Cecil B. Demented

By JASON SOLOMONS, Mail on Sunday

John Waters is all about taste - good taste, bad taste and certainly

an acquired taste. For example, his heavyweight muse, Divine, ate real dog

mess for him in 1972's Pink Flamingos; his 1981 film Polyester was shot in

'Odorama' and audiences were given scratch 'n' sniff cards to make scents of

the plot.

Melanie Griffith stars in his latest assault on mainstream sensibilities,

Cecil B Demented. She joins major players such as Kathleen

Turner, Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci, who all took risks but who all saw

their stock rise like a Divine hairdo after wading in Waters's comedies.

Griffith plays Honey Whitlock, a grand Hollywood star visiting Baltimore

(the capital of what Waters calls his 'mondo trasho') for a premiere. The

movie theatre's staff have been infiltrated by underground film fanatics who,

in a flurry of bullets and smokebombs, kidnap Griffith and force her to star

in their no-budget movie: a sort of 'guerrilla filmmakers in the mist'.

The frenetic high camp and bitchery are funny at first. We watch gleefully

as Griffith undergoes painful hair-bleaching with a miserable bee-stung pout,

and we laugh as it flips into a smile when the cinematographer tells her she

now looks younger. We laugh again as the guerrillas besiege a cinema

screening Patch Adams - The Director's Cut.

Led by Stephen Dorff's Cecil B Demented, a film fanatic with a hatred of

Hollywood and the studio system, the crew are tattooed with the names of

their maverick heroes: Otto Preminger, Peckinpah, William Castle (a horror

director who wired auditorium seats to shock his audiences) and Fassbinder.

Although Griffith is on fine comic form, Waters's garish style grows shrill

and tiresome - in the era of gross-out a la Farrelly Brothers, he has lost

his knack of delighting us with the disgusting. It's like being hit repeatedly over the head with candyfloss.

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