Love is Strange: Reflections on ... The Honeymoon Killers (1969)

/ Tony Lo Bianco and Shirley Stoler as Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck in The Honeymoon Killers (1969) /

I was buggin’ out with excitement to re-visit The Honeymoon Killers (on Thursday 12 February 2015 to be precise) when The Barbican screened it as part of their My Twisted Valentine mini-season. It’s been well over twenty years since I've watched this vicious 1969 black comedy cult movie. I know because I last saw it at London’s much-missed grindhouse repertory cinema The Scala in then-derelict Kings Cross which was defunct by 1993. It absolutely blew me away then. Happily, I can report The Honeymoon Killers is un-mellowed by time. It still packs a nasty jolt!

A true tale of amour fou, The Honeymoon Killers is based on the lurid true story of serial killer couple Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez. Dubbed “the Lonely Hearts killers” by the tabloids (they lured their female victims to their deaths using personal ads), their homicidal rampage between 1947 and 1949 and subsequent trial gripped the public’s imagination. Both were ultimately executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison in 1951, still declaring their devotion to each other.

Director Leonard Kastle’s film (the only one he ever made) recreates their story in grainy, atmospheric black and white. The Honeymoon Killers looks and feels harsh, stark and immediate - like a gritty documentary or a Diane Arbus photograph come to life. The murder scenes, captured by tense and jittery handheld camera in long real-time takes, suggest a gruesome and nightmarish home movie. They force you to contemplate how long it takes and how unpleasant it is to actually kill someone. Forty-five years later, these sequences still disturb.

The Honeymoon Killers explores the banality of everyday suburban evil:  this is a realm of stifled and compromised lives, disappointments, Catholic kitsch, comfort-eating and lace doilies.  Perhaps because of budgetary constraints (the film was made on $150,000), The Honeymoon Killers makes no attempt to recreate the 1940s in costumes or decor – it’s firmly set in the late sixties (thus presumably unintentionally, it evokes the spectre of the Charles Manson murders). Like the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, it is inspired by the story of the real-life murder spree couple rather than slavishly faithful to the facts. The details are pared-down, simplified to just the austere essentials. For example, the actual killers reportedly murdered twenty women; in the film, they are only shown killing a handful. It also omits the fact that Martha had children by a previous relationship, which she abandoned to be with Ray.

Sold to contemporary audiences as a straight exploitation horror movie (see the misleading trailer), The Honeymoon Killers is stranger and more original than that.  The tone is unsettling: it frequently feels like broad black comedy with deliberately overripe acting, predicting the cinema of John Waters. There are arty avant garde moments (the climactic underwater bit where Martha tries to drown herself in a jealous rage; soaring classical music on the soundtrack). The film bristles with paranoia and thwarted lust.

The casting of the murderous lovers is inspired. Tony Lo Bianco’s gigolo Ray is a swarthy and manipulative charmer with a thick Spanish accent, a toupee and Latin rhythm in his hips. (As an added bonus, the fleeting glimpse of Lo Bianco’s pert naked cafe con leche butt certainly makes an impression).With her freckles, mane of teased hair, 1960s eyeliner and steely demeanour Shirley Stoler is riveting as the imperious and petulant Martha. Stoler (1929-1999) went on to have a distinguished career as a character actress, specializing in sinister villainesses in both film (Klute, Desperately Seeking Susan) and TV (soap operas The Edge of Night and One Life to Live, Charlie’s Angels, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse). Her towering performance here anticipates Divine. Is there any higher compliment?

Reflections on ... Nico in Philippe Garrel's Le bleu des origines (1979)

/ Nico in the film Le bleu des origines (1979) by Philippe Garrel / 

“I film women with a soul.” Interview with Philippe Garrel

[I recently had the high honour of being referenced as a source on Dennis Cooper’s blog. OK he didn't mention me by name, but Cooper recently devoted a blog entry to uncompromising French filmmaker Philippe Garrel and the paragraph on Garrel’s ultra-obscure / rarely-seen 1979 film Le bleu des origines was lifted from my IMDb review. I saw the film at The British Film Institute in 2007. It prompted me to post it here in its entirety and make it look prettier than it does on IMDb.]

