Trouble maker

WHEN YOU LOOK at the perversions director John Waters has committed to celluloid during the past 56 years, you can see how he earned his monikers: King Of Filth and Sultan Of Sleaze, among others. There was the chicken penetration scene (exactly as it sounds), the lobster sex attack (exactly as it sounds), the eating of dog shit (yep, exactly as it sounds). The last was the final act of , John Waters’ transgressive 1972 hit, when Divine — the centre of his acting ‘troupe’, ‘the Dreamlanders’ — in drag, crouched down next to a dog and chewed the warm offering. When his next film, , arrived just two years later, the question was: how could John Waters shock us even more? But something had changed. Waters had got serious(ish). He had double the budget, an actual crew and a film that had something to say about notoriety and celebrity, and maybe even the criminal justice system, with this story of a young suburban woman Dawn Davenport (played by Divine) who has a kid and becomes entangled in a deranged world of crime (this barely does the crazed plot justice). More than four decades on, as the film is released by the very respectable Criterion Collection, the Baltimore filmmaker remembers