Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19587 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-10-23
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 88 minutes

Amazon.com
John Waters spoofs independent filmmaking at its most absurd fringe with this affectionate portrait of a guerrilla filmmaking collective that declares war on Hollywood drivel. Bitchy screen queen Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith, whose kewpie doll voice and aging baby face are right at home) is kidnapped by would-be auteur Cecil (Stephen Dorff), a slogan-spouting bottle blonde with a cult-like crew of cinema outlaws called "The Sprocket Holes." Cecil has declared war on Hollywood with the ultimate underground movie, "Raving Beauty," and his reluctant star Honey soon adopts her young misfit captors like a worried Mommy as her cultural cachet rises: the falling star has turned into a cult cinema rebel. It's a bizarre revision of the Patty Hearst story (with Hearst herself in a supporting role) full of film insider jokes and '60s revolutionary references, but it's more spoof than satire. Waters's primitive style is often clumsy, and the picture moves in fits and starts, but the cast's enthusiasm brings it to life. Waters has always celebrated misfits, outcasts, and cultural rebels and their self-made families, and this is his most outrageous, anarchic such bunch in decades. Through all the shootouts, bomb throwing, and fights with angry teamsters and suburban moms, there's an odd sense of innocence to the enterprise. It's as if Waters wants to remind us: it's only a movie. --Sean Axmaker

From The New Yorker
The new John Waters picture takes its place in the long and semi-honorable tradition of Hollywood self-scorn. The title character is an underground movie director (Stephen Dorff) dedicated to the demolition of standard studio pap. Surrounded by his gang of guerrilla technicians, he kidnaps a lustrous star (Melanie Griffith) and forces her to play the lead in his latest slice of zero-budget decadence. As Cecil and his crew attack multiplexes and movie sets, it's never quite clear where they or Waters are pointing their radical rage: at the process of filmmaking, at the national theatre chains, or at those citizens of a free America who exercise their right to watch baloney. The movie promises to be funny, should be funny, and spends most of the time teetering on the brink of being funny, but it just isn't funny. The trouble is that real events have overtaken the conceit; there are plenty of young indie directors out there who, fired by the success of "The Blair Witch Project" and the Dogme group, have every hope of getting their spicy, home-baked pictures onto the big screen. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

B. Demented, check it out...
John Waters at play in the fields of his beloved Baltimore, once again. This time with a "gang of cinematic misfits" led by Stephen Dorff.

Melanie Griffith gets kidnapped and gets her hair bleached "right off the deep end of the Clairol color chart!". Gratuitous sex, violence and pornographic hijinks ensue.

Extra treat: Patricia Hearst plays the much-loved 'mom' of one of the cinematic "terrorists". B Demented and feel free to check this out.

Garbage still smells like stank the next morning.
I know that if my garbage can is lined with a scented bag, the insides still reak of yuck. Even if I tie it with a knot and place it on the curb, and the knot is finely taught and the bags lined in proportion, deep down somewhere in the recesses of my minds eye, I still know, no matter how hard I may want to candycoat it, that it is still trash.

Here then is Cecil B. Demented. I understand that my foulness of this horrible film will be a flame war for those avant-garde, art house, belly churning, curtled milk type, Grindhouse-praising 'as-if-it's-the-next greatest-thing-to-sliced-bread' groupies, however if you are a die hard john waters fan, what's there not to love?? If he made poop walk, you would think it was fascinating.

Waste money, buy this, and then trash it. It is as appealing as leaving your trash untied and unkept in your living room. Pure and total ca-ca.

To send a message use Western Union
Film starts out fresh and funny and is outrageously similar to the Patty
Hearst kidnapping, but the characters then progress into cartoon dolls,
each getting shot or burned at least five times before the end. South
Park was similar to this. Why do they bounce back when hit or land on
their feet jumping three stories down? Satirical pokes at genre film
audiences get laughs, but the violence is overboard and believable only on a comic book level.