Le bleu des origines is an uncompromising example of old school avant-garde cinema at its most cryptic, enigmatic and inscrutable. Made by Philippe Garrel in 1979 using a hand-cranked silent camera, bleu represents absolute year zero in film-making, a return to the starkest basics of film's origins in early silent cinema, replacing any trace of narrative or even dialogue with an emphasis almost exclusively on close-ups of women's faces. The film is black and white and absolutely silent for its near 50-minute duration. 

The total silence feels oppressive: silent cinema, after all, was accompanied by music. The silence, though, serves to ensure the focus on the actresses' faces is absolute, with no distraction.

The faces in question belong to the former Velvet Underground German chanteuse, Warhol Superstar and cult figure Nico, and bohemian French starlet Zouzou. By 1979 Nico had been Garrel's lover, muse and collaborator for a decade. Le bleu des origines was the seventh and last film they made together and marked the end of their off-screen relationship as well.

The film's tone is intimate but mysterious and ultimately despairing. It is essentially a portrait of two women, Nico and Zouzou, who are offered up for endless existential contemplation. There is no hint of even the most basic narrative but it is human nature to try to construct one, to try to thread together scenes, which are alternately jagged and brief, and sometimes-long Warholian takes that frankly court boredom. 

Garrel offers hints of symbolism that are probably highly significant but remain opaque: Nico examining a jewel in her hand; many shots of both women reading manuscripts or poetry by candlelight; a glimpse of Nico's passport; Nico pointing at the sky; Zouzou writing; Nico folding a letter and putting it in an envelope; Zouzou wielding a knife; Nico as an angel of death with waist-length hair in a billowing black cape, filmed in high winter on the roof of the Paris Opera House among the stone gargoyles. Most strikingly, Nico in some kind of dungeon or prison slowly climbing a stone staircase, pausing on each step, in jerky zombie-like movements straight out of a lost German Expressionist masterpiece. 




/ Consider this a trailer for Le bleu des origines: eerie dirge "We've Got the Gold" from Nico's 1974 album The End providing a soundtrack to clips from Le bleu des origines /

Nico and Zouzou are mostly filmed alone but sometimes together. What links them? Both women were frequent collaborators with Garrel and had appeared in his films several times separately before. Nico was romantically linked with Garrel: I’m uncertain whether Zouzou was. Like Anita Pallenberg, both women had been involved with the doomed Rolling Stone Brian Jones. In the 1960s both Nico and Zouzou had been glamorous art-y girls of the moment, fashion models turned singers and actresses. By 1979 both women had hit hard times. Nico, Zouzou and Garrel are all known for their heroin addiction. (Later in her life Zouzou did jail time and was reduced to selling the Parisian equivalent of The Big Issue outside Paris metro stations).

Again and again Garrel films them in scenes that emphasise their alienation, anguish, distress, isolation, solitude. Both Nico and Zouzou were great beauties and there is genuine pleasure in lengthily scrutinising them in long silent takes; from shot to shot, though, depending on how the light hits their faces, both can look suddenly, startlingly ravaged, older than their years. Maybe the film is about the hell of heroin addiction? 

There is actually a third woman in the film who appears so briefly she is almost subliminal: Jean Seberg. (Seberg and Nico had already appeared together in the earlier Garrel film Les hautes solitudes in 1974). In some shots a barely glimpsed heavy-set but still beautiful older woman appears, standing behind Nico while Nico plays the piano like the phantom of the opera. Later, and shockingly, Seberg inexplicably slaps Nico hard across the face. Seberg committed suicide in 1979, the year this film was released. This surely represents her last-ever film appearance.

While Zouzou gets equal screen time and is certainly charismatic, it must be said the film belongs to Nico. In her haunting close-ups she suggests the post-punk Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich of underground art cinema. Even in the “talkies” of the 1930s some of Garbo and Dietrich's most mesmerising on-screen moments were silent close-ups of their faces (i.e. the concluding scenes of Queen Christina and Morocco). Their allure was non-verbal, not dependent on dialogue or voices – they cast a spell with just their eyes. In Le bleu des origines Nico does the same. 

