A Dirty Shame

A Dirty Shame is the most recent film from the “pope of trash” John Waters. Only a pile of cultural garbage such as Baltimore could produce such a director of “bad” taste. Mr. Waters attempts to go back to his early gross out roots with A Dirty Shame, a film that follows sex addict revolutionaries as they battle puritanical “neuters” in suburban (not shithole ghetto) Baltimore. Johnny Knoxville plays Ray-Ray, a messiah of the perverse and unclean. His latest recruit is Sylvia Stickles, a neuter housewife turned cunnilingus obsessed sex addict apostle.

I am not a very big fan of Johnny Knoxville. I remember him from his early days as the fake redneck that did stupid shit in the Big Brother Skateboarding videos put out by the Larry Flynt owned skateboard magazine of the same name. I must admit that Knoxville’s role as Ray-Ray in A Dirty Shame is fitting as he does play a cunning pervert leader quite well. The horrid and repulsive looking (and acting) Tracy Ullman also does a great job with her performance that will have me turned off for the next two weeks.


John Waters did a lot of research on sex perverts and fetishes in preparation for writing A Dirty Shame. Seeing Gay hairy “bears,” “sploshing,” and eroticizing dirt made me want to vomit more than laugh. A Dirty Shame also features some of the most unappealing nudity I have seen in a recent film. I think I was even frightened by some of the unnatural erect suburban neighborhood trees. I never thought that I would see the day that David Hasselhoff’s feces would turn someone into a sex addict.

My favorite films from John Waters are Pink Flamingos and Desperate Living. I am also a fan of his later more mainstream films like Cry-Baby and Pecker. Although John Waters attempts to created a film similar to his earlier works with A Dirty Shame, it isn’t particularly successful. Whereas a film like Desperate Living is “trash art,” A Dirty Shame is just trash. But then again, the film does have a couple good laughs.

-Ty E