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"Toiled talk in the kitchen," the consumerist vortex on the fringes, the filthy mirror nobody wants to gaze into. Queens at its greasiest is society, business is an electrolysis saloon that doubles as a hired-killer agency, children and dogs are fair game. Carroll Baker is the queen rat, fully attuned to the cycles of underground supply and demand, at the bottom is the welfare wallflower (Susan Tyrrell) who displays bovine compassion and gets attacked with an aerosol can for her trouble. Other dwellers include the Italian hitwoman with a knack for dismemberment (Stefania Casini), a Laverne & Shirley assassin sister-act (Maria and Geraldine Smith), and the vengeful heffer (Brigid Berlin) who voices the presiding view of humanity: "The more you smell 'em, the more they stink!" The fox in the henhouse is the leather-jacketed lunk (Perry King), whose assignment of offing an autistic kid ("Consider it euthanasia") tests his (and the film's) limits of immorality. A landscape of strewn porn magazines, soiled diapers and hideous hair, with purposely vile gags escalating from the methodic trashing of a restaurant bathroom to the switcheroo of a toddler wailing in a crib to a plastic doll splattered on the pavement. Jed Johnson is no Paul Morrissey, and King is perhaps no Joe Dallesandro, though Baker dauntlessly fulfills the Shelley Winters part, carrying the blistering satire to its natural conclusion, face down in a sink full of dirty dishes. Where's Poppa? and Pink Flamingos are the models, whiffs of Feiffer and Albee are felt along the way, the end of Warhol's cinematic interest is clearly registered. (Postmodernism burns along with the neighborhood theater: "I thank God we were showing a bad movie, otherwise a lot more people would've been killed.") With Charles McGregor, Gordon Oas-Heim, Susan Blond, Mary Boylan, Barbara Allen, and Lawrence Tierney.
--- Fernando F. Croce |