Pink Flamingos is a American black comedy horror film [ a ] by John Waters. The characters engage in several grotesque, bizarre, and explicitly crude situations, and upon the film's re-release in it was rated NC by the MPAA "for a wide range of perversions in explicit detail".
It was filmed in the vicinity of Baltimore , Maryland, where Waters and most of the cast and crew grew up. Displaying the tagline "An exercise in poor taste ", Pink Flamingos is notorious for its "outrageousness", nudity , profanity , and "pursuit of frivolity , scatology , sensationology [ sic ] and skewed epistemology ". The film is considered a preliminary exponent of abject art.
The film, at first semi-clandestine, has received a warm reception from film critics and, despite being banned in several countries, became a cult film in subsequent decades. In , the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Notorious criminal Divine lives under the pseudonym "Babs Johnson" with her mother Edie, delinquent son Crackers, and traveling companion Cotton. They share a trailer on the outskirts of Phoenix, Maryland , next to a gazing ball and a pair of plastic pink flamingos. After learning that Divine has been dubbed "the filthiest person alive" by a tabloid paper, jealous rivals Connie and Raymond Marble attempt to usurp her title.
The Marbles run a black market baby ring: they kidnap young women, have them impregnated by their manservant Channing, and sell the babies to lesbian couples. The proceeds are used to finance pornography shops and a network of dealers selling heroin in inner-city elementary schools. Raymond also earns money by exposing himself — with a large kielbasa sausage or turkey neck tied to his penis — to women and stealing their purses when they flee. Later in the film, one of Raymond's would-be targets, a trans woman , thwarts his scheme by exposing her breast, which excites him, and then showing her penis and scrotum, causing Raymond to flee in shock.