/ The famous concluding close-up of Queen Christina (1933) in which the serenely impenetrable Greta Garbo stares into the horizon, her inner world sealed off to us. I’d argue this anticipates the lengthy, unfathomable close-ups Andy Warhol and then Garrel would devote to Nico in their underground art films  /

As the film continues, the mood of distress and impending tragedy grows more overt. Towards the end Nico is shown wrapped in a headscarf, crying genuine inconsolable tears, her breath visible in frosty night air, seemingly not acting. Her depression is tangible. For someone frequently lazily described as an ice queen who sang in a bored monotone, Nico here convincingly projects raw emotion: her presence aches with a heavy sadness. 

Sometimes hypnotic, sometimes catatonic, Le bleu des origines is as bleakly beautiful as Nico's best music and was obviously a heartfelt personal and artistic statement. If the film does represent the end of their relationship, it is certainly a last cinematic love letter from Garrel to Nico.

/ Portrait of Nico circa her 1981 album Drama of Exile /



/ You can watch Le bleu des origines in its entirety on the Youtube link above. How lucky I was to see it in an exquisite sparkling print at The British Film Institute: this is clearly a bootleg (I think someone filmed it sitting in a cinema!) but Garrel has never released it on DVD and for now this represents your best viewing source. For a soundtrack to this silent film I suggest you load your CD player with Nico's essential trilogy (her "gravest hits" if you like) - The Marble Index (1969), Desertshore (1970) and The End (1974) - and crank it up loud /

Further reading:

Read the Dennis Cooper blog for an excellent overview of Garrel's career

Fascinating 2002 interview with the then-58 year old Zouzou in The Guardian. What a life.

I've blogged about the ever-inscrutable Nico (“possessor of the most haunting wraith cheekbones of the 20th century” - thank you, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair) many times: her contemporary Marianne Faithfull reflects on Nico here; the historic encounter When John Waters Met Nico; Nico’s 1960s modelling days; how the old jazz standard "My Funny Valentine" (and heroin) connects Nico with Chet Baker; and  finally, When Patti Smith Met Nico.

The next LOBOTOMY ROOM ... Saturday 21 March 2015 at Hysteria!

/ Flyer by Ego Rodriguez /

From the Facebook events page:

Skulk in the depths of drunken depravity - at LOBOTOMY ROOM!

At last - a club night for the hillbilly beau monde! LOBOTOMY ROOM! Where sin lives! A punkabilly beer blast! A spectacle of decadence for the permissive Continentally-minded! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Twisted Tittyshakers! Punk Cretin Hops! Kitsch! Exotica! Curiosities and other Weird Shit! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs The Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell (of Dr Sketchy and Cockabilly notoriety). Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock!

Gay greasers, cry-babies, prison wives and juvenile delinquents of all ages are welcome at LOBOTOMY ROOM! The semi-regular cult club night in waiting returns to the suitable environs of a low-ceilinged subterranean sex dungeon basement in Dalston (aka downstairs at Hysteria)! No musical guests this time – just me playing all your putrid vintage sleaze favourites until you’re losing your mind!

All this and admission is gratuit. (That’s French for FREE!)

Lobotomy Room: Faster. Further. Filthier.

A tawdry good time guaranteed!

/ Cover girl for this Lobotomy Room flyer: the enigmatic Gertrude Forstner (stripper name: Lady Chinchilla), photographed here in 1963. Between burlesque engagements (she was famous for her savage “cage act”) she was French sex kitten Brigitte Bardot’s screen stand-in. Read more about Lady Chinchilla here /

Read about all the Lobotomy Rooms to date  here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Lobotomy Room 27 December 2014 featuring Jane Ruby

From the Facebook events page:

Escape the boredom that imprisons us all – at LOBOTOMY ROOM!

Frug, twist, watusi and monkey away your post-Christmas / pre-New Year’s Eve ennui - with the throbbing excitement of Lobotomy Room at East London boîte de nuit Paper Dress Vintage!

Lobotomy Room – a punkabilly beer blast! A sensual and depraved spectacle of decadence for the permissive Continentally-minded! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Twisted Tittyshakers! Punk Cretin Hops! Kitsch! Exotica! Curiosities and other Weird Shit! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs The Cramps Taught Us, hosted by DJ Graham Russell (of Dr Sketchy and Cockabilly notoriety). Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock!

