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I really enjoy the John Waters universe sometimes. With movies like "Serial Mom," "Cry-Baby" and "Pecker," it makes for a nutty little alternate dimension that's great to check out once in a while, although I'll gleefully take about fifty steps back from "Pink Flamingos" and pretend I never saw it... which is impossible due to the lasting impressions burned into my retinas by The Singing Asshole. But that atrocity may be made up for with "Fuckin' Don Knotts! He's the coolest!" from "Serial Mom." Although that still leaves all the chicken fucking and shit-eating from Flamingos to be dealt with. This flick might make up for it. I was giggling about the possibilities stemming from the concept of "Cecil" before it even started. Led by Cecil B. DeMented (Stephen Dorff), a roving gang of cinematic terrorists (no doubt some lame term a movie critic has used to describe Waters that he felt would be more interesting taken literally) use violent, aggressive tactics to make their own film that decries Hollywood crap like God-fucking-zilla, including the kidnapping of a crappy Julia Roberts-type of actress named Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) and the eventual turning of the conceited twat towards their side. This is the kind of insanity that movies like "Godzilla" make me want to commit. In the Waters universe, this insanity succeeds. Dorff, who I'd previously only thought of as a sort of Ethan Hawke wannabe (who himself is just a Brad Pitt wannabe), has leapt in my estimation considerably with this film coupled with Blade (not that he was all that great in Blade, but if you do a decent comic book movie, I'll like ya better). Griffith still sucks, but she forced some respect out of me by doing this film in the first place - and her work in "Nobody's Fool" also leads me to wish she had talent that matched her gumption. Alicia Witt is pretty good as porn star Cherish that gets converted to DeMentedism - I particularly enjoyed the parody of 'troubled pasts' that she relates as why she went into porno.
The movie is a little rough and tumble/slipshod feeling at times, but that's sorta what the movie's ABOUT, so it works. Ridiculously aggressive cinematic terrorism. DEMENTED FOREVER! Yeah, I got into it. Good time will be had by some.
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