The most shocking and ‘grossest’ movie ever made includes real-life s** scenes and faced bans.
Directed by John Waters, it is one of the most infamous underground films ever made.
Although it was originally filmed in 1972, it wasn’t widely available until 1989, when a distributor submitted it to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) for an official rating.
The BBFC agreed to grant the film an 18 certificate but required that three minutes of footage be removed due to its extreme content.
According to the BBFC website, one of the scenes cut involved: “the sight of chickens being roughly handled and killed during a bizarre s**ual assault on a woman.”
Another sequence featured a man flexing his a*** in close-up to create the illusion of it ‘singing.’
Ultimately, some of the film’s most notorious moments had to be excised before it could be legally distributed.
For many viewers, the movie is so shocking that they instinctively cover their eyes for a significant portion of its runtime.
Yet, this was precisely the reaction Waters intended. As he stated in his memoir ‘Shock Value’: “To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.”
Beyond its political undertones, the film also foreshadows elements of punk rock with its rebellious fashion, anarchic energy, and use of 1950s rockabilly music.
It shares themes with 1970s horror films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, both of which feature degenerate misfit families.
It even predates the media’s obsession with glorifying criminals, a theme that would later be explored in Natural Born Killers (1994).
The film’s unconventional plot revolves around Divine, an iconic drag performer whose real name was Harris Glenn Milstead.
In the film, Divine portrays a woman also named Divine, dressed in a tight, shimmering gown, sporting exaggerated makeup and an enormous, backcombed hairstyle.
Branded in the media as ‘the filthiest person alive,’ Divine goes into hiding under the alias Babs Johnson.
She shares a derelict trailer home with her son (Danny Mills), his voyeuristic girlfriend (Mary Vivian Pearce), and her eccentric mother (Edith Massey), a woman obsessed with eggs.
The antagonists, Connie and Raymond Marble (played by Mink Stole and David Lochary), are a couple desperate to claim the title of ‘filthiest people alive.’
Their heinous crimes include abducting teenage girls, keeping them imprisoned in their basement, forcing them into pregnancy, and then selling the newborns to lesbian couples.
They also sell h****n to high school students. Despite these grotesque acts, the film is, in essence, a comedy.
Considered the quintessential cult film, Pink Flamingos was never meant to be a mainstream success.
“This isn’t a failed film that gained a camp following and then became popular,” says John Mercer, author of Gay Pornography, per the BBC
“It was made by someone who was an outsider, it was about outsiders, and it was shown at the margins of cinematic distribution and exhibition. It’s the paradigmatic example of cult cinema.”
Waters later transitioned to more mainstream projects, directing Cry-Baby (1990), starring Johnny Depp, and Hairspray, which later inspired a successful Broadway musical.
However, in the early 1970s, he was working with a much smaller budget, often filming in his hometown of Baltimore with a group of unconventional friends known as ‘the Dreamlanders.’
Many of them had no prior acting experience, but they embodied the spirit of rebellion that Waters sought to capture.
As Mercer points out, the characters in Pink Flamingos are: “true outsiders who despise society’s conventions.”
The film’s impact on underground cinema was immediate. When it premiered at the Elgin Theater in New York, it became a staple of the ‘midnight movie’ phenomenon.
Crowds would line up night after night, eager to witness something that couldn’t be found anywhere else
“It’s a carnival movie,” explains Ian Hunter. “A freak show, in the long tradition of exploitation movies that goes right back to the 1920s and 1930s.”
Despite its notoriety, Pink Flamingos remained banned in certain countries, including Switzerland and Austria.
It is notorious for including incest, indecent exposure, and even a scene involving a severed pig’s head.
However, its most infamous moment is the film’s final scene.
As Waters recounted: “It was the first scene I had thought up for Pink Flamingos. I knew I had only $10,000 to work with, so I figured I had to give the audiences something that no other studio could dare give them even with multimillion-dollar budgets.
“Something to leave them gagging in the aisles. Something they could never forget.”
This climactic moment, which involves Divine consuming real dog feces on camera, remains one of the most shocking acts ever captured on film.
As Hunter explains: “It’s partly about proving that you’re hardcore enough to sit through it, and enjoying the fact that you have an alternative aesthetic. You want to be the person who’s laughing at other people gagging. It becomes a collective ritual.”
Watching Pink Flamingos in a theater setting, surrounded by an audience that is either cheering or recoiling, provides a uniquely transgressive experience.
While Pink Flamingos is undeniably grotesque, its influence extends far beyond shock value.
As Waters himself put it: “It’s easy to disgust someone… but this, he added, would not be ‘very stylish or original.’” Instead, he crafted a film with a distinctive satirical edge, a deliberate challenge to social norms, and a message that was ahead of its time.
Film scholar Gary Needham notes that Pink Flamingos: “pushes back against the liberation-era gay politics of the 1970s, which were about being nice and fitting in, and anticipates the radical queer politics of the 1990s which were about a refusal to assimilate.”