Musical guest is JANE RUBY - the bluesy chantoosie who purrs and belts in a voice of pure pink cashmere. Perhaps best-known as the hour glass-contoured frontwoman of South London’s now-defunct voodoobilly band Naked Ruby throughout the 2000s, Ruby then sang and played guitar in all-girl surf punk outfit The Deptford Beach Babes – and now she’s seducing audiences with her new one-woman solo act. Ruby’s songs evoke visions of Ann-Margret in her Kitten with a Whip prime twisting frantically to Link Wray and are informed by her chequered past. Hailing from the wastelands of Adelaide, Australia has left the devilish red-haired singer a life-long glamour junkie, something Ruby indulged via her stints as a former nudie cutie artist’s model, dancer (Can-Can, flamenco and belly) and cocktail lounge jazz diva covering Billie Holiday and Nina Simone standards (an apprenticeship that still lingers in her femme fatale vocal antics). Ruby’s lyrics are sometimes spun from her real-life debauched alcohol-fuelled Janis Joplin-esque misadventures and sometimes are Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!-style revenge fantasies (assuming her songs about killing men are not based on firsthand experience). Blues, flamenco-tinged rock’n’roll and dirty stories are assured. If we’re lucky Ruby might even throw in a spot of belly-dancing!All this and admission is gratuit. (That’s French for FREE!)

Lobotomy Room – a tawdry good time guaranteed!

To paraphrase The Ramones: there was no stoppin’ the cretins from hoppin’ – at the 27 December 2014 LOBOTOMY ROOM!

I had vowed to myself I would do one final (third) Lobotomy Room for 2014 – and I pulled it off! My expectations were realistic: this is the third time I've done a Lobotomy Room at Paper Dress Vintage on the weekend between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, so I knew already the streets of Shoreditch would be a desolate ghost town and loads of my friends would be out of town. But everything considered ... we did pretty damn well!

Swingin’ special musical guest red-headed blues mama Jane Ruby (an old friend of mine from way back in the nineties) certainly helped. A vision in vintage aquamarine sequins and working a towering tousled beehive ‘do, Ms Ruby cast a spell with her heavenly intonations, accompanying herself with just guitar on a beguiling mix of original material and inspired covers (including “I Put A Spell on You” and “These Boots Are Made for Walking”).  Kudos as well to Paper Dress Vintage’s unflappable bar manager Carla for literally keeping everyone intoxicated. But mainly thanks to the hip, good-natured, enthusiastic dancing crowd who were a pleasure to DJ for. They helped ensure Lobotomy Room ended 2014 on a high. 

Who knows what 2015 holds in store for my fetid club night?

/ Jane Ruby rockin' around the Christmas tree /



/ Paul, Pal and Dez /



/ Those Amy Grimehouse girls Alex and Mia /



/ Eric and Charlie /



/ Stylish couple /



/ The Italian contingent: the fabulous Barbara (centre) and friends /




/ Hip couple: Vanessa and David /



/ Dance floor action, seen from the DJ booth /



/ Only one photo of me taken all night - and it's ghastly! (I look like I'm chewing a wasp in every photo ever taken). But still, it's Jane Ruby and I /



/ When Jane Ruby sang a song in Spanish, it sparked a spontaneous outbreak of flamenco dancing - a definite Lobotomy Room first! It was like a moment from a Pedro Almodovar film / 

