A very John Waters traveling show, replete with freaks, robbery, murder, sex, blasphemy, and savage shellfish—a lurid, surreal celebration of camp and trash.
The Cavalcade of Perversion is a traveling show run by Lady Divine and a crew of her fellow degenerates. They have to drag suburban housewives into each vile, tasteless performance—only to rob them at gunpoint at the end of each show. When Divine gets bored of the routine and graduates to murdering the attendees one day, it sets her off on a rampage, hunting down her cheating lover, Mr. David, and unleashing a chain of frenzy, a truly blasphemous sex act, and a surreal violation by a giant lobster. Multiple Maniacs is John Waters’ paean to the glories of trash. As Lady Divine chants as she marches proudly into downtown Baltimore at the end of the movie, “I’m a maniac! A maniac that cannot be cured! O Divine, I am Di-vine!”
John Samuel Waters, Jr. is an American filmmaker, actor, writer, personality, visual artist and art collector, who rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films: Pink Flamingos and Hairspray. He is recognizable by his pencil-thin moustache.
Thanks to Macmillan Audio, the amazing John Waters (author), and Libro.fm for providing a free advance audiobook of Multiple Maniacs: a Screenplay expertly read by John Waters himself. Getting free stuff does not influence my reviews in any way.
This is the screenplay that pretty much started it all from Waters, with Lady Divine and The Cavalcade of Perversion. Every trigger warning you can think of applies to this. I am not sure what else to say because that covers it, I think. Enjoy! I know I did.