Carl Roberts 
The BFI Southbank celebrates Trash! The wildest films you’ve ever seen, with the cult film icon Mink Stole and Peaches Christ, plus Plan 9 From Outer Space!
This April, BFI Southbank presents Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen (30 March-30 April), a season celebrating those filmmakers and movies that revel in trash cinema’s low budget, underground weirdness on the big screen in all their trashy glory. Here, trash is a label to be worn with pride rather than to be taken as an insult. Additionally, season highlights include an intimate evening with cult film icon Mink Stole (Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, Hairspray) presenting a new show with San Francisco drag impresario and filmmaker Peaches Christ. Also, the season features the world premiere of a new 35mm print of Plan 9 from Outer Space. Ed Wood’s cult sci-fi horror proudly claims the title of ‘the worst film of all time.’ This season features a newly created print, crafted from original elements preserved in the BFI National Archive.
Curated by BFI National Archive curator William Fowler and BFI Head of Cinema Programme Justin Johnson, the season includes some of American trash cinema’s most (in)famous names, ranging from the 1930s to the 1990s including films by John Waters (Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos), George and Mike Kuchar (Sins of the Fleshapoids, Hold Me While I’m Naked), Jack Smith (Normal Love), Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast), Russ Meyer (Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), Paul Morrissey (Trash), Curt McDowell (Thundercrack!), Beth B (Salvation!) and Bruce LaBruce (Super 8 ½) amongst others.
AN AMERICAN TRADITION
The American tradition of trash films delights in its low budget and so-called ‘bad taste’ aesthetic. They are lurid, camp, transgressive, wild and DIY. Made by friends and lovers who subvert received ideas about gender, sex and identity. These films are often received as barbed, playful, nihilistic retorts to the socially and politically rigid. Trash cinema gleefully serves up the very opposite of respectable mainstream film. These films do so with their sensationalist, taboo-busting narratives and shoestring budgets.
They feature outsiders, misfits and flamboyant creatures, both behind and in front of the camera. Their history goes back to the carny sideshows of yore. They break the fourth wall and revel in the audience’s complicit inclusion in both the shocks and jokes. Shown at cheap drive-ins, alternative art spaces and midnight movie palaces, these queer, divine, eye-popping works challenge the limits of censorship. Furthermore, they blur the boundaries between art and exploitation, parody and homage, excess and play.
Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen builds on the legacy of BFI Southbank’s highly successful John Waters, Scala and Moviedrome seasons. Whilst some films in the season have entered the language of mainstream cinema and even influenced popular culture, bringing this curated programme to the big screen allows audiences to reclaim trash’s subversive delights for the cinema. Here, they find their best, most exciting articulation. This invokes both their original shock value and artistic merit with a mix of archive and new prints and digital restorations. Plus, there is a selection of titles available UK-wide online via BFI Player.
THE SEASON INTRODUCTION AND IDOL WORSHIP: AN EVENING WITH MINK STOLE AND PEACHES CHRIST
The season introduction, Some Films Are Trash, Some Have Trash-Ness Thrust Upon Them (1 April), will dissect the specific qualities that trash films have in common and explain why trash deserves to be embraced. Season curators Will Fowler and Justin Johnson will be joined by Helen de Witt, Elena Gorfinkel and Dominic Johnson. Together, they will discuss where trash begins and ends.
The centrepieces of our Trash! season is Idol Worship – An evening with Mink Stole & Peaches Christ (10 April). A revelatory and heartfelt cabaret show starring living legend Mink Stole and drag impresario and filmmaker Peaches Christ. Close friends for over two decades, we join Mink Stole and Peaches Christ for an evening of storytelling, film clips and live song. It will be a wildly entertaining and uncensored exposé that is as hilarious as it is revealing. This is definitely the event for fans of John Waters’s films, Divine, drag history, and trash cinema in all its shocking glory. Meet and Greet tickets will also be available.
All talent appearances are work permitting and subject to change.
PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE
Our other centrepiece screening is the world premiere of a brand new 35mm print of Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959). Ed Wood’s crowning achievement, made from original elements preserved by the BFI National Archive. A bona fide cult classic, Plan 9 From Outer Space, dubbed ‘the worst film of all time’, has long circulated on poor-quality video and DVD. Now audiences can experience the film as it was meant to be seen on the big screen. This screening resurrects goth icons Bela Lugosi and Vampira in big, bold monochrome 35mm.
