Review of A Dirty Shame (2004) by Manny C — 23 Mar 2011

John Water's last great directorial effort (so far) still knows how to bring the wicked perversity. The rest of popular culture may have finally caught up with him, but leave it to Waters top show he's still the King of Bad Taste.

This is no exception: A Dirty Shame is prime Wasters, unleashed and totally uninhibited. Tracy Ullman is all kinds of excellent as Sylvia Stickles, a middle-aged frump living with her sexually neglected husband (Chris Isaak) on Hartford Road in Waters' native Baltimore.

Sylvia may be frumpy, but there are hints of something outrageous to come when you hear the song 'Sylvia', taken from a bawdy 1965 Carroll Baker flick. That outrageous event happens when Sylvia suffers a concussion after a car accident, and pretty soon she's a total sex maniac, sticking her legs up in the air, itching to have her labia licked.

Her first stud is Ray-Ray (Johnny Knoxville, in his best onscreen role outside a Jackass movie). Ray-Ray leads a sex-addict cult, made up of folks who also suffered head injuries, and he's made it his mission to save the world from sexless prudes.

That could provide some insight into why Sylvia's daughter, Caprice (Selma Blair, sublime) gets super breast implants and strips under the name Ursula Udders. Just don't expect any insight into why or how Sylvia starts dancing in a nursing home and picks up a bottle with her vagina.

But why ask why in a twisted movie that has trees shaped like hard-ons? The jokes don't always work, but what does work stays with you, particularly a nice scene where Sylvia has a heart to heart with her daughter and quips, 'I'm a cunnilingus bottom.

' Sure, there's barely a plot, but that's always been the case with Waters. It's one worth getting lost in.