I love when people who liked Hairspray.........
Rent this and Pink Flamingos and watch it with their kids, then get all pissy because of the content. I'm glad it ruins their day!
shareThose two movies offended the hippie-ish Baby Boomers back in the day! John Waters once said tgat if anyone threw up watching his movies, it was like he received a standing ovation. Today's under 30's for the most part wouldn't last five minutes with these movies! Coddled, politically correct zombies and emo hipsters listening to manufactured hip hop music and on their IPhones all the time is what they have become!
shareNo offense, but you're full of sh!t. These films haven't aged well in regards to shock value. I love them, John Waters is not given enough credit as a writer, his dialogue is amazing and hilarious - "I'm afraid a rat's gonna come out and bite my new nylons" - and the outrageous things are still funny, but they're far from shocking.
If I wanted, I could do a search on the internet and find actual footage of a man killing another man and having sex with his corpse. In the 90's John used to say that the scene with the dog works because eating poop is the one thing they won't show in porn. The internet changed that one. Now, not only can I see people eating poop and smearing it all over their bodies, I can watch Kermit the Frog watch a video of people eating poop because a scat video has become a part of our pop culture lexicon.
And I don't think you're as old as you're letting on Gramps. Thirty is a really specific cut-off date. Someone in their 30's or 40's weren't going to midnight screenings when these films came out, so their point is moot. It's like World War Two, you can talk about it as a historian, but you can't claim to have been a part of the experience and talk about how young people will never know how good they have it.
Anyway, to the OP's point. I don't think that happened too often. Maybe five times total, and that's a generous estimate. John only really talks about a case in Florida and I think it was an adult couple, not a family with children.
I mean think about it; how many people do you know (not film buffs) but just families, who pick videos based on the director? And if you're going to pick a film based solely on the director, you're probably the type of person to reads the blurbs and synopsis on the cover and I don't think New Line would ignore the shock value of early Waters in their marketing. There's no way it still happens today 1.) John Waters is a national treasure, everyone knows who he is and they know that his early works were over-the-top works of trash filled with obscene, gross-out humor and 2.) Who rents movies anymore?
"aged well in regards to shock value"
I never watched this film for shock value. In fact, that's something I find puzzling about some Waters fans: that the more disgusting something is, the better it is. I agree with critic Guy Mariner Tucker that this film was Waters' "first real masterpiece" because it had real human warmth and humor. It wasn't designed only to shock as Pink Flamingos was. It is actually a very "touching" story in a strange way. It's about a person with a bad life who fools herself into thinking she can have a better life through crime. It's about self-delusion, and I can relate to it because I've deluded myself sometimes, too. In another sense it's about the follies of the world. It pokes fun at all the "sacred cows," including compassion.
My favorite Waters films:
Female Trouble
Polyester
Hairspray
None of them were designed primarily to shock.
The ending of FT is not meant to be funny. It's actually very touching.
"Extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no vice."