Another effort from notoriously tasteless duo John Waters and Divine, Multiple Maniacs finds heavyweight transvestite Divine as the maniacal head of a group of murderous kidnappers. Bent on ridding society of it's most boring element, suburbanites, Divine and company tour under the guise of Lady Divine's Cavalcade of Perversions, a not-so-elaborate ruse to lure in the most complacent element of the population and slaughter them en masse. Mesmerized by promises of "actual queers, kissing on the lips," and other such promises of lurid thrills, the plan works like a charm until a vicious love triangle leads to a risky plot to murder ringleader Divine. Despite their past, Divine's partner David (David Lochary) and scheming newcomer Mary Mary Vivian Pierce) plot to dispose of the murderous murderess just as Divine is planning to fire David. Enraged at the sudden turn of events, Divine hits the streets in anger only to find innovative uses for a rosary before being raped by a man in a dress and a giant lobster.

In 1970, Waters was an aggressively weird underground concern. The recent remastering and re-release of Multiple Maniacs, his second feature, offers an opportunity to get reacquainted – not just with the perverse, filthy bent of Waters’s early output, but with a radical, confrontational configuration of an American queer cinema that’s worlds away from contemporary prestige romances such as Carol or LGBTQ problem pictures such as Freeheld. Multiple Maniacs doesn’t court respectability. This is a film in which a voluptuous drag queen is anally pleasured with a rosary in a church pew, while a bloody montage of Christ’s passion and suffering unfolds in her mind.

Multiple Maniacs opens with a gaggle of suburban, pearl-clutching, suffocatingly straight-types being lured into the “Cavalcade of Perversion” – a travelling sideshow of fetishism operated by Lady Divine (Divine) and her boyfriend, Mr. David (David Lochary). The image of Mr. David promoting the show as abounding with “acts that would make any decent person recoil in disgust,” works as a handy metaphor for Waters himself.