Desperate Living (1977), writer-director John Waters’ first feature-length movie not to star his inimitable drag-queen muse Divine, is consistently funny. But nothing quite hits like its opening few minutes, when its housewife main character, Peggy (Mink Stole) — whom her therapist calls one of the most neurotic women he’s ever treated — is stomping around her bedroom, noisily and conspiratorially complaining about life. She hisses to no one in particular about local lawlessness and the destruction of property, the Supreme Court, and the supposed communism of a nearby day care center. When a game of catch in her backyard accidentally results in the ball smashing through the window she’s standing near, she decides that it’s part of a secret plan to kill her, and that the ball was, in fact, actually a bullet shot from a rifle. “Don’t tell me I don’t know what Vietnam is like!” she shrieks before, a couple of minutes later, killing her husband with the help of her liquor-pilfering housekeeper, Grizelda (Jean Hill), for reasons that have no basis in reality.

Peggy is an antic satirization of the kind of prone-to-making-shit-up right-wing paranoia that, as contemporary times continue to make clear, bemusingly never really dies. It’s cathartic, albeit unavoidably depressing, to watch Desperate Living in an era where her heightened brand of fascism-tinged delusion has ascended to a new stratum of mainstreaming. Her toxicity is kept to the fringe of the movie’s world, though, since the above-mentioned murder forces her and Grizelda to go on the run. They have no real idea where to go until they’re pulled over by a cop, who, after forcing them to satisfy his kink — putting on women’s underwear around the lingerie he already has on under his uniform — points them in the direction of Mortville. It’s a shantytown where criminals, or those simply deemed societally undesirable, go to live in makeshift shelters in lieu of jail, the building materials to work with so inadequate that even the board for a vacancy sign isn’t big enough for the word to be entirely spelled out in a straight line.

Everyone is lorded over by Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey), a tyrant with portraits of Hitler and other dictators in her castle’s foyer who exclusively eats mukbang-size meals, is liable to sentence people to death on the spot, and has a coterie of leather-daddy guards who sexually service her with the snap of a finger. Her feet never touch the floor; she’s carried around when she wants to move from the two destinations she spends the most time at: her throne and her bed. Those familiar with Waters and his work with Massey — a onetime barmaid he befriended in the late ’60s — can probably guess before even watching Desperate Living that she’ll be the funniest thing about it. The naturally endearing Massey turns a wooden line read into an art; the higher the volume, the better.

Edith Massey in Desperate Living.

Peggy and Grizelda will link up with a bad-for-each-other couple, Mole and Muffy (Susan Lowe and Liz Renay), who give them a rentable room in their falling-apart flat. Unlike Waters’ last film, Female Trouble (1974), which had a conventional-for-him story parodying Hollywood Golden Age-era women’s pictures, Desperate Living is more reminiscent of Pink Flamingos (1972) — another way of saying that the storyline is more a succession of absurd situations and goofy lines spoken by its wall-to-wall badly behaved characters than anything that will build momentum in a traditional narrative sense.

That unsurprisingly doesn’t present much of a problem, because Waters’ lampooning of foam-mouthed, individualistic hostility is so pungent and because his cabal of performers match his eagerness to simultaneously shock and say something that, beneath all his famously bad taste, is smart, putting into relief how much more monstrous conservative ideologies are than what they bigotedly deem dangerous. 

It goes without saying that, as fun as Desperate Living is, Divine, who wanted to appear in the movie but had already committed to starring in a play, is sorely missed. She and Waters thankfully remedied her absence’s pains with the latter’s next movie, 1981’s wonderful Polyester. With an upped budget and proper production-company backing, the film rendered Desperate Living as a sort of last stand for Waters as a filmmaker confined to minuscule budgets aggressively flouting commercial considerations.