John Waters Collection

This Christmas season, is there any better way to say “I love you” than to make someone watch a 300-pound transvestite eat dog excrement? The only honest answer here is “yes.” We joke, because we love. But if you’ve got a strong stomach or need to buy a gift for someone who does, feast on this six-pack from John Waters. The self-proclaimed Pope of Trash, Waters was a no-budget Baltimore filmmaker with a taste for true weirdness and a group of likeminded deviants (like the gigantic Frankenstein-fabulous Divine) all willing to do anything to help get their movies noticed. We mean anything. His early films can’t be called good by any normal meaning of the word. But he knew how to pile on the shock value, presenting a warped and scatological vision of a suburbia populated by freaks and perverts (there are chickens involved sometimes, and that’s all we’ll say). The shocks were so appalling that you can’t help but admire his audacity—Waters was the Ionesco of the sewer, the original Johnny Knoxville of the big screen. Divine’s between-meal snack makes Pink Flamingos still his most infamous movie, but each of the pre-Hairspray bunch here go for broke in their own lurid way. True, the man mellowed with age. Hairspray is his cracked, nostalgic look back at the world of 1960s TV dance shows. It’s still utterly strange judged against mainstream teen-dance stuff like Footloose . But when you can only describe a John Waters comedy with words like “sweet” and “sentimental,” something very strange is going on. That’s an attitude completely at variance with the ironic vulgarity he’d embrace again for Cecil B. Demented , but he nails Hairspray’s abnormal innocence with surprising aplomb.