In the rungs of the cinematic ladder, there’s a special place for absolute trashcore madness. A previously hard-to-find, iconic piece of the genre from cult icon John Waters has now been restored and given a new trailer. Called, “Horrendous. Sickening. Revolting. Most distasteful.” by Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Joseph H. H. Kaplan, the film is Multiple Maniacs.
Filmed in Baltimore, it follows “real” people — including Waters’ go-to collaborator Divine — as they seem to putz about and commit crimes, including imagery of a man billed by the trailer as “Jesus Christ” walking through the woods on a cross. In other words, you’ll know right off the bat if this is the type of film for you.
Ahead of a theatrical run in early August and likely Criterion release, see the trailer below.
John Waters’s gloriously grotesque and extremely hard to see second feature comes to theaters at long last, replete with all manner of depravity, from robbery to murder to one of cinema’s most memorably blasphemous moments. Long out of print, the restoration will open at the IFC Center in NY on August 5 (with Waters present), with a nationwide release to follow.
Made on a shoestring budget in Baltimore, with Waters taking on nearly every technical task, this gleeful mockery of the peace-and-love ethos of its era features the “Cavalcade of Perversion,”a traveling show put on by a troupe of misfits whose shocking proclivities are topped only by those of their leader: the glammer-than-glam, larger-than-life Divine, who’s out for blood after discovering her lover’s affair.
Starring Waters’s beloved regular cast the Dreamlanders, (including Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Edith Massey and Cookie Mueller), Multiple Maniacs is an anarchist masterwork from an artist who has doggedly tested the limits of taste for decades.
Multiple Maniacs will have a theatrical run via Janus Films starting August 5th in New York before its likely Criterion release.