Crash Course in Misbehavior | MONDO TRASHO (1969)

How do you say Divine?

With the flair of a silent film gone bad, director John Waters brings Divine into the national spotlight with his 1969 first full-length MONDO TRASHO.  Fair warning: you may feel like taking a shower after partaking in this cavorting of excess.  It's a lo-fi, 16 mm project that opens with a Medieval-cum-S&M chicken executioner and returns full-circle to the farm with some commendable death throe maneuvers in pig shit.  Throughout,  Divine's sparkle space outfit truly shines, despite the pants half which keep falling.  

Water's world is populated by freaks of all kind, from the city park to the looney bin to the mad doctor's office--and everyone's got an angle.  Divine might be crass and déclassée, a flat out criminal even, but while she shoplifts with panache and holds up a cabbie by knifepoint, it's all for a good cause, the rectifying of her running over the grittily beautiful and frail-ish waif The Bombshell (Mary Vivian Pearce).  Divine's desire to right her wrongs shows her heart's in the right place.  She's the least nutty of all the Baltimore crazies, and the most devout of the fallen prostrate at the Virgin Mary's periodic interventions.

The soundtrack is consistently jarring, a loud hodge-podge of doo-wop, mo-town, rock, and classical often taking the place of dialogue in this one-and-a-half hour venture into non-synch sound where voice-overs happen rarely.

MONDO TRASHO lives up to its name in spades, and is a seriously disturbing albeit comical journey that sways more towards experimental art piece than a traditional film.  The now-classic verbal exchange containing a litany of foul-language barbs between the two suburbanites waiting on their bus is certainly worth making it to the end.

Catch the insanity while it's up for now: