CECIL B. DEMENTED

Power to the people who punish bad cinema!

As with all of John Waters’s great films, CECIL B. DEMENTED pits a surrogate family of social outcasts against mainstream society. The outcasts this time are a gang of terrorist cinephiles who call themselves “the Sprocket Holes” and wage war against Hollywood mediocrity. Their leader is Cecil B. Demented (Stephen Dorff), a megalomaniacal wannabe-director. Together they kidnap Hollywood’s biggest star, Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith), and force her to act in their renegade movie, eventually converting her to their cause. (Incidentally, Patricia Hearst makes a good-natured cameo as a gang member’s mother.)

Waters excoriates all those who rob cinema of its sense of danger and excitement. To combat the malaise, he proposes a grassroots cinema that is personal, political, improvisatory, and interactive with the world around it. CECIL B. DEMENTED is also a fantasy movie where marginal and dying exhibition spaces like drive-ins, kung-fu grindhouses, and porno theatres are not only thriving, but also foster radical anti-mainstream cinephile communities. It's the closest Waters has come to self-parody while remaining utterly sincere. “There are no rules in underground cinema, only edges!”