‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’: The movie John Waters described as “a fine wine”
Befitting his reputation as one of cinema’s marquee mavericks, the favourite movies of John Waters tend to be cut from a cloth fairly similar to the man himself, in that there’s plenty of absurdism and surrealism to be found.
Having been bestowed with a variety of monikers throughout his career that almost always tend to be alliterative, Waters has embraced his status as either ‘The Pope of Trash’, ‘The Duke of Dirt’, ‘The Prince of Puke’, or ‘The Ayatollah of Assholes’, all of which he wears as a badge of pride.
His stylistic sensibilities comfortably exist outside of the mainstream, but that was exactly why Waters became such an inspirational and influential figure. He created his own bespoke brand on the back of pushing boundaries, shattering taboos, and making the unthinkable a standard part of his on-screen arsenal, so it makes complete sense that he’d love nothing more than a subversive favourite of his to be handed out as a present to as many people as humanly possible.
Waters has always been a noted and vocal supporter of Russ Meyer, the prolific director and producer who turned camp sexploitation and voluptuous women getting into ridiculous escapades into a genre in itself, serving as a major inspiration on the man who would eventually capture somebody eating a fresh dog turd on camera and turn it into an underground classic.
Having already made his opinions clear on Meyer’s oeuvre by writing in his memoirs: “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made,” Waters took a moment to shine a light on what’s comfortably second on his personal pile and arguably its director’s masterpiece.
Taking the criticism levelled towards its spiritual predecessor on the chin, 1970’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls evolved from being a conventional sequel to a self-aware, self-reflexive, and metatextual follow-up that raised the bar for sex, sleaze, and camp even higher, much to Waters’ delight.
When picking out his own curated collection from Criterion, Waters encouraged everyone to gift somebody else a copy of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which he compared to a vintage plonk. “This movie’s like a fine wine,” he said. “It gets better and better as life goes on.”
Scripted by Roger Ebert of all people in his screenwriting debut, Waters believed it was the best thing the future critic had ever written, going so far as to brand the script as “much better than his film criticism”. A backhanded compliment, sure, but a compliment all the same. In his view, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls never gets old: “It’s almost impossible to watch it and not love it.” For anyone who takes his gifting idea on board, there’s only one way to find out.
