Polyester (1981)

Directed by John Waters. Starring Divine, Edith Massey, David Samson, Mary Garlington, Tab Hunter, Joni Ruth White, Ken King, Mink Stole, Hans Kramm, Stiv Bators, Rick Breitenfeld. [R]

Transgressive underground filmmaker Waters’ first brush with the mainstream is this raucous send-up of the soapy melodramas of the 1950s. Life for middle-aged housewife Francine Fishpaw (Divine) is anything but, ahem, divine—her husband is fooling around with his secretary, her promiscuous daughter is impregnated by a hooligan and wants an abortion, her delinquent son is a glue-sniffing foot-stomper, her wicked mother is a snobbish and drug-addled abuser, she falls into alcoholism, attempts suicide, and on and on. Commitment and chutzpah carries it a long way; results are mixed, but hysterically funny at several junctures (it’s hard to make militant nuns not humorous), and Waters never seems to strain to shock/gross-out purely for shock/gross-out value this time. Title tune sung by co-star Tab Hunter (who knew a thing or two about the sort of women’s pictures being satirized); another one, “The Best Thing,” is crooned on the soundtrack by Bill Murray! Released to theaters with a William Castle-esque gimmick (“Odorama”) where viewers were handed scratch-and-sniff cards with numbered spots to scratch at specific points in the film—skunk, flatulence, dirty shoes, etc.

71/100