The Prince of Puke: The five most disgusting John Waters movie moments
It takes a lot to gain the nickname ‘The Prince of Puke’, but John Waters earned it with aplomb.
For any other director, it would be unfair to boil them down to this, and admittedly, Waters is so much more than that. He’s a genuine auteur whose works have the same fascination and revulsion with the myth of Americana as David Lynch. However, Waters himself absolutely loves the reputation he has as a purveyor of some of the most disgusting scenes to ever grace mainstream American cinema. It’s not something he shies away from, but instead embraces wholeheartedly.
So here, we’re going to go through five of the most outrageous, shocking and downright disgusting scenes from his movies.
For clarification, it is limited to just one moment per film. After all, a handful of his films are essentially 90 minutes of barely connected vignettes of characters actively trying to make an audience part with their partially digested lunch. Rather than roll with “the five most disgusting scenes from Pink Flamingos“, let’s branch out instead.
Though if you know the slightest thing about that film in particular, you can probably guess what made number one.
So, here’s hoping you had your lunch hours ago, because we’re diving into the five most disgusting John Waters moments ever put to screen.
Wish me luck!
The five most gruesome moments from John Waters movies:
5. Serial Mom – Murder with an iron poker
It says a lot that a moment as revolting as this can find its way to the very bottom of this list, but this is the work of John Waters we’re talking about. After all, he’s a man who decided that the best way to follow up his breakout hits Hairspray and Cry-Baby was to make a deliriously camp Kathleen Turner vehicle in which the screen legend plays a murderous housewife who takes up an iron poker to exact revenge for heinous acts like wearing white shoes after Labor Day.
The film sets its stall out pretty quickly, ignoring any sort of origin story for Turner’s Beverly Sutphin in favour of getting right to the good stuff. Early on, Beverly catches her daughter’s boyfriend getting overly familiar with another woman. She follows him into the men’s room and sticks the poker through his back as his using a urinal. Waters’ camera takes a ghoulish satisfaction in seeing the philandering dolt’s face planted in his own urine as Beverly yanks the poker out of him, finding his liver still attached.
Yikes.
4. Desperate Living – Penis attachment (and detachment)
Despite his mainstream breakthrough coming in the late 1980s and ’90s, the ’70s were arguably when Waters was at his most gruesome. Desperate Living was the final film in the so-called Trash Trilogy and only finds itself below the first two because, sweet Baby James, there is some (quite literally) foul shit to be found there. Which isn’t to say that this little doozy of a black comedy from 1977 doesn’t have its fair share of moments that stir the guts, far from it.
Chief among them is a scene between Susan Lowe’s Mole McHenry, a lesbian professional wrestler, and her lover Muffy St. Jacques, played by Liz Renay. McHenry wins the Maryland Lottery and uses the money to give herself a gender reassignment surgery. When she shows off her newly added appendage to her love, Muffy is appalled. In that moment, and with the camera not missing a moment, McHenry takes up a pair of scissors and chops it off there and then, leaving her with “a Barbie doll crotch”.
3. Female Trouble – Dawn giving birth
Off we go to the second film in Trash Trilogy. 1974’s Female Trouble is a love letter, of a sort, to the slew of ‘teenage delinquent‘ films Waters watched and adored in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Except, according to Waters, there was one issue with all of them. The delinquents either died or reformed their ways. In Female Trouble, Waters and his star and muse Divine created Dawn Davenport, a character who very much died after revelling in her repellence, not showing a moment’s guilt for her abhorrent actions.
Davenport begins the film as a runaway and, almost as a tone-setter for what’s to come, starts off by being picked up on the highway by the monstrous, lecherous Earl Peterson. They then have sex on a discarded mattress coated with skid marks, an encounter that leaves her pregnant.
Subsequently, the film flashes forward to the birth of Dawn’s daughter, Taff,y and, as you can probably imagine, it’s not handled with tact and subtlety. The entire scene is topped off by Dawn holding the newborn Taffy and biting her own umbilical cord off. Female Trouble might not top itself for grossness from then on, but my God, it comes close.
2. Multiple Maniacs – The Vomit Eating Man
Most of the time, you’ve got to be smart about your first couple of movies. They are the chance to make a first impression on audiences, so you’ve got to make it the most focused, accessible version of what you bring to the table possible. Or you could just go full John Waters and kick off your filmmaking career with Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs. The former is the weirder option due to it featuring The Virgin Mary as a recurring character and Divine wandering around New York with bird feet, but in terms of sheer shock value, Multiple Maniacs set a bar that few other filmmakers could ever beat.
The film is exactly what it says on the tin. Divine stars as Lady Divine, the owner and operator of the Cavalcade of Peversion, a travelling show that features fetish acts, carnival freaks and as the show’s headline act, a man who throws up into a bucket before scooping it all right back into his mouth and swallowing it all up with a satisfied gulp. You might wonder why this features so high on the list when the film also contains murder and cannibalism, this is because what you see from the vomit-eating man is a hundred per cent real.
Something that, legend has it, is also the case with the number one entry on this list. Because you all saw it coming, didn’t you?
1. Pink Flamingos – The ending
What else could it be? An entry so putrid I legitimately don’t want to spend too much time writing about it because I’m retching thinking about it. Divine stars in Pink Flamingos as Babs Johnson, a criminal who engages in a pitched battle with two rivals, Connie and Raymond Marbles, to retain her tabloid-given crown of “the filthiest person alive”. Both parties do some truly heinous stuff in order to retain their title, but the very last moment of the film shows Divine keeping the crown in disgusting fashion.
In a film with on-screen incest, cannibalism, murder and mutilation, the worst parts of the film sound innocent by comparison. How could anything be worse than some of the more outrageous things written about in the script? Because the vast majority of them are special effects. Unlike the real-life death of a live chicken on screen, or the footage of a prolapsed anus rhythmically flexing to ‘Surfin’ Bird’ or, yeah, let’s go there, the ending.
Where, after murdering Connie and Raymond, Divine spots a small dog defecating on the sidewalk. She wanders over and, calm as you like, picks up the dog shit and eats it. No one can quite figure out whether the scene is real or fake, but, according to the memoir, Divine’s mother, Frances, it was the one film of his that he asked her not to watch. That in and of itself answers the question for me.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to look at videos of penguins for the rest of the week.
