You people need to wake up!!!

Agreed, this movie was great and hilarious.. sure it was crude and disgusting but thats the point, it was made to disgust people thats why its so brilliant.. oh i have a question about the movie.. when taffy runs away to her dads.. is divine her dad but without all the makeup and everything?? it looks like him but just wasn't sure....

"It is crude, vulgar, and disgusting in every aspect" everything that makes this movie great

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I need more parts...

To me, this movie is so gross and discusting that I feel I have to take a shower after watching it! But I Love it! This movie is soooo much better than Hairspray!

John Waters certainly wouldn't find bad reviews about his movies offending at all. So those who hate his movies can just lay off ... John Waters once stated that having someone vomit while watching one of his movies was like getting a standing ovation. Although a slow but steady integration into mainstream filmmaking has tempered that kind of thinking, Waters remains one of cinema's most audacious practitioners.

Born into an upper-middle-class Catholic family, Waters grew up in Baltimore, which serves as the locale of all his movies. Childhood interests in car accidents and murders marked him as an unusual personality. As a teenager, he began making 8mm films, largely influenced by the experimental and exploitation films that he sought out while skipping school.

His crude early short films, sporting titles like HAG IN A BLACK LEATHER JACKET and EAT YOUR MAKEUP, were screened only in the Baltimore area, but did spark the genesis of Waters's Dreamland Productions stock company. Made up of his friends and neighbors, the Dreamlanders came to include Divine, a 300-pound transvestite, and Edith Massey, a snaggle-toothed barmaid and thrift shop owner, as well as Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, Mary Vivian Pearce, Danny Mills and David Lochary.

Waters's first 16mm sound feature, MULTIPLE MANIACS (1971), established the pattern for most of his work: a complex plot involving a "family;" vicious attacks on middle-class manners and morals, religion and other sacred cows; and an overriding mission to offend even the most jaded moviegoer.

PINK FLAMINGOS (1972), made for $10,000, was Waters's first film to receive national distribution, becoming a hit on the midnight movie circuit. Divine played "the filthiest person alive;" she finds her title challenged by the Marbles (Stole and Lochary), who kidnap women, have their servant rape them with a syringe and then sell the babies to lesbian couples. The film assaults the viewer with a barrage of repellent images, such as the hefty Massey splayed out in a play pen wearing a bra and girdle and covered with the half-eaten eggs that are her passion. The notorious finale, in which Divine eats dog excrement (in one seamless take from dog to drag queen), remains one of the most sickening sights captured on film.

Nonetheless, Waters plays everything on a broadly comic scale. Dialogue is ridiculously melodramatic and performances are overblown. The sets, designed by Waters's regular art director (and later, production designer), Vincent Peranio, are the essence of kitsch. As bad taste is elevated to a new aesthetic, the audience must laugh to keep from gagging. The act of attending and professing to enjoy one of Waters's midnight movies became a safe way to thumb one's nose at the establishment during the Me Decade.

Divine returned to star in FEMALE TROUBLE (1975), Waters's rumination on fashion, fame and criminality. The film demonstrated that the director had discovered the last exploitable subject in film—the idea of taste itself.

In DESPERATE LIVING (1977), Waters's satire became sharper. Mink Stole starred as Peggy Gravel, a suburban housewife recovering from a breakdown. When Peggy's husband is killed, she and her maid escape to Mortville, a community of criminals presided over by the despotic Queen Carlotta (Massey). The expected disgusting gags are present—sex changes, rabies injections, roach eating, death-by-dog-food. But the anarchistic tone of Waters's earlier films has given way to more pointed commentary on class and gender roles, as Peggy is stripped of her middle-class pretensions.

Waters made his move out of the midnight movie ghetto in 1981 with POLYESTER. He toned down the visually gross elements but compensated with a gimmick worthy of one of his heroes, producer/director William Castle. Audience members were given scratch 'n' sniff "Odorama" cards, which they were cued to use by numbers flashing on the screen. Scents ranged from roses to dirty sneakers. Divine played Francine Fishpaw, a housewife beset by family problems; her philandering husband owns a porn theater, her daughter is a high school harlot and her son is the dreaded Baltimore Foot Stomper! Francine goes over the edge but is rescued by drive-in owner Tod Tomorrow, played by former teen idol Tab Hunter in a delightfully mannered performance. The film plays like a hyperbolic "woman's picture" from Hollywood's golden age, complete with a ludicrous happy ending. Once again, bourgeois attitudes are Waters's favorite target.

Throughout the 1980s Waters has published numerous cheeky articles in film and music magazines, extolling the virtues of Pia Zadora, the National Enquirer and other campy topics. HAIRSPRAY (1988), a light musical about the racial intergration of a popular Baltimore teen TV program in the early 1960s, established Waters as a bankable and moderately mainstream director. His assaults on good taste have largely dissipated, but Waters continues to be one of cinema's most potent satirists.