John Waters Penuiltimate work to date, ‘Cecil B. Demented’ feels like a refreshing return to form for the film maker, after a near 10 year run of inconsistent stabs at finding his place within the (at the time) ‘modern’ cinema landscape.

The film follows Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) a snobby and high strung professional film actress who, while attending a gala premiere of her latest ‘Oscar worthy’ work, finds herself kidnapped and pulled into the cult of Cecil B. Demented. an underground film maker with a cult like following who believe in the concept of ‘Reality cinema’ the idea being that you pre-film some scenes as lynchpins and then shoot the ACTUAL movie in a real public place, with unsuspecting members of the public present who are encouraged to work to Cecils demands…or face the ‘night night’ end of a pistol.

With the police hot on their trail and a growing opposition from hollywood and industry execs. Cecil and his team have taken a vow of celibacy until the film is complete because ‘the film comes first’ at all costs.

And after struggling a bit with ‘Cry Baby’, not quite fully loving ‘Serial Mom’ and drumming my fingers throughout ‘Pecker’ This film really does seem to recapture a sense of anarchic and controversial naughty fun that I loved about John Waters pseudo studio era (Female trouble, Desperate Living, Polyester).

The script is littered with references to cult and outsider film makers, it gets the balance of being lightweight enough to enagage people unfamiliar with cult, but complex enough to keep long time Waters followers bedded in just about right for most of the runtime, and clocking in at an hour and 29 it really doesnt waste much time.

Theres a nice clear story at the heart of this one, with a soldily paced out 3 act structure which transitions decently. While it does lean a little towards the repetative (with the main body of the shooting scenes getting numbingly repatitious in particular) the humour and tone are really why your paying to see this thing.

John Waters writing here is razor, critical and delivered with absolute perfection by the cast, its a very quotable movie with some fab one liners and some real creative fire behind the plotting itself. I laughed my way through most of this movie and really quite enjoyed the idea of Waters both lambasting the hollywood system, while also turning the light inwards to those weird ‘outsider’ film makers who think they’re significantly better than everyone else. Which I acutally kind of respected.

the characters all have their own unique personalities and complexities, though it does feel weird seeing these characters that were clearly written with Johns old ‘Wrecking crew’ in mind, getting played by a new stable of actors.

The directions rock solid, an structured production with a clean creative vision behind it that even bothers to experiment a little beyodn the usual generic scene structuring rules. The set design in this one really helps give the production a big boost, and if I were a gambling man, i’d put money on Waters being influenced here by the 1989 erotic ‘equal’ “Dr. Caligari” as there are moments in this that look/feel very similar to that movie.

Direction of the cast for the most part is pretty solid too, i’d argue that this is realistically the most naturalistic a cast has appeared in a John Waters movie. the delivery is over the top and manic for the most part, but for this cast? it feels genuine. A lot of other Waters movies have cast members who dont quite look/feel right delivering loud, aggressive toned works..but here, I think they’ve been carefully guided and instructed and I think they do a great job.

The cine too is delightful, hyper colourful, vivid set design REALLY helps give the camera a lot to work with, composition is rock sold throughout, while it may be a little generically sequenced in places, it more than makes up for it with some genuinely surreal moments and the brave move in not being afraid to experiment with sequence structuring.

The edit is relatively tight, as with most films I do feel this could have stood to have been 5-10 minutes shorter, but on the whole its a really well assembled production and probably the best cut John Waters movie i’ve ever seen.

The performances also really help here, with a wide variety of character types on display, it means you get all the different flavours of ‘Waters’ characters from over the years perfectly curated, and im certain there’ll be at least one performance here that you’ll really enjoy, if not all of them.

For me, it has to be Griffiths as ‘Honey’ she really gets a meaty shot here at a character with a decent growth piece, and she transitions between snobby and dismissive, to defeated, to slowly warming to the cultish ideology to eventually a full embrace of it, working through all the emotions involved in that along the way. I think she’s fabulous for every minute she’s on screen, her physicality is subdued, which I think works in the films favour, but her delivery for me was what really sealed the deal.

Thow in a VERY aggressive and gritty 2000s punk soundtrack, intercut with 50s jukebox classics and old movie studio stings and I had a really good time with ‘Cecil’. It felt like a confident return to form for the director, While it is a little bit of a downer that Johns period of experimentation in style and writing didnt yield any new strings to his bow in terms of areas to grow into. I feel like his work between 1990 and 1999 helped make him a much more confident director and writer, and by this point. I feel like he was able to transplant his newly learnt skills straight into his old stomping ground, and he works WONDERS with it.

Definitely recommended if your a fan of films like ‘Female Trouble’ or ‘Polyester’, I think you may come away a bit dissapointed if you preferred Waters more ‘gross out’ and gritty era of film making, but in terms of his latter day works? this is one of the best.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/cecil-b-demented/