A DIRTY SHAME

After taking on the suburban melodrama, the message picture, and the rock ’n’ roll film, John Waters tried his hand at making an old-fashioned sexploitation movie (the kind, he recalled, that “all the nuns told him he would go to hell” for watching). A DIRTY SHAME is an encyclopedic bacchanalia of sexual experimentation covering everything from adult babies to Roman showers.

Tracey Ullman plays a frigid housewife who suffers a concussion that fills her with a sudden, extreme sexual appetite. The rest of her newly discovered sex-postive commuity—including her messianic sex-cult leader (Johnny Knoxville) and her go-go dancer daughter with breasts the size of life rafts (Selma Blair)—follows suit, each celebrating the liberation of their own special fetishes. But will the prudes and the “neuters” repressing this small town put a stop to the debauchery before the world's greatest orgasm is achieved?

“The film of a free man. This is the only film from the late-'90s/early-2000s ‘gross-out comedy’ boom that celebrates rather than stigmatizes sexual diversity, and posits sexual promiscuity as an emancipatory lifestyle choice. And so of course it was dismissed by the bourgeois critic class as a childish provocation and saddled with an NC-17 rating.” - Will Sloan