Desperate Living

A pillar of trash cinema, Desperate Living is not for the faint of heart or stomach—sex, copious full-frontal nudity, bodily fluids, foul things being eaten—this film has it all. Mink Stole plays a convincing mental outpatient, forced to move to Mortville, a community of misfits, criminals, and deviants after she kills her husband with the aid of her enormous nurse, Grizelda (Jean Hill). What makes Desperate Living so entertaining is that the viewer hasn't the faintest idea what will happen until it actually happens, a testament to how imaginative and wickedly depraved the mind of John Waters really is. Waters wrote, directed, and shot the film on a $65,000 budget, despite having to build Mortville in a field in suburban Baltimore, where he used cardboard for many of the walls. Edith Massey, Susan Lowe, and Liz Renay (a real-life felon!) add three more fantastic and despicable characters to an ensemble of freaks that makes GG Allin seem like Tipper Gore. Despite schlocky special effects and a few underexposed shots, Waters succeeds in creating a bizarro world where he comments on real issues like gender roles, sexuality, and abuse of power, albeit without compromising his devilishly trashy roots.