Director: John Waters
Running Time: 94 mins
Certificate: 18
Release Date: March 20th 2017 (UK)
Even 47 years on, it’s sometimes difficult to know what to write about John Water’s early work. While he later tempered some of his more depraved urges and found a wider audience with the likes of Hairspray, Serial Mom and Pecker – although all still with the unique Waters stamp – when he first started out he was blazing a trail unlike anyone else.
Multiple Maniacs was Waters’ first feature-length sound movie, made in Baltimore at the tail end of 1969 with a cast and crew composed largely of his friends. It opens with Mr. David (David Lochary) trying to entice people into a tent to see Lady Divine’s Cavalcade Of Perversions. The straight-laced punters aren’t impressed by the ‘real-life queers’, drug addicts, armpit lickers and naked pyramids they find in the tent, and are even less pleased when they discover it’s all been a ruse to kidnap, rob and possibly kill them. [Read more…]