Fever - Edith Massey
These Boots Are Made for Walking - Mrs Miller
Dangerous Lips - The Drivers
Little Queenie - Bill Black's Combo
Virgenes del Sol - Yma Sumac
Mama's Place - Bing Day
Beat Generation - Mamie Van Doren
Kismiaz - The Cramps
Fever - Nancy Sit
Mau Mau - The Wailers
I Live the Life I Love - Esquerita
Misirlou - Martin Denny
Fujiyama Mama - Annisteen Allen
Ain't That Good? George Kelly and Orchestra
Mambo Baby - Ruth Brown
She Wants to Mambo - Johnny Thunders and Patti Palladin
Torture Rock - The Rockin' Belmarx
Intoxica - The Centurions
You're Driving Me Crazy - Dorothy Berry
You're the One for Me - Wanda Jackson
Margaya - The Fender Four
Tear It Up - Johnny Burnette and The Rock'n'Roll Trio
I'm a Bad, Bad Girl - Little Esther
The Swag - Link Wray
How Much Love Can One Heart Hold? Joe Perkins and The Rookies
Tina's Dilemma - Ike and Tina Turner
Jim Dandy - Sara Lee and The Spades
Whistle Bait - Larry Collins
Dirty Robber - The Wailers
Bombora - The Original Surfaris
Johnny Lee - Faye Adams
Wild Wild Party - Charlie Feathers
Rip It Up - Little Richard
Jailhouse Rock - Masaaki Hirao
Rock Around the Clock - The Sex Pistols
Year One - X
Comin' Home, Baby - The Delmonas
Ain't That Lovin' You, Baby - The Earls of Suave
Save It - Mel Robbins
Handclapping Time - The Fabulous Raiders
The Big Bounce - Shirley Caddell
Club Delight - Jack Jolly
No Good Lover - Mickey and Sylvia
Shortnin' Bread - The Readymen
Muleskinner Blues - The Fendermen
Beat Party - Ritchie and The Squires
Suey - Jayne Mansfield
Pass the Hatchet - Roger and The Gypsies
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
Fools Rush In - Ricky Nelson
Jim Dandy - LaVerne Baker
Dance with Me, Henry - Ann-Margret
Wipe-Out - The Surfaris
The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard
Lucille - Masaaki Hirao
C'mon Everybody - Sid Vicious
Teenage Lobotomy - The Ramones
Love Me - The Phantom
Chicken Walk - Hasil Adkins
Boss - The Rumblers
Chicken - The Cramps
Hoy Hoy - The Collins Kids
Cry-baby - The Honey Sisters
I Want Your Love - The Cruisers
Tall Cool One - The Wailers

Further reading:

Read about all the Lobotomy Rooms so far here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

See the rest of the photos from this Lobotomy Room on my flickr page

Lobotomy Room is kindly sponsored by Vivien of Holloway - for all your faux vintage glamour needs!

Lobotomy Room flyer designed by the muy guapo and muy talented Ego Rodriguez.

Follow me on tumblr for all your rancid kitsch and homoerotic vintage sleaze needs!

Reflections on ... Something Wild (1961)

This is what I wrote for Beige magazine in October: 

Upcoming British Film Institute season Birth of the Method [25 October – 30 November 2014] explores the intense, influential and revolutionary school of acting espoused by New York’s legendary Actors Studio in the 1950s. 

Sure, much of the then-radically naturalistic Method approach looks pretty twitchy and mannered today (the scratch-your-crotch and mumble clichés started for a reason), but the season features some genuinely interesting titles starring the Method’s most notable exemplars: Montgomery Clift, Marilyn Monroe and of course the Method made flesh, Marlon Brando (at the height of his virile beefcake beauty in On The Waterfront).
 
Particularly intriguing is the arty and obscure sexploitation vehicle Something Wild (1961). Starring pouty and perverse Carroll Baker (of Baby Doll notoriety, which is also screening) it’s virtually never revived so seize this rare opportunity to see this curiosity. Cinema’s kitsch king John Waters has raved about Something Wild as camp-meets-“failed art movie” hybrid and likens Baker in it to Ann-Margret in Kitten with a Whip as “When a Sexpot Emotes.” What more incentive do you need?

Obviously I made a point of seeing Something Wild (1961) at The British Film Institute on 27 November and it was indeed wild and a real experience! I’d never seen this rarely-revived and obscure psychological drama before but had always been curious about it.

I was expecting something a bit more sexploitation-y, kitsch and Kitten with a Whip. Having now seen Something Wild, I eat the words I wrote above! In fact it was relentlessly bleak, dark and very much an uncompromising somber European art film that just happened to be in English and filmed in New York. It stars luscious blonde Carroll Baker in what must surely be her career-best performance. The film both looks and sounds incredible. The dissonant jazz soundtrack is by Aaron Copeland. The film’s stark noir-ish black and white look is via cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan. Something Wild was apparently his last film. He’d begun his career working in German silent cinema under Fritz Lang in the 1920s and he invests that knowledge of German Expressionism to Something Wild, which frequently unfolds like a dream (or a nightmare). In 1960 Schüfftan had worked on the eerie French horror film Les yeux sans visage – he brings a similar sense of menace and dread to Something Wild.

