A filth-filled revolt against public decency, John Waters’ deranged fairy tale about Desperate Living goes gloriously off the deep end of bad taste. After murdering her husband, a hysterical housewife (Mink Stole) and her maid accomplice go on the lam and find themselves exiled to Mortville, a deviant dystopia of social & sexual outcasts ruled by the twisted & tyrannical Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey). Water’s self-described “lesbian melodrama about revolution” is loud, rude, constantly quotable, politically subversive, and very, very funny.
“Waters cultivates sleaze like a rare orchid… he is to Baltimore what Ingmar Bergman was to Sweden.” – Baltimore Sun
“You could look far and wide to find a more pointlessly ugly movie than John Waters’s Desperate Living, but why would you bother?” – Janet Maslin, The New York Times
