Cecil B Demented (DVD)

I'm sure there was a time when 'cult' meant something other than 'slightly sideways of centre' or 'low budget/mass appeal'...maybe it simply meant 'stinkingly bad', who's to say? Anyway, awash with 'cult' propaganda and advertising at the local video shop, my mind wandered most warmly (probably with more respect than is due), to the king of smell-o-rama himself, John Waters...and I waited with baited breath for that bubble of nostalgia to burst. *The Film. Cecil B Demented (Stephen Dorff) is a misaligned and dangerously kooky film maker; he holds refuge in a disused cinema with a congregation of Hollywood ...  Read the complete review

There are a lot of things you could call Cecil B. Demented, John Waters' latest art-house ornament about a obsessed independent filmmaker who goes by the nom de poseur of Cecil B. Demented - movie joke, get it? With the same level of comedic class, Waters could also have titled it Eric von Strokehead, Otto Derringer, Orson Ills, on and on with similar creativity. Preeningly pompous and so knuckleheaded in its thematic onslaught against mainstream culture, my time would have been more productively spent watching paint dry. Even by the ever-plunging standards of the film-festival circuit, this Artisan release is no work of craft, but merely a pretentious ...  Read the complete review

Tonight I went to see Cecil b. Demented, probably not a well-known film to you all, but entered into the one of the 2000 Cannes film festival’s competitions. As I had no idea what to expect what I watched was a funny, not to be taken too seriously satire that I personally thought was a good (but not great) film. The thing I liked about it most was it’s originality and it definitely worked to make a pleasurable cinema outing. The film is both written and directed by John Waters (1994 Serial Mom) who quotes that he got the name of the film and main character from a critics review which called him Cecil B. Demille. The plot is based on the fight for ...  Read the complete review

The Pope of Trash continues his increasingly light-hearted dig at American culture with this slender but enjoyable effort. Baltimore’s finest appears to have been spending a lot of time with London’s low-budget film collectives – the film terrorists here closely resemble people I’ve met at film events over the years. In fact at the last one I attended I spoke to a young German man, who informed me in deadpan and Teutonic tones that ‘I had to get out of street politics before I hurt someone really badly’. If he’d shown a bit more commitment, he could have ended up in this film, which shows the efforts of a ragtag band of cinema ...  Read the complete review

Starring the linkes of Starring Melanie Griffith, Stephen Dorff, Ricki Lake, Patricia Hearst and Mink Stole. Written , not to mention the fact this is directed by John Waters, this film has the credientials to be a very good project indeed. However, any hope about this film should certainly end here! This film follows a group of cinema loving anarchists, driven on the idea that making a film would create the ultimate orgasm, as long as the film is completely free of the Hollywood establishment. To get what they want, the group kidnaps an aging starlet, whose career has gone down the tube with continuingly grating sap films. This actress, Honey Whitlock ...  Read the complete review