
John Waters, the writer and director of these movies, is a legendary filmmaker whose films occupy their own niche in cinema history. His muse and leading lady was Divine a 300-pound transvestite who could eat dog shit in one scene and break your heart in the next. In Hairspray, a pleasantly plump teenager, played by Ricki Lake, and her big-hearted hairdresser mother, played by Divine, teach 1962 Baltimore about race relations by integrating a local TV dance show. Female Trouble is a coming-of-age story gone terribly awry: Dawn Davenport (again, Divine), progresses from loving schoolgirl to crazed mass murderer destined for the electric chair all because her parents wouldn''t buy her cha-cha heels for Christmas. In Multiple Maniacs, dubbed by Waters a celluloid atrocity, the traveling sideshow Lady Divine''s Cavalcade of Perversions is actually a front for a group of psychotic kidnappers, with Lady Divine herself the most vicious and depraved of all but her life changes after she gets raped by a fifteen-foot lobster.
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