Moviemaking’s most cherished creepy uncle John Waters once gave Melanie Griffith a wig, a gun and a manifesto to scream: “Death to those who support mainstream cinema!” Cecil B DeMented, Waters’ madcap 2000 satire, remains the filmmaker’s most explicit and passionate defence of his bread and butter: trash cinema. It’s a genre so nebulously defined that it doesn’t even possess a Wikipedia page. But it’s generally interpreted as transgressive underground cinema – movies made with varying degrees of taste, that typically gives the middle finger to conventional notions around sexuality, gender and morality.
Trash cinema is a woman in Jed Johnson’s Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977) getting so tired of her baby’s screeching that she throws it out of her apartment window. It’s kids turning to murder and going insane after one puff of a joint, in Louis J Gasnier’s anti-drug PSA Reefer Madness (1936). It’s the late, great drag queen Divine being sexually assaulted by a gigantic lobster in Waters’ Multiple Maniacs (1970). Trash is a genre that’s un-PC by design, its outré brand of sideshow cinema polarising audiences and attracting the weirdos (that is to say, the gays).
