Director: John Waters
Starring: Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Selma Blair, Chris Isaak, Suzanne Shepherd, Mink Stole

- Reviewed by Vickie

I freely admit that I don't get the appeal of most John Waters' films. So, please keep that in mind when reading the rest of this review, and feel free to disagree.

His latest project is something of a sex comedy. A debauched look at sexuality through the eyes of two sets of people: the "neuters," who crave a pure, chaste world devoid of what they perceive to be deviance, and the sex addicts, who want.well, sex and lots of it. At the center of the debate is Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman), a prudish wife and mother who becomes an insatiable sex fiend after a bump on the head. Her husband (Chris Isaak) is initially excited but eventually disgusted with this change in his beloved. The couple's mammothly endowed daughter, Caprice aka Ursula Udders (Selma Blair, sporting the world's biggest set of falsies), who's under house arrest for assorted indecent acts, hopes her mother's new outlook on life might free her from her padlocked bedroom.

Helping Sylvia accept her new mission in life is sexual healer Ray-Ray Perkins (Johnny Knoxville), who leads a group of sexual disciples in an ongoing quest for orgasmic enlightenment. He believes that Sylvia is their messiah and that she will lead them to discover a sex act that no one has ever performed before.

Sure, that all sounds kind of funny, but the execution of the idea is, save for Caprice's enormous breasts, painfully flat. The entire film, and the characters within it, are all one-note. Nothing really happens. There are plenty of sex jokes, the occasional naked person, double entendres and graphic discussions of all kinds of things, but that's about all. Sylvia veers back and forth between craving sex and renouncing it and, after the third or fourth time, it gets really tiresome. Chris Isaak is awkwardly bland and out of place, which (I suppose) is the point of the character, but it still felt wrong. The scary thing is that the best performance in the film belongs to Knoxville, who plays Ray-Ray with the perfect blend of smarm, charm and reckless libido. He's actually really good. Everyone else just seems like they're phoning it in.from a pay phone.at a remote gas station in the middle of nowhere.

Fetishists may be amused by their representation on the big screen, and the uninitiated will gain some valuable lessons about things like Roman showers, upper-deckers and frottage. I didn't know what any of those things were before, and I'm not exactly grateful that I do now.

Does that make me a neuter? Dunno, and maybe that's the whole reason Waters crafted this film in the first place - to make us all examine where our boundaries lie and how tolerant we are of people who are different. But it does make me someone who wasn't at all taken with the shock-humor A Dirty Shame was dishing out.

And, based on the stony silence during the entire screening of this comedy, I'm guessing I'm not alone.

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