John Waters' cult classic Pink Flamingos, made in 1972, was so shocking that it was only widely distributed a decade later. The film was banned in several countries and heavily censored in the UK, where the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) granted an 18 certificate in 1989 only after three minutes of footage were cut from five scenes.
The BBFC detailed the cuts, which included the removal of scenes showing chickens being roughly handled and killed during a bizarre sexual assault, and a man flexing his anus in close-up to make it appear as if it were 'singing'. All of the film's most important sequences had to be left on the cutting room floor.
Waters, who calls himself 'the king of sleaze', intended the film to provoke extreme reactions. In his memoir Shock Value, he wrote: 'If someone vomits watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation.' The plot follows Divine, a woman condemned as 'the filthiest person alive', who lives in a derelict mobile home with her family, while villains Connie and Raymond Marble try to outdo them in depravity.
Despite its shocking content, the film became a cult hit, playing at midnight movies in New York's Elgin Theater. John Mercer, author of Gay Pornography, describes it as 'the paradigmatic example of cult cinema'. Waters later directed mainstream hits like Cry-Baby and Hairspray, but Pink Flamingos remains his most notorious work.
