woman picking up a bottle with her nether regions, a character called “Fat Fuck Frank” and the line “My name is Sylvia Stickles—and my clitoris is in crisis!”
Sylvia, played by an extremely game Tracy Ullman, is the film’s heroine, a sexually repressed “neuter” who shuns husband Chris Isaak’s advances (“It’s light out, for Chrissakes!”) and keeps her volcanically chested stripper daughter (Selma Blair) under lock and key, literally. But after a knock on the noggin, Ullman’s inner nympho is let loose and, with the help of Johnny Knoxville’s “full service” mechanic Ray Ray, she takes a tour of the assorted fetishes in her increasingly orgasm-crazed Baltimore neighborhood.
Pitched to studios by Waters as “a cunnilingus concussion comedy,” the film, in truth, makes you wonder at times whether the cunnilingus/concussion part of the equation is not overwhelming the comedy part. But then the legendary director of Hairspray and Pink Flamingos will unleash of a nugget of dialogue that reminds you why he is a national treasure, like “Lesbians have taken over the softball field!” Good, dirty, fun—and the only DVD this year likely to reference the respective cinematic oeuvres of both the deconstruction-obsessed Jean-Luc Godard and the mammary-obsessed Russ Meyer.
