A Dirty Shame

Review by: Zak Santucci
ZakSantucci@TheCinemaSource.com

No matter what you think about the movie A Dirty Shame, it is always refreshing to see an artist go back to his roots after a brief period of being a bit mainstream (I mean as main stream as someone like John Waters can be). I mean I feel a bit unqualified to say so, but I hear the movies prior to Polyester are a bit less watered-down. Unfortunately Polyester is the earliest movie I’ve seen by him. If that last couple sentences of rambling does anything, it’s imply that A Dirty Shame is not watered-down.

The one thing that sets John Waters movies apart from a lot of movies is they are not set in any reality. Apart from unrealistic things happening, none of the characters are “real”. Everyone in this movie is actually either a “neuter” (someone with no sexual drive whatsoever) or a “sex addict” (yeah that one’s self-explanatory). Tracy Ullman plays Sylvia Stickles, one of the ultimate neuters. She runs a convenience store with her very neuter mother, and her kind of neuter but not too bad husband, played by Chris Isaak. Selma Blair plays their daughter Caprice Stickles, or as she’s known in the bar circuit, “Ursula Udders”. See, she’s a stripper with enough implants to make her breasts bigger than basketballs (you actually get to see these in the movie and the make-up job was pretty good). This family lives on Hartford Road where we see some ridiculous characters very early on. Anyway, Sylvia Stickles is driving to work one day and gets hit on the head. In this world, head injuries cause an extreme addiction to sex. Luckily, Johnny Knoxville is nearby to recruit her as a sex apostle right away. He plays a sex “Jesus” named Ray-Ray whose goal in life is to invent a new sex act. The neuters find out about this and want it stopped, there is a war as the group of sex addicts grows and grows. Hilarity ensues.

Eventually this movie becomes insane with the whole town doing whatever sex act they want. Besides about three scenes of full frontal nudity (two men and one woman) there’s nothing really explicitly seen. There’s a lot of perversion and lot of you actually saying, “AW!”, but nothing as terribly offensive as I expected. Especially knowing John Waters track record I expected to really see stuff. With the famous zit-popping scene from Hairspray I was scared some horrible deviance was going to fill the whole screen and not let me look away for a good minute. That didn’t happen. I don’t want to say this was disappointing, but it was to an extent. I love a good offensive piece of garbage. The one thing about this is that it did not matter because the movie was funny.