Amazingly, the director Jack Garfein (now 85) was in attendance to introduce the film onstage. He said it took him fifty years to make sense of why he made Something Wild. As a child he was imprisoned in Auschwitz. The film was his cri de coeur and attempt to come to terms with those memories. Something Wild was a mega-flop when it came out, baffled critics and public alike (as Don L Stradley put it, “critics reacted to it as if they’d sat in something slimy”) and was swiftly buried by the studio. As a result, Garfein (who was married to Baker at the time – it was an intensely personal project for them both) was never entrusted to make another film again! I'm careful not to give too much away: the film concerns a girl who gets raped and psychologically unravels – very much anticipating Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). The ending is genuinely strange and divisive. It may be over fifty years old, but Something Wild hasn't lost its ability to disturb.

Further reading:  Read Kim Morgan's analysis of Something Wild here

The Next LOBOTOMY ROOM ... Saturday 27 December 2014 at Paper Dress Vintage!

Escape the boredom that imprisons us all – at LOBOTOMY ROOM!

Frug, twist, watusi and monkey away your post-Christmas / pre-New Year’s Eve ennui - with the throbbing excitement of Lobotomy Room at East London boîte de nuit Paper Dress Vintage! 

Lobotomy Room – a punkabilly beer blast! A spectacle of decadence for the permissive Continentally-minded sin set! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Twisted Tittyshakers! Punk Cretin Hops! Kitsch! Exotica! Curiosities and other Weird Shit! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs The Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell (of Dr Sketchy and Cockabilly notoriety). Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock!

Musical guest is JANE RUBY - the bluesy chantoosie who purrs and belts in a voice of pure pink cashmere. Perhaps best-known as the hour glass-contoured frontwoman of South London’s now-defunct voodoobilly band Naked Ruby throughout the 2000s, Ruby then sang and played guitar in all-girl surf punk outfit The Deptford Beach Babes – and now she’s seducing audiences with her new one-woman solo act. Ruby’s songs evoke visions of Ann-Margret in her Kitten with a Whip prime twisting frantically to Link Wray and are informed by her chequered past. Hailing from the wastelands of Adelaide, Australia has left the devilish red-haired singer a life-long glamour junkie, something Ruby indulged via her stints as a former nudie cutie artist’s model, dancer (Can-Can, flamenco and belly) and cocktail lounge jazz diva covering Billie Holiday and Nina Simone standards (an apprenticeship that still lingers in her femme fatale vocal antics). Ruby’s lyrics are sometimes spun from her real-life debauched alcohol-fuelled Janis Joplin-esque misadventures and sometimes are Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!-style revenge fantasies (assuming her songs about killing men are not based on firsthand experience). Blues, flamenco-tinged rock’n’roll and dirty stories are assured. If we’re lucky Ruby might even throw in a spot of belly-dancing!

All this and admission is gratuit. (That’s French for FREE!)

Lobotomy Room – a tawdry good time guaranteed!

Facebook events page

Lobotomy Room is kindly sponsored by Vivien of Holloway - for all your faux vintage glamour needs!

Flyer by Ego Rodriguez. The “cover girl” this time is cult movie actress / burlesk strip-tease artist / convicted felon / naive outsider painter / gangster’s moll / authoress of books including My Face for the World to See and How to Attract Men ... the fabulous Liz Renay (1926 - 2007). You inevitably know Renay best for her portrayal of the vicious Muffy St Jacques in the 1977 John Waters classick Desperate Living. She is the embodiment of Lobotomy Room!

Read about all the Lobotomy Rooms so far here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Reunion with the Prince of Puke: John Waters at Southbank Centre 11 November 2014

[John Waters - the "filth elder" of us all  - made a triumphant return visit to London on Tuesday 11 November 2014 when he brought his This Filthy World: Filthier and Dirtier show to The Royal Festival Hall. I've been regularly contributing to Beige magazine lately and they asked me to do a scene report. You can also read this on their website]

Trust John Waters to lure the freakiest, queerest crowd assembled at The Royal Festival Hall since punk diva Siouxsie’s 2013 Meltdown comeback gig. Or the last time Diamanda Galas performed there. Or in fact since the last time Waters brought his acclaimed one man stand-up comedy show This Filthy World to town.

In his tight, rapid-fire ninety minute set, the veteran cult filmmaker turned raconteur regaled us with dirty stories like a joyous bad influence toilet-mouthed uncle (albeit an exceptionally elegant uncle clad in Comme des Garcons). [Note: I've since been corrected that Waters' ultra soigné suit was by Belgian designer Dries Van Noten!]

