Pink Flamingos (1972)

Roger Ebert refused to give this a star rating on the grounds that it should be considered "as a fact, or perhaps as an object". It's not an unreasonable position: the film is labelled as "an exercise in bad taste", and it's more or less just a series of juvenile attempts at being obscene or offensive.

How norms have changed! I went into it expecting a filmic goatse, a prophecy literally fulfilled by a sequence (perhaps the most or second-most nauseating) involving a man flexing his anal sphincter on camera.

Divine, named the filthiest woman alive, lives with her mentally-ill mother (obsessed with eggs), her son (has sex with chickens) and companion (voyeur). She's challenged for her title by Raymond and Connie Marble (David Lochary, Mink Stole), who make a living selling babies to lesbian couples.

Most of the scenes with the Marbles are just a step above Monty Python or The League of Gentlemen -- it's certainly not shocking by comparison with, for example, the infamous rape in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible. It's violence via high camp.

As a result, it isn't shocking, and despite some unpleasantness in the plot (multiple homicides, castration etc.) actually comes across as affectionate and celebratory. Yay filth? Or perhaps it's just that it's hard to compete with phenomena like tubgirl and 2 girls 1 cup: if you live in the cloud, it takes more than this to offend.

From that jaded perspective, I'm not quite as sympathetic as Ebert. Not only is it astonishingly stupid, we weren't even vomiting in the aisles. It's amusing in places, but that's all.