BFI National Archive curatorial and preservation staff, and acclaimed writer, radio broadcaster, Royal College of Art lecturer and long-term Ed Wood devotee Ken Hollings, will introduce and contextualise Wood’s magnum opus. Tim Burton’s loving homage, Ed Wood (1994), is the perfect companion piece to the season and Plan 9’s special screening. Burton’s film celebrates Wood the dreamer’s drive and determination (impeccably performed by Johnny Depp). He moves from one poorly received film production to another. It features an Oscar-winning turn by Martin Landau as veteran horror icon Bela Lugosi.
GEORGE AND MIKE KUCHAR
Gloriously kitsch and often bizarre, maestros of the American avant-garde, twin brothers George and Mike Kuchar created entire worlds in Super 8 and 16mm, with playful, spontaneous, experimental films exploring themes of sexuality and identity. A whole other universe is uncovered in Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), Mike Kuchar’s status quo-busting, new-love seeking, unbounded, camp, sci-fi, midnight movie success. The incredible George Kuchar took his inspiration from Sirkian melodramas and B-movies. His camp, cheap films created feelings of joy, inclusivity, and melancholia. Trash! screens Hold Me While I’m Naked, George Kuchar!, a collection of classic shorts including Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), Mosholu Holiday (1967), Knocturne (1968), Wild Night in El Reno (1971), I, An Actress USA (1977). And Orphans of the Cosmos (2008).
SHOCK, WEIRDNESS AND EXPLOITATION
Shock, weirdness and exploitative provocation stand as vital trash totems for films of transgression and excess. Reefer Madness (1936), Director Louis J. Gasnier’s cult classic, is a cinematic Trojan horse – a public information film warning parents of the alleged dangers of marijuana, subverted to become a camp exploitation romp. A serial killer caterer in Miami uses his victims’ body parts in his cooking as a sacrifice to the ancient Egyptian goddess Ishtar in Herschell Gordon Lewis (the Godfather of Gore)’s Blood Feast (1963). The critics may have called it salacious and vulgar, but this classic is loved by generations of ’splatter’ fans everywhere. Blood Feast was only released uncut in the UK 20 years ago, so be warned – it’s not for the fainthearted.
JACK SMITH AND RUSS MEYER
The notorious underground filmmaker, queer artist, and happenings master Jack Smith followed his police-raided, trans-cinema weapon, Flaming Creatures, with Normal Love (1963), a verbose, intensely colourful, and visionary unfinished marvel. Screening from a 16mm print, delivered direct from the USA, Normal Love sees his New York underground stars emerge as glamorously dressed monsters in scenes and stories at once dreamlike and baroque.
The pouting male hunk is objectified, worshipped and even ridiculed in a series of films about desire and desperation. Frequently cited as the greatest B-movie of all time, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) follows a fearless trio of homicidal go-go girls (led by the formidable Tura Satana) who blaze their way across the Californian desert. They leave a trail of murder and mayhem in their wake. Russ Meyer’s classic exploitation movie galvanised his cult reputation and trademark penchant for nudity, trashy narratives, tongue-in-cheek dialogue and domineering female characters. Its status, particularly among feminist critics, has drastically changed over the years. Now, many critics are reappraising its virtues. Print is courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
JOHN WATERS
Lovingly dubbed ‘The Pope of Trash’, the ‘King of Bad Taste’, the ‘Prince of Puke’, and the ‘People’s Pervert’. Legendary director John Waters drew inspiration from “underground” filmmakers like Andy Warhol and George and Mike Kuchar. Exploitation heroes Russ Meyer, Herschell Gordon Lewis and William Castle. As well as serious auteurs such as Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. Waters, who turns 80 in April, has consistently pushed the boundaries of taste, taking delight in offending everyone.
Using his native Baltimore as a location, and employing his friends and associates as actors. These, including Divine, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, David Lochary and Cookie Mueller, together with the fearless Dreamlanders and Waters, created a series of low-budget, flamboyantly trashy classics. Trash! screens two of these. Waters’s celluloid atrocity, Multiple Maniacs (1970) and Pink Flamingos (1972), is one of the most notorious films ever made.