Outing himself as a Lana Del Rey fan, the trash auteur admitted contemplating coming onstage and serenading us with her entire Ultraviolence album while maintaining direct eye contact in an act of creepy performance art - but chickened out. Waters suggested David Lynch should produce the dysfunctional ice maiden’s next album and argued Lynch would be missing a trick if he doesn’t invite her to appear on the 2016 Twin Peaks reboot.

Perversely, Waters loves tarnished pop idol Justin Bieber even more now that he’s on the descent, admitting he’d love to cut an album of duets with him like Tony Bennett’s and Lady Ga Ga’s.

Recalling his childhood, Waters described how in kindergarten he’d tell his mother stories about the peculiar little boy in his class who never spoke to his classmates and only coloured with black crayons. When Mrs Waters enquired about this kid to his teacher at a PTA meeting, the teacher exclaimed, “But that’s your son!”

Anecdotes about the making of his notorious midnight movies were inevitable. Waters called outrageous late maverick actress Susan Tyrrell - who loved freaking out the squares by loudly announcing she possessed “the pussy of a 12-year old girl”- one of the most terrifying women he ever met.

[Tyrrell, of course, played Ramona Rickettes in Waters' 1990 film Cry-baby. He mentioned the cast also included the notorious, troubled and frequently violent sex kitten Joey Heatherton. He talked about Heatherton being arrested in 1985 for physically assaulting a clerk at the passport agency office – and then just recently attacking a neighbour whose noisy juicer machine was disturbing her. “Don’t fuck with Joey Heatherton!”]

When his elderly mother asked about the subject matter of 2004’s A Dirty Shame (Water’s last film to date) and he replied, “Sex addiction”, she wearily sighed, “Maybe we’ll be dead before it comes out.” His father shrugged “It was funny but I hope I never see it again.”

Waters cited viewing putrid 1945 “sexual hygiene film” Mom and Dad at an impressionable age as a key influence on his own sensibility. An embryonic example of sexploitation cinema, it played in Baltimore’s grindhouse theatres for eight years. Starved for a glimpse of female nudity, the men in the audience actually masturbated to close-ups of childbirth. Waters said seeing this set him on his path as a filmmaker.  

The tone sweetened when he fondly reminisced about his two much-missed leading ladies, Divine and Edith Massey. Explaining Divine’s persona as hybrid of Jayne Mansfield and Godzilla conceived to scare hippies, Waters described filming his 300-pound drag starlet crawling through mud on a pig farm in 1969’s Mondo Trasho. Once the cameras started rolling two of the pigs spontaneously started fucking. It wasn’t in the script, but it added to the magic. “Divine turned the pigs on!” he marvelled.

Admitting he still wakes up surprised that Divine is dead, he revealed that actress Mink Stole, his casting director Pat Moran and himself have bought burial plots together adjoining Divine’s and dubbed the area Disgraceland. Waters urged everyone to come and fuck on their graves when they’re dead: “We’d love it!” His is actually a double burial plot and Waters suggested if any rabid fan wanted to dig-up the remains of either Pier Paolo Pasolini or Jean Genet and re-bury them next to him, he’d appreciate the tribute.

But let’s face it, we come to John Waters for filth and he didn't disappoint. Most middle-aged straight men “are bears without even knowing it,” he argued. Waters is an unrepentant connoisseur of poppers. When he throws “popper parties” uncomprehending straight guests unsure about the mechanics of taking amyl nitrate have drunk it or stuck it in their asses. “We need popper education!” He skewered what he sees as the dysfunctional S&M relationship between humans and their pets: dogs are “doomed to suffer human caresses ...your cat hates you!” And he taught us kinky new sexual slang. A “blouse” is an effeminate top. [Note: he also lamented no one uses the expression "basket" anymore!]. As for “blossoms” (also known as “rosebuds”), do a Google image search if you’re feeling brave but perhaps not from your office PC.

/ The photos below were taken by Mia of Amy Grimehouse /






Further reading:

My 2010 interview with John Waters for Nude magazine

My 2011 reunion with the Prince of Puke

When John Waters brought his Christmas Show to Royal Festival Hall in 2011

Full scene report from the Amy Grimehouse 12-hour John Waters Filth Fest on 29 March 2014