10 Essential Trash Films You Need To Watch

Pink Flamingos opens on a shot of a trailer home, setting the tone for a movie about drag queen Divine’s determination to retain the tabloid-bestowed title of “filthiest person alive” in the face of challenges from “two jealous perverts who hate Divine more than anything in the world.”

The Marbles, played by David Lochary and Mink Stole, run a “baby ring”, selling the offspring of abductees to lesbian couples and ploughing the profits into porn stores and heroin operations that target inner city elementary schools.

But they can’t compete with a cross-dressing trailer resident who keeps his/her mentally ill mother in a playpen, allows her delinquent son to rape a woman sent to spy on them and is willing to break into their home and perform indescribable acts on their furniture.

For bad measure, John Waters also throws in a party montage that includes a guest contracting his sphincter in close-up, a kidnapped hitch-hiker being impregnated with a sperm-filled pipette and Divine eating a dog turd (set to How Much Is That Doggy In The Window?). How did Waters become so mainstream that he appeared on The Simpsons?