‘Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions’ is not only the sleaziest show on Earth. But also a front for a group of unruly criminals whose thirst for blood and violence will not be quenched. Unseen on the big screen for decades, Multiple Maniacs is John Waters’ anarchic and gloriously depraved masterpiece. Gleefully disrupting the status quo as well as satirising the peace and love era with its shockingly subversive narrative. It features one of the most blasphemous moments ever committed to film and a scene-stealing performance from a giant lobster.
PINK FLAMINGOS
Just two years after Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos brought Waters nationwide notoriety on midnight-movie screens. A deliriously funny, boundary-pushing lo-fi extravaganza of bad taste, featuring scenes of wanton exhibitionism, creepy voyeurism, sodomy, masturbation, gluttony, vomiting, rape, incest, murder, cannibalism, castration, foot fetishism, chicken sex, a singing prolapsed anus and the actual consumption of dog faeces, Pink Flamingos cemented Waters’s daring reputation. The ‘Citizen Kane of Trash’ still contains something to offend almost everyone over 50 years since it first screened.
TRASH AND THUNDERCRACK!
Cult underground filmmaker Paul Morrissey, best known as Andy Warhol’s cinematic collaborator at ‘The Factory’, reunited with a dreamy Joe Dallesandro in Trash (1970). A bleak tale of a heroin addict and his trans girlfriend (Holly Woodlawn) struggling with the harsh grind of 1970s New York street life, laced with dark humour and acute tenderness. Trash screens from an original UK distribution 35mm print preserved by the BFI National Archive.
Written by George Kuchar and known for its extreme sexual content, Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! (1975) employs classic, old dark house tales of yore to create a trash classic; a knowing, sexual melange that is at once cheap, camp and direct, yet constructed with incredible, technical dexterity. One dark and stormy night, a group of strangers take refuge in a remote house. Soon after, everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
DORIS WISHMAN
Resistance can take many forms. Directed by Doris Wishman, the only known female filmmaker on the 1960s US sexploitation scene, the grimy Another Day, Another Man (1966), follows Ann, who decides to become a New York sex worker when her husband succumbs to a mysterious ailment. Michael Kalman’s camp, comedic and explicit Elevator Girls in Bondage (1972) tells the story of the trans and drag female staff in a cheap, seedy San Francisco apartment block who rise up in a Marxist-inspired revolution.
PUNK AND NEW PERSPECTIVES
Punk and new perspectives transformed trash in the 80s and 90s, while still valorising its original strategies and practitioners. Featuring music from Cabaret Voltaire and Arthur Russell, director Beth B followed her punk, Cinema of Transgression, early works with Salvation! (1987), a darkly comedic attack on the hypocrisy of Christian televangelism and the intertwining machinations of big business and the mass media. Bruce LaBruce’s lively, satirical fake-documentary Super 8½ (1994), about struggling, Warhol-esque porn film maker Butt Double – played by the filmmaker – features a litany of sexual scenarios, employing multiple films-within-films to track the internalised drama of its characters and their power plays. Queer icon Vaginal Davis and others feature in cameo, while director LaBruce relishes the chance to reconfigure traditional documentary and pornographic film.
High octane and embracing excess, Sarah Jacobson’s subversive, no-budget, underground 90s classic, I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993), sees her lead character Mary commit murder, over-and-over, in her brutal bid to confront the patriarchy, screening with A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), Ryan Trecartin’s hyperactive, animalistic yet brilliantly edited 2004 video, in which he plays the disturbed Skippy, who locks himself in the bathroom during a party.
Tickets for BFI Southbank screenings are on sale to BFI Patrons on 9 March, BFI Members on 10 March, and to the general public on 12 March.
Introducing Carl! As the News Editor at Future of the Force, Carl has been an invaluable member of our team since early 2016. His expertise and dedication have made him an integral part of our editorial staff. Beyond his professional role, Carl is a fervent supporter of Liverpool F.C. and an avid follower of pop culture. He has a deep passion for Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the iconic movie franchises Star Wars and Star Trek.
He can be found either at his neighborhood cinema, enjoying the latest releases on the big screen, or at home streaming the newest blockbuster movies.
