'Jingle balls, jingle balls ...' (Cecil B Demented (DVD))

Member Name: maz

Product:	Cecil B Demented (DVD)
Date:	13/12/00 (79 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's a John Waters movie

Disadvantages: How did this get an 18 certificate?

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 rebels to overthrow the corporate movie hegemony – here pictured as ‘Patch Adams – the Director’s Cut’ and ‘Forest Gump 2 – Gump Forever’ – by kidnapping mainstream star Honey Whitlock and forcing her to star in their film.

The rebel band is led by director Cecil B Demented, played by Stephen Dorff, and Whitlock is played magnificently by Melanie Griffith, in a role recalling Kathleen Turner’s role in ‘Serial Mom’. Other faces include Ricki Lake, ‘discovered’ by John Waters when casting for ‘Hairspray’ and now a major Oprah-style TV celebrity; Mink Stole, the only remaining star from the original Waters entourage; and Patty Hearst, who plays the mother of Fidget, the youngest of the film terrorists.

For those who don’t know, Hearst was an heiress kidnapped by a radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in the 1970s who displayed an advanced case of ‘Stockholm syndrome’ as she gleefully robbed banks with the activists. The story in 'Cecil B Demented' is similar, as Whitlock – perhaps spurred on by images of adoring fans on TV arguing that her new role makes her look younger – becomes increasingly enamoured of the group and its aims.


But the agenda here is not really radical – while Waters doesn’t indulge in the commodification of dissent found elsewhere in the US film industry (think ‘Fight Club’), the film is no more an examination of radical issues than ‘Hairspray’ is a critique of 50s race relations. It’s played strictly for laughs, the caricatures more good-hearted than in his early work, and as a comedy it works pretty well: there are a couple of set pieces – my favourite being the porno cinema, hordes of ‘whackers’ resembling nothing so much as Romero zombies – which are truly hilarious.

It’s odd to think of Waters as the godfather of the ‘gross-out’ film typified by the Farrelly brothers’ work, as he’s increasingly described. Waters’ films have always had a bite, even if it is becoming increasingly gummy, and are consistently intelligent in their mode of attack; the Farrelly brothers are like a jock-friendly version, offensive only in their terminal lunkheadedness and thought-provoking to nobody. Waters took care always to bait liberals, recognising that only they would even bother to see midnight movie fare like ‘Pink Flamingos’ and ‘Female Trouble’; the Farrelly brothers have their sights on the box office alone. To conclude, then – a fun if slight addition to the Waters canon; when ‘Patch Adams – the Director’s Cut’ is playing in every cinema he’ll be sorely